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Muriel Rukeyser

Trudi Witonsky, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot”: Some Context

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Published 7/20/2022

The Vassar Encyclopedia’s entry on Muriel Rukeyser contains part of a poem, originally published anonymously in the November 1933 issue of Con Spirito.  Highly critical of T.S. Eliot, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot” was identified as Rukeyser’s by Mary McCarthy, musing over the publication in her memoir, How I Grew: “The Scottsboro Boys. Yes, that sounds like Muriel and the reference would be to a reading by Eliot in Avery [Hall] during our senior year, when he gave us one of the early Possum poems” (260).  This remembrance might seem like slim evidence, without available confirmation from any of the magazine’s other founders (Elizabeth Bishop, Frani Blough, Eleanor and Eunice Clark, and Margaret Miller) (Hicok 84). However, recent discoveries of archival materials add to the case for authorship and clarify Rukeyser’s ultimately more expansive and nuanced assessment of the older poet.  

We know from Rukeyser’s diary that 1933 was a time of heightened interest in Eliot. As Elisabeth Däumer explains, he had just returned to the U.S. that year for “an ambitious tour of lectures — among them the Norton lectures at Harvard University, later published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, and his infamous Page-Balfour lectures at the University of Virginia, published as After Strange Gods, in which he articulated an explicitly conservative Christian literary and cultural criticism, speculating about the corrosive influence of large groups of ‘free-thinking Jews'” (1181-2). Hallie Flanagan, hired to develop experimental theatre at Vassar and, later, director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project, was staging the first ever production of Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, and had invited the poet. He came to see the performance on May 6th, and the next day read his poems. 

According to James Loucks, Eliot gave several talks in New York before that date, and we know from her diary that Rukeyser attended his lectures at the New School for Social Research and Columbia on April 20th and 21st, where he discussed Milton, Dante and Shakespeare (27).  Rukeyser had just returned from covering one of the Scottsboro Nine trials in Decatur, Alabama for the Student Review, the publication of the National Student League. There she was arrested for talking with black reporters and then jailed after it was discovered that she had posters in her suitcase advertising an April conference on “Negro Student Problems” at Columbia (Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society).  Unfortunately, she also contracted typhoid. Though it has been generally supposed that she missed seeing the play at Vassar but did attend Eliot’s lecture there, a letter from her good friend Ruth Lehman queries, “Why weren’t you at Eliot?” The letter from Lehman has no date on it, but in the archive’s folder, there is an envelope that seems to accompany it dated April 28, 1933. According to Loucks, Eliot also spoke on the 27th at the New School (which is where Rukeyser heard him on the 20th) (27). Rukeyser’s diary for the 26th says, “Sick all day.” The 27th has no mention of Eliot but does mention “fever.” Subsequent entries from the 28th on also mention fever, pain, and fatigue. Then, in an entry for May 1st, Muriel wrote, “Passed out. Uptown” and on May 2nd, there is a note “Hospital/Typhoid” with a downward arrow drawn towards the date “June 1” which reads, “Resumed.” Entries after that continue to mention her fatigue, so one can assume it took some time to recuperate. Thus, it seems clear that she completely missed Eliot’s visit to Vassar.

Letter from Ruth Lehman to Muriel Rukeyser, circa April 28, 1938, with permission by Adam Lehman

In February, just months before the visit, Con Spirito, an alternative literary magazine, had been launched as a counter to the Vassar Review, which, as Eunice Clark explained, felt conservative and traditional. “We were a tiny part of a worldwide literary revolution stretching, in variegated forms, from Walt Whitman to Finnegans Wake, and we were feeling our oats to a point where the official literary magazine, The Vassar Review, looked to us like the Bastille. They didn’t print our avant-garde contributions and they altered our sentences to sound more like Matthew Arnold” (Jessup 17). A vehicle for ambitious young writers, Con Spirito “attempt[ed] to create a space of freedom for the imagination,” directly countered male-dominated literary tradition, and re-imagined modernism (Hicok 85).

By this time, however, Rukeyser had left the Vassar campus for both financial and personal reasons. The Depression was beginning to affect even wealthier students (Cohn 15), and, as a letter from President Henry Noble MacCracken to her father on June 10, 1932 explains, Rukeyser was experiencing a kind of restless dissatisfaction. MacCracken recommended a year off.  She spent part of that summer with the Clark sisters and Denise Dryden, launching the literary magazine Housatonic (Jessup 17), which came out with four issues. This experience must have informed the Clark sisters’ work with Con Spirito, and though Rukeyser was not on campus during the spring of 1933 when the plans for Con Spirito began (Jessup 17), a letter from Eleanor Clark solicits Rukeyser’s involvement of another sort.  On September 15, 1933, Clark wrote, “Dear Muriel, Please subscribe to Con Spirito. It’s going to be as good as ever we hope, which is much too good for college and so has to be supported from outside . . . Also SEND STUFF, [sic] as soon as possible. We are going to use outside stuff because there is no other way of keeping up previous standards and nothing lower is worth bothering. with. [sic]  It will be anonymous for an issue, maybe two; anyway until we can decide on definite policy. But you wont mind that will you? [sic] Get us anything else you can that you think we might use. I know that s difficult [sic], all things considered, but there might be some things in search of market that we could have without money.” 1

A later undated letter from Eleanor Clark, written on Vassar stationery, confirms Rukeyser’s authorship. She writes, “Dear Muriel, We have printed best lot of your poems. They look very nice. Do you want the copy back? We didn’t print St. Thomas :  criticism — not ‘synthesized’ enough – wordy perhaps. They are good words but the good places should have been allowed to stand more on their own – not so much reinforcement. Everybody liked woman + bird + Sunday – also Mr. Eliot, though I think that might have fitted the subject more sardonically (good word) if it had been chosen 2 too.”

The published poem depicts a collective loss of purpose at a moment of crisis: we “dither and amble and twitter at the brink of time.” As depicted here, Eliot lacks vision to create new possibilities from the resources of tradition:  “whispering fragments of a century/ sliding among a thousand ghosts of meaning,” later “collapsing in attempts to make an end / to his idea’s beginning.” Similar images later reappear in “Citation for Horace Gregory” (1935) where Eliot, “led us to the precipice / subtly and perfectly    ;     there striking an attitude / rigid and aging on the penultimate step, . . . ” (62).  But the criticism sharpens. Däumer elucidates how the poem, in labeling Eliot a “grinning Panfilo” connects his poetic ideals and politics with “the Spanish conquistador Panfilo’s known brutality in conquering Florida.” Initially, she explains, “This ironic comparison might seem strained unless we consider Eliot’s identification with precisely the conservative ideals of order, underwritten by Catholicism, that Rukeyser, a young radical, linked to the rise of fascism in Europe: ‘the rubber heels of statesmen . . . mirrored on a tiling'” (1182).

However, the poem’s target is not just the poet but his audience, including the speaker herself, indulging in elite solipsistic concerns: “The audience crumbles in cerebral whoredom, / devoted lustfully to a conceit’s expansion, / to an obscure line’s scansion.”  The target of the next line is unclear, though the sentiment is the same: “These Fantastics bow and nod, / homage to prosody as God.” It’s unclear who the Fantastics might be, and they reappear at the end of the poem, but an essay on “The Cultural Economy of Modernism” by Lawrence Rainey highlights the way early modernists like Ezra Pound appealed to elite patrons, by presenting “literary culture [as] a privatized medium of symbolic exchange for an exiguous aristocracy of sensibility, a court of intellect” (37).  At a private talk in March 1907 on the Provencal poet Daniel Arnaut, Pound described the poems as “good art as the high mass is good art,” and noted that they must be “approached as ritual” so that they could “make their revelations” (37).  In contrast, F.T. Marinetti, expounding on Futurism at this same time, rejected Pound’s sequestration of poetry, proclaiming, “Art is not a religion, not something to be worshipped with joined hands” and received great coverage in the press. Subsequently, Rainey explains how in resisting the popularization and commodification of art, Pound, Eliot and Joyce, as well as others, developed a new artistic economy that depended on investment in limited editions of literary texts, which clarifies why Rukeyser would critique this social and economic positioning of art.

Following up on the implications of these practices, the last section of the poem incorporates images from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“sand swarming on these bodies, songs forgotten”) and possibly Whitman (“the long sea shouting derisive in our ears”) to consider how we, the poet and audience, will be judged by future generations, how we make use of our experiences and our art, if “the secrets of the dead / their minds’ encumbrances all gone to mould” will continue to appeal to us with the same type of poems that “undid / the purse-strings of kings’ bounty, beauty-pandered.” The poem’s ending invokes an alternative vision of poetry’s purpose —  “Find for us these, our spirits from these sands arisen — physical work, united hands”; yet the closing lines mock this desire, traditional agendas constricting poetry’s potential for connection and action: “The Fantastics still converse and smirk / and finger in their pockets our prison keys.” By the time of Eliot’s reading, modernism’s system of patronage and investment had unraveled due to the Depression, which led to reliance on universities (Eliot’s tour was proof of that) and an “assen[t] [to modernism’s] canonization, so guaranteeing a new market of pliant students” (Rainey 62). Rukeyser’s fellow students were that captive audience, soon to be inculcated into New Criticism.

Though this particular poem excoriates Eliot, in fact, Rukeyser’s overall attitude toward the older poet, as Däumer explains in her essay, was more ambivalent. Other work that Rukeyser had published one year earlier exhibits a more complex attitude, and indeed, Alan Wald’s research indicates that many on the left were attracted to the work of T.S. Eliot in particular (193 -195), seeing potential in his defamiliarizing juxtaposition of high and low culture, among other things. Yet as was common with others on the Left in the 1930s, Rukeyser felt that Eliot’s inclination toward the past and his despair about contemporary issues, informed by his social and political conservatism, made him a problematic “ancestor” (Ellison 185).  In an ambitious article, “Modern Trends: American Poetry” written for the Vassar Miscellany News on May 21, 1932, she praises the work of Archibald MacLeish for his “bravery of comprehension” (2) and claims that Eliot’s early work was equally groundbreaking but constraining as well: “Prufrock, parts of The Waste Land, and Gerontion, with some of the shorter pieces, are summaries in exquisite and exact poetry of the pale inability of a frustrate season to feel adequacy in anything” (4). While she deplores Eliot’s politics, she voices hope for evolution of his vision and testifies to the significance of his artistic influence: “. . . [G]iven release from the loyalties which sterilize him, there may be more poetry of the breed of his broader and greater work. He has had a reaching power over the younger poets – in attitude as well as in form: and his ‘school of thought’ will probably leave an incisive print on our poetry” (4).  

In addition to her critiques of Eliot’s politics and pessimism, we might also understand Rukeyser’s critiques of Eliot to be critiques of her own social class. In a letter she wrote to New Masses, “You Will Not Use: A Bourgeois Document,” (1931), which is in the archives at the Berg Collection but seems not to have been sent, she explicitly expresses her own search for an ethical artistic position in terms of social class:  “I am speaking of the bourgeoisie, and especially of near-bourgeois youth, into which I was born. These people are a confused and rejected class. They are the youngsters who paint street-workers, because they are enchanted by the rhythm of a hammer-stroke – who write limping verses about ‘dawn’ and ‘the city’ and ‘the suffering multitudes.’” 3 We see this multi-targeted critique in one early poem, “Sheridan Square.” Not much discussed, it examines Eliot to wrestle with the issue of how to incorporate class concerns and literary modernism. It is part of a longer series called “Place Poems,” written, as Kate Daniels explains, “in 1930 while [Rukeyser] was a student at Vassar,” published in the school’s literary magazine in 1932, and in Poetry in 1933 (27-28). “Sheridan Square,” mocking in tone, has a complex target, critiquing Eliot, Rukeyser’s own milieu, and proletarian orthodoxy (the sing-song dismissal of Eliot suggests a too-simplistic view of his work, and Sheridan Square was an area known for speakers on soapboxes exhorting crowds).

          Mr. T.S. Eliot knows the potency of music,
          Mr. T.S. Eliot knows the impact of bright words –
          He has forgotten the caked hands, the muscle-banded shoulders,
          In loving sounds swift birds. (Collected Poems, 580-81).

The contrast between aesthetic work and physical labor echoes the putdown of “bourgeois” intellectual work in the writings of workerist critics who, like Mike Gold, promoted a romanticized virile image of a worker. But the poem then turns to critique those who, like the writers mentioned in Rukeyser’s letter to New Masses, feel superior to, yet clumsily objectify the working class:

          A bricklayer stands, and plunges into the subway.
          “Shall we use him as symbol? No,
          Let us be done with symbols, we who talk
          Over the healthy wood of the tables here, . . .  (580)

The poem’s end links both Eliot and Rukeyser’s upper-class generation in critique, resolving in favor of increased life-experience: “Mr. T.S. Eliot (whom we consider) would forget the desert, / Might forget his fears / Carrying a hod beside this man” (581).  In other words, if Eliot took on working class experience of building the city, he might feel a greater sense of accomplishment than in writing poems about the city as a wasteland. But the critique also extends to Rukeyser’s generation of poets and critics: 

          We might do better
          Than sit here mouthing opinions, by carrying a hod,
          Raising a made thing high instead of a sentence,
          Worshipping with this offering our literate god. (581)

This counterpart to Rukeyser’s letter mocks intellectual pretension not grounded in life experience. Though it sounds like a common anti-intellectual critique, I’d argue that it expresses her frustration with her own limitations at this moment, attempting to reconcile her valuation of lived experience and desire for a usable art, with an equally deep concern for poetic craft, complexity, and intellectual growth.4  The tone, used infrequently after her first collection of poetry, links this poem with others critiquing her own social class. 

By 1935 with “Poem Out of Childhood,” and 1938 with Book of the Dead, Rukeyser’s wrestling with Eliot’s influence and his inspiration takes on a different tone. Though still critical, in these poems, Rukeyser’s work engages his themes, musical phrasing, and techniques of “allusiveness, fragmentation, and mythic substructure” (Däumer 1182). As Däumer notes, later comments by Rukeyser on Eliot, “sugges[t] not rejection, but the high expectations of a fellow poet alive to Eliot’s prodigious accomplishments” (1182). In fact, both writers exhibit mutual “interest in poetry’s communicative power and the novel ways in which modern poetics call for the mental, emotional, and physiological participation of readers” (Däumer 1187).  However, the early poems illuminate Rukeyser’s own developmental journey, the nature of the disagreements, and how Rukeyser came to her expansive literary sympathies.

Works Cited

Cohn, Robert. When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass StudentMovement,1929-1941. Oxford UP, 1993.

Clark, Eleanor. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. September 15, 1933. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

—. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. N.d. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

Daniels, Kate. “A Note on the Place Poems.” Poetry East vol. 16-17, Summer 1985, pp. 27-28.

Däumer, Elisabeth. “‘Wanting More From Mr. Eliot’: Muriel Rukeyser, T.S. Eliot, and The Uses of Poetry.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 7, 2018, pp. 1181-1203.

Ellison, Ralph. “The World and the Jug.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan. Modern Library, 1995, pp. 155-188.

Jessup, Eunice. “Memoirs of Literatae and Socialists 1929-33,” Vassar Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, Winter 1979, pp. 16-17.

Hikok, Bethany. Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905-1955. Bucknell UP, 2008.

Lehman, Ruth. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. April 28, 1933. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

Loucks, James. “The Exile’s Return: Fragments of a T.S. Eliot Chronology.” ANQ, vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 16-39.

MacCracken, Henry Noble. Letter to Louis Rukeyser. 10, June 1932. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.

McCarthy, Mary. How I Grew. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

Rainey, Lawrence. “The Cultural Economy of Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism edited by Michael Levenson. Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 33-69.

Rukeyser, Muriel.  Diary. Box 1, Folder 1. Muriel Rukeyser Papers, 1844-1986. Manuscript. Library of Congress. Washington D. C. Accessed November 15, 2015.

—. Letter publicizing conference at Columbia on “Negro Student Problems.” March 20, 1933. Franz Boas Papers. American Philosophical Society. https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/text%3A104885#page/1/mode/1up Boas Papers. American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, PA.

—. Letter: “You Will Not Use: A Bourgeois Document.” N.d. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Accessed June 23, 2019.   

Wald, Alan. Exiles From A Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 2002.

Witonsky, Trudi. “‘Something Like Bringing the Entire Life’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Personal, Poetic and Social Development in the 1930s,” Women’s Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, June 2021.

To cite this article in MLA, 8th edition: Trudi Witonsky. “‘Lecture by T. S. Eliot: Some Context.” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/07/11/trudi-witonsky-lecture-by-mr-eliot-some-context/.

Bio: Trudi Witonsky is Associate Professor of English in the Literature and Languages Department at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where she teaches courses in 20th-Century American Literature, African American literature, and First Year English. She has recently published an essay on Rukeyser’s early poetic development: “‘Something Like Bringing the Entire Life’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Personal, Poetic and Social Development in the 1930s,” Women’s Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, June 2021.

Rukeyser’s Difficulty–ALA Conference Session, Chicago, Illinois, May 26, 2022

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Thursday, May 26, 2022, 4:30–5:50pm, American Literature Association Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois

Organized by: Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University

Chair: Vivian Pollak, Washington University

  1. “The Promise of the Night-Flowering Worlds,” Trudi Witonsky, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
  2. “‘Not even the bones of what I want to say’: On Muriel Rukeyser and Frances Wickes,” Casey Miller, Eastern Michigan University
  3. “Race, Place, and the Politics of Compassion in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Gates’,” Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University

Panel Description

For decades, much of Muriel Rukeyser’s writing remained unpublished, unfinished, or lost in the archive. Thanks to the recovery work of scholars such as Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Eric Keenaghan, and Catherine Gander we now know more than ever about Rukeyser’s work and life as well as the impact of misogyny and anti-communism on the reception of her work. More contemporary readers now recognize Rukeyser as a key political poet whose writing bears witness to the wars, crises, and social justice movements of the 20th century: the Great Depression, two world wars, the Scottsboro Trials, Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, Spanish Civil War, feminism’s second wave, and the Vietnam War.

The more we know, however, the more remains to be explored. Far from offering clear testimonies of these landmark political events, Rukeyser’s poems are often obscure, allusive, long, and downright difficult. Her work may be easy to paraphrase, but it can also be delightfully and maddeningly hard to read. Taking these recent discoveries in Rukeyser Studies as a starting point, this panel explores the persistent mysteries surrounding Rukeyser’s life and work. What is it about Rukeyser that continues to beguile, intrigue, enchant, frustrate, and confound old and new generations of scholars? This panel features the work of scholars exploring the aesthetic, ethical, and historical complexities that animate Rukeyser’s career, asking, “What’s difficultabout Muriel Rukeyser?”

Trudi Witonsky, “The Promise of the Night-Flowering Worlds”

For this conference paper, I’d like to discuss “Dream Singing Elegy” (1944) in order to explore a couple of things that make Rukeyser’s writing difficult and yet relevant. At a foundational level, part of what makes reading Rukeyser hard is that she resists the categorizations we’ve been taught. Her work and perceptions can’t be adequately captured by any one disciplinary or political lens. She’s not just a 1930’s Marxist documentarian, a modernist, a feminist, a bisexual poet. She works in multiple genres, visual as well as literary, prose as well as poetry, and conditioned as we are by our own training and specializations, we have to decompartmentalize our own understandings in order to adequately appreciate what she’s doing. But Rukeyser’s resistance to closed borders and to reified categories is one reason her work remains relevant and still generates imaginative possibilities for understanding our lives and options.

The Elegies are particularly difficult with their abstractions, allusions, and processes that grapple with how to survive psychically in the horrifying context of World War II. In “Dream Elegy,” in addition to earlier influences on her work (Marxism, documentaries, modernism, and activism), Rukeyser takes inspiration from surrealism, the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, her Jewish identity, anthropology and multicultural sources (the 1870s ghost dancing of the Klamath Tribes as reported in an academic chapter by anthropologist, Philleo Nash). For this presentation, I’d like to explore the nature of these influences (How does Rukeyser imagine psychic survival? Does the poem represent a kind of romanticizing primitivism? To what degree does she rely on Nash and was his assessment “accurate”? Does the poem make facile connections or does it represent something like what Ralph Ellison called “the Jazz impulse,” groping toward a more positive “meeting place”?). This presentation will explore the nature of the “charisma” of the influence, to use a term put forth by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, in light of both the World War II context and more recent anti-racist work. Rukeyser always understood herself as embedded in history, acted upon but also capable of efficacious action. Her interest in art that transcended the museum, that incorporated the body and emotional life as well as intellect, that spoke to political and aesthetic innovations, makes her a useful ancestor as we recenter our literary traditions (thinking about the impact of sexism, racism, class, and sexual orientation). How might this Elegy be valuable in our current historical moment, given current impasses, despair, and resignation?

Trudi Witonsky is an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She formerly coordinated the First Year English program and currently teaches introductory composition as well as upper division American Literature courses. Her research interests include Muriel Rukeyser’s development in the 1930s, Adrienne Rich’s activism, multicultural literature, and pedagogy.

Casey Miller, “’Not even the bones of what I want to say’: On Muriel Rukeyser and Frances Wickes”

Muriel Rukeyser’s extensive archive has been a source of meaningful discovery for Rukeyser scholars. For every previously unpublished manuscript or illuminating connection, however, a new maze of fissures breaks open. Much like her poetry, Rukeyser’s sprawling archive feels expansive, infinite, packed with easter eggs and unanticipated cross-talk–difficult by scale alone. The boxes dedicated to Rukeyser’s relationship to Jungian psychologist Frances G. Wickes most thoroughly epitomize this ‘difficulty,’ where a decades-long relationship with implications at once intimate, clinical, intellectual, creative, and pecuniary manages stunning ambiguity considering the extensive variety of documents and mutual professional influence the two shared. The available correspondence at the Library of Congress offers a glimpse into what Clive Bush calls a “life-long friendship” in which Rukeyser and Wickes bond over shared interests in child development, Jungian symbolism, and–perhaps above all–the power of stories. However, the exact nature, extent, and timeline of their relationship is still a mystery. The archive introduces unanswered questions about the nature of Wickes and Rukeyser’s relationship–affectionate letters suggest a sexual or romantic dynamic, for example, and remarks from Rukeyser’s unfinished Wickes biography seem to confirm a period of clinical analytic work between them. Later, more fraught moments in their longstanding friendship, however, are recounted in excruciating detail. Committed to helping an aging Wickes with her memoirs and archives, Rukeyser toiled for years without compensation as Wickes wavered on unkept financial promises. Complicated questions around payment, finances, and transference rise up around Rukeyser’s documentation of their later professional relationship, and only increase in mystique against her poetry of the same era. I consider Body of Waking (1958) and its deeply psychoanalytic themes alongside The Life of Poetry, Elegies, and select other poems dedicated to Wickes against the history presented in the Rukeyser archive. Rukeyser references some psychoanalysts explicitly over the course of her life–we know from The Life of Poetry Rukeyser closely read Karen Horney and Otto Rank, found Jung’s ideas valuable for poetry, and directly appropriated and rearranged Anna Freud’s work in 1949’s Elegies–but her personal relationship, correspondences, and what I theorize as transference onto Frances Wickes penetrates a new dimension of our understanding of Rukeyser’s poetics and closes significant relational and emotional gaps in the current knowledge of Rukeyser’s biography and intimate relationships.

Casey Miller is an MA student in the Literature program at Eastern Michigan University. She is a graduate assistant for The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive where she collaborates with Elisabeth Däumer on web updates, event planning, and educational resources. She is an instructor of first year writing at EMU, a recipient of the 2021 JNT Paul Bruss Scholarship, the Departmental Award for Outstanding Graduate Student, as well as a presenter at the Graduate Research Colloquium. She is currently also working on a theory of John Keats’ odes through the lens of disability theory and queer embodiment.

Jacqueline Campbell, “Race, Place, and the Politics of Compassion in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Gates’”

Remembering Muriel Rukeyser in 1981, Denise Levertov praises the poet’s commitment to joining poetry with political action: “From her presence as a protestor at the Scottsboro trial in 1931, when she was eighteen, to the lone journey to Seoul which she undertook in 1975 in the (alas unsuccessful) attempt––using her prestige as president of PEN––to obtain the release from jail of Kim Chi Ha, the Korean poet and activist, Muriel acted on her beliefs, rather than assuming that the ability to verbalize them somehow exempted her from further responsibility.” For Rukeyser’s readers, this 1975 journey to Seoul stands as unexamined evidence of the poet’s lifelong desire to wed poetry with protest, to act on the beliefs written in her poems. No existing scholarship, however, examines the historical details of Rukeyser’s relationship with Kim Chi-ha, the dissident South Korean poet accused of violating anti-communist laws by the military dictatorship under Park Chung Hee.

Using archival research as well as recent studies in affect and emotion, I will attempt to reconstruct the historical narrative of Rukeyser’s protest against the imprisonment of Kim Chi-ha, asking how racial politics and the legacies of U.S. imperialism shaped American writers’ sympathetic responses to this crisis abroad. My paper looks at archival records of Rukeyser’s tenure as President of the PEN American Center as well as the correspondence, drafts, and interviews preceding the publication of “The Gates,” the 1976 poem documenting her experience in Seoul. This compositional history of a single key poem will place Rukeyser within the cultural and political milieu of the New Left and will explore the ambiguous politics of sympathy and compassion shaping how poets respond to the suffering of others. My paper argues that “The Gates” self-consciously documents the poet’s struggle to identify with a poet she never met and could not ultimately help. Though the poem’s final stanzas insist on overcoming racial and cultural difference, I will offer a model of reading that dwells in the difficulty that precedes that overcoming, exploring the uses of both protest and poetry. 

Jacqueline Campbell is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University. Her dissertation, “Preparation for Action: The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser,” explores the social function of poetry in the thought and writing of 20th century American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser.

Jacqueline (Jackie; she/hers) is the organizer of this panel. She can be reached at jmc11@princeton.edu, jmc5564@gmail.com, or (610) 653-0321.

Vivian Pollak’s books include Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender, The Erotic Whitman, and Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference, which was nominated for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. In 2020, she published Muriel Rukeyser: The Contemporary Reviews, 1935-1980, an open access bibliography with electronic links when available. Her essay on “Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser Among the Jews” is forthcoming in the Oxford Walt Whitman Handbook, and she is putting finishing touches on an essay for the Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, titled “Queer Mythologies from Whitman to Frost.” Vivian Pollak is professor emerita at Washington University in St. Louis and a former president of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

“What are all his escapes for?”: Making Sense of Muriel Rukeyser’s Houdini

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Dear Reader,

In what follows, I have tried to offer a careful reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s 1973 version of Houdini: A Musical, published by Paris Press in 2002. This is the version new audiences will soon encounter together during the four public Houdini events sponsored by the Eastern Michigan University Center for Jewish Studies and the English Department this spring. My goal was to strike at some of the play’s most central questions, to pick up on some of the ambiguities and ideas that might appeal to new and not-so-new readers alike. My own reading grew from the question Marco Bone asks in the play’s final scene: “What are all his escapes for?” We might also ask: What is art for?

At the end of this essay, you will find a few questions intended to spark conversation as well as a find from the archive. There must be many more questions I’m missing––I hope you’ll tell me about them.

Cheers, Jackie

*

Houdini is an odd play. Serious and silly, bawdy and surreal, this loosely biographical musical about the life of the great American escape artist seems to wink at its audience, asking us to join in on a joke we don’t always get. Over the course of two acts we watch Harry Houdini rise from poverty, find love, master his craft, and gain international acclaim. We see him break locks, escape trunks, evade death in a frozen river, and testify against fraudulent mediums in a congressional hearing. He exerts perfect control over his body and all his fears. Then, when Houdini appears at his most unstoppable, this self-made man suddenly dies, punched in the gut by a trio of medical students. When he speaks from beyond the grave in the play’s final lines, he commands the audience to liberate themselves, to “Open yourself, for we are locks / Open each other, we are keys”––right before making what might be an innuendo (“Touch yourself as I touch myself”). Is this a hero’s journey? A love story? A farce? 

Houdini is a story about art. It is an exploration of the role artists play in society, an examination of the artist’s power to change their audience and the conditions of our shared world––and the limits of that same power. I know that sounds like a bit of a stretch. Isn’t this a story about a magician? More importantly, isn’t this a story about self-liberation, a story that can inspire us to free our bodies, psyches, and imaginations? The answer is: Yes, Houdini is all of those things. But it’s essential to step back and ask why a magician might be qualified to teach us anything about how to live in the first place, and I want to suggest that the play is uniquely aware of that strange tension: the delightful and sometimes untenable absurdity of calling a showman an artist. Even if you can accept that Houdini is an artist and not just an entertainer, a more troubling possibility remains: the possibility that even artists can’t do much to change a world riddled with injustice and inequality. Houdini does it anyway.

What makes Houdini’s performances an enduring art––not just fleeting entertainment? We can begin by looking at the play’s ambiguous setting and time. Rukeyser’s final 1973 version of the play, published by Paris Press in 2002, includes the following notes: “The time is the legendary past of circuses, carnivals, and magic acts. Historically, the first quarter of the twentieth century, slides to the present time.” The real Erik Weisz was born in 1874 and died in 1926. If the “present time” denotes 1973, the year the play was staged by the Lenox Center for the Performing Arts, then it is clear that even “historical” time is not quite historical here. The world of Houdini is curiously devoid of the major events and crises of the 20th century: There are no World Wars, economic booms or busts, protests, or unrest. Even the congressional hearing in Act Two, Scene Three, which includes material taken directly from Houdini’s Testimony Hearing on House Resolution 8989, seems to float unhinged from the events of the day. While many contemporary readers remember Rukeyser as a Thirties documentarian, this play, completed toward the end of her life, is explicitly not a documentary about the life of Erik Weisz. Rather, Rukeyser sought to create a mythic, “legendary” world that could endure beyond Houdini’s lifetime and her own––even if the details are not entirely true. 

Freed from the confines of historical accuracy, the play strives to reveal some other kind of truth: a truth that only Houdini can show us. In the first scene, Houdini and Bess share their first date. They are walking along a Coney Island beach full of lovers, tourists, tricksters, and grifters when Houdini lets his future wife in on a secret: how to pick up needles with your eyelids. “You control your muscles,” he explains, “And you control your fear. Now you know all.” Suddenly Bess sees Harry as much more than a skilled entertainer:

          You could do anything.
          (The people on the beach are still for a moment.)
          Look––they’re stones, they’re statues of themselves. 
          You can see what they need.
          Look––we could have a mind-reading act.
          Harry––if you bend over me, they’ll think we’re kissing.
          Look––if you could stand up now and say to them:
          “My fear––look what I do with it!”

“Somebody like you,” she tells him, “you could lead them along.” What Bess sees in Houdini is not just the ability to stage a great act, but to “lead them along”: to teach audiences how to be human. Without Houdini the people on the beach are just “stones” and “statues of themselves.” They are not living––or at least not living in a meaningful way. Yet for Houdini the meaningful life is an autonomous one. Through the practice of intense personal discipline, through mastery over his own body and emotions, Houdini transforms his fear into power. He submits to no authority other than his own. Audiences, Bess believes, can learn to do the same. 

Yet the play also casts some deep doubt on the extent of Houdini’s powers. In Act One, Scene Three, Houdini performs his first big lock-breaking act: He opens all the locks in the “city jail,” ushers the prisoners out of their cells, then locks each man into a new one. Throughout the stunt, Houdini asks what kind of crime each man has committed. One prisoner answers, with an odd nonchalance: “Child-knifer… Cop-killer. Mass-rapist. Nothing much.” When the momentarily freed Fourth Prisoner asks Houdini “Can you get me out of here?” Houdini, “looking at him in despair,” only answers “No.” When the trick is done, Houdini turns to the prisoners and says, “Forgive me.” The jail scene ends with a song, “Hostility,” sung by the prisoners, who are divided into the “Black Prisoner,” the lead singer, and “Prisoners,” the ensemble. The “Black Prisoner” sings:

          The man who opened my prison door
          Has put me back in jail.
          No chance to plead my innocence,
          Or get out of here on bail.
          Someone showed me free,
          And drove me deeper in my misery.

These characters do not reappear in the play, and Houdini never again apologizes to anyone involved in his act. The jail scene marks a strange divergence in what is otherwise a story of triumph. Confronted with systemic racism and mass incarceration, Houdini’s powers of self-liberation seem to have reached a hard limit. Perhaps these are conditions of confinement that cannot be overcome. 

At the outset of Act Two, Scene Two, as Houdini prepares to take the stage, his assistant Marco Bone and his wife Bess sing his opening act, a song called “What the King Said”:

          Today your ambassador said in fun,
          “Things are tough in Washington––
          Let’s go see what Houdini has done.”
          With all the forms of American rape,
          We need a good all-purpose escape,  
          An all-purpose good economy escape…
          Every president and king
          Must be able to get out of everything… 

“What the King Said” may be a satire, but the song still raises the possibility that Houdini’s act is futile––and maybe even counterproductive. When viewed by people in positions of power, Houdini’s illusions are entertainment and escapism at best (“Things are tough in Washington–– / Let’s go see what Houdini has done”). At worst, they offer a lesson in how to deepen injustice and inequality (“Every president and king / Must be able to get out of everything.”). Lying, fraud, negligence: These are all forms of “escape,” too. The song’s second verse imagines a king speaking to “Houdini the Great,” saying, “You can have all your locks and clocks / As long as I’m in the royal box.” Just as the prisoners can’t use Houdini’s message of self-liberation to actually get out of their cells, so too are the “ambassadors” in Washington and the king in his court unchanged by the performance. For those in the lowest and the highest positions of power, life goes on just as before. Perhaps artists are only free to create so long as they make sure not to threaten the dominant power structure. 

Again and again, the play pushes against the limits of freedom, only to suddenly sweep those limits away, suggesting that anything is possible. We might wonder if the play truly believes its own message. Take, for example, Act One, Scene Four, when Houdini sings “Chains, Freedom, Keys,” the play’s most memorable expression of his belief: that freedom is accessible to everyone, everywhere. Moments before a shackled Houdini is lowered beneath the frozen surface of the East River, about to perform the most dangerous escape of the play, he sings: 

          There are chains––
          There is freedom––
          There are keys––
          And of these, chains are strong
          Freedom’s endless, keys are great
          And we
          Are the greatest of these,
          The greatest 
          Of these.

In the world of Houdini, individuals have the ability to free themselves from suffering––if not from the structural conditions of suffering (like being incarcerated or impoverished), than from the psychic ones (like feeling weak or afraid). No longer reliant on supernatural authorities like God or the spirits of the dead, and perhaps powerless to intervene in the workings of the state, individuals can essentially make the best of what they’ve got: their own bodies, minds, and emotions. This way of thinking might reflect the therapeutic language of self-help, the corporatized technospeak of self-optimization, or even the alienating consequences of capitalism itself. Yet Houdini’s claims about personal autonomy might also stake out a powerful bid for individual agency in a world that would otherwise render its inhabitants completely powerless. The play’s persistent ambiguity won’t let us say for sure.

When Houdini’s claims cross over into the unbelievable, it’s often the wry assistant Marco Bone who plays the naysayer. After the second verse of “Chains, Freedom, Keys” concludes, “There are keys–– / And the greatest of these / Can free the world,” Bone cuts in with a skeptical accusation: “You’re telling them something they want to hear.” Why should anyone trust a promise of world liberation made by an entertainer, by someone who tells audiences “something they want to hear” and gets paid for it? We can read Bone’s skepticism as part of the play’s larger pattern in which claims about art’s power to transform society are constantly met with flashes of doubt and resistance. Yet this pattern is also marked by the swiftness––the sometimes baffling and even awkward speed––with which those doubts are cast aside. When Houdini replies, “I’m just doing it,” Bone is instantly convinced (“You’re saying it. With yourself!”) and the scene shifts to the news of Houdini’s mother’s death. The point is not to say that Houdini is inconsistent, but that the play’s constantly shifting tone forces its viewers to continually ask ourselves what we’re willing to believe. Can self-liberators really “free the world”? Are Houdini’s promises true, or are they just the rhetoric of the ultimate showman? And why does the play so playfully avoid answering its own questions? 

Houdini refuses to pin down the precise meaning of freedom or the function of art. Yet there is one thing the play might know for sure: That artworks, regardless of what they do or what they’re for, endure. In the play’s final scene, just before Houdini dies, he promises Bess, “I’ll come back to you. I’ll make a way. I’ll come back.” Here Marco Bone, the skeptic, makes his final interjection:

Read your newspaper. The law against fortune-tellers? Of course, it did not go through. Tell your fortune, ladies and gentlemen? What are all his escapes for? What did he make his stand for? Go further, you say? Does Houdini go further? Breaking out forever? 

Beatrice waits for a word from Harry.

Bone finally asks the play’s central question: “What are all his escapes for?” It’s important to note that this question comes in the midst of Houdini’s failure to enact tangible political change. Houdini’s efforts to pass “the law against fortune-tellers,” the crusade against false mediums that occupied the majority of Act Two, “did not go through.” Here the play reaches a tipping point: If we are to believe that Houdini’s “escapes” matter, that they will make an impact on society regardless of what’s written into the law, then he needs to achieve immortality through some other means. One way out of this conundrum is to prove that Houdini does in fact have supernatural powers. “Breaking out forever,” the escape from death, would be Houdini’s biggest stunt yet. Yet the fact that Houdini even raises the possibility of a ghostly return seems to contradict his entire life’s work. Why would he promise a supernatural intervention if he believed that spiritualists were frauds? 

As “Beatrice waits for a word from Harry,” the stage directions tell us that “something does come, a message in the form of a song.” Houdini then reappears on stage beside his wife and sings a fragment of an earlier song, “Let Me See, Let Me Feel”: “Let me see, Let me feel, / Let me know what is real, / Let me believe––” An ensemble of naysayers raise their final doubts: “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. / It didn’t even sound like his voice.” Is this song sung by a ghostly voice, or is it just a memory in Bess’ mind? Did Houdini really escape death, “breaking out forever”? The stage goes dark. When Houdini emerges again, this time the stage directions make clear that he is about to break the fourth wall and address the audience directly: “Singing, crowing, laughing, a chaos of noise. HOUDINI steps out of the blackness to the point closest to the audience.” It is at this point in the play––the point when we are asked to believe the impossible––that Rukeyser subtly reminds us that we are watching a play. Erik Weisz was a man, but Harry Houdini was a character he played, and Houdini is a character in this play. He is on a stage. In front of an audience. If he is alive after death it is because the play itself is giving him life––or a particular view on a life, shaped by the vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Whenever the play is staged, they both, in a way, return. The play itself is the “actual magic.”

Perhaps what Rukeyser wants us to see is that the encounter with art––with music, poetry, theater––is very much like the supernatural. Perhaps artworks cast a spell so powerful we cannot fully know or explain how they work. We should certainly try. But just as we cannot know exactly why poems or songs or even musicals move us exactly the way they do, we also cannot predict what their effects in the world will be. The work of artists might be ignored or lost. These works might be co-opted and abused by the powerful, or they might offer consolation and inspiration for the powerless. They might change one person’s life or society at large––for better or for worse. The artist’s desire to create goes on regardless, but why? Houdini’s playfulness, irreverence, and sheer strangeness speak to the unanswerable nature of these questions. Rukeyser would have wanted us to keep asking them anyway.  

*

Questions to consider:

  1. How would you describe the experience of reading, hearing, and seeing Houdini? I have used words like “strange,” “surreal,” “inconsistent,” and “ambiguous,” but these are my responses and interpretations. Which words would you choose? 
  2. Houdini continually asks its audience to question what they are and are not willing to believe. Which moments in this play feel impossible to you? Do you find these moments intriguing, exciting, frustrating, confusing? Why? 
  3. What really happens in the play’s final scene? Does Houdini return? Whose voice does Bess hear? Why does it matter?
  4. At the end of this essay, I suggest that “the play itself is the ‘actual magic’.” But is art really magic? Or like magic? And what does “actual magic” really mean?
  5. Attached to this post you will find a letter Rukeyser sent to an unnamed recipient, likely Lyn Austin (Houdini’s Producer) and André Gregory, on August 1, 1973. After the initial production of Houdini in July 1973, Austin and Gregory requested that she rewrite the play’s second act in anticipation of an additional (though never staged) production in 1975. Here you can find Rukeyser’s notes on Act Two, including some uncertainties and possible revisions. How do these notes affect your understanding of the play? For example, why does the shift in music after “What the King Said” matter so much? Why are the “storm of light” and the “yellow curtain” called “big clues”? Why should the words “SELF-LIBERATOR” remain unsaid?

Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Box II:13, Folder 11, Plays, Houdini, 1944-54, 1969-74, n.d. Posted with permission of William L Rukeyser.

Jackie Campbell is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University. Her dissertation, Preparation for Action: The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, explores the social function of poetry in the thought and writing of 20th century poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser. 

A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini

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Between

Carolyn S. Stroebe, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist (#PSY11564) in Berkeley & author of Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness.

And

Elisabeth Däumer, Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies and Administrator of  Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive at at Eastern Michigan University.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80)/ Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

Important Note: Passages taken from Dr. Stroebe’s book, Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness and from unpublished interviews or other material are in quotes and italicized. The primary interview featured here was with Muriel Rukeyser (and Professor Frank Barron) at a private home on Union Street in San Francisco, California, on the afternoon of 30 July 1979.

CS:  Professor Däumer, Elisabeth – Congratulations on producing Houdini!  And soon!

And thank you!

ED:  Yes, it’s happening! Thanks to a generous grant from Michigan Humanities–an affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities–as well as EMU’s Center for Jewish Studies (which means my colleague Marty Shichtman) and the English Department. (http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/locks-keys-freedom-muriel-rukeysers-houdini-and-the-public-role-of-poetry/)

CS:  I found the New York Times article announcing the first and only earlier production in 1973 starring a 30 year old Christopher Walken.  So this production of yours – a celebration as we near its 50th anniversary?  Half a century.

ED: Yes…we’re doing four staged readings of the play, or rather musical. And a virtual conversation, via zoom webinar, on Rukeyser and Houdini with two terrific speakers: Jan Freeman, who edited and published the play in 2002, and Stefania Heim who is the first to analyze the composition of the play.  They are going to be joined by Houdini expert Matthew Solomon, who has written on Houdini and the new magic of silent movies.

CS: That’s great!  Let me calendar all of those immediately!

ED: This webinar will take place at 11am on March 20 and should be of special interest to Rukeyser aficionados, since Houdini has garnered too little attention—so far! So we’re very excited and hope lots of people will attend the staged reading (we’re planning to live stream the first on March 20, 2pm) and the zoom webinar.

CS:  If it weren’t for my extreme Covid cautiousness I would fly out for the opening performance.  I have lots of questions for you about the play and what it suggests about Muriel. I am so grateful that we are an interdisciplinary team.  You are the Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies Professor and I, a Clinical/Personality Psychologist, albeit one blessed to have interviewed Muriel shortly before her death. And what we do we have in common?  We are both in love with Muriel!

ED: Carolyn,  since you are in such a unique position and of interdisciplinary status – could you introduce yourself a bit more – for example, how  did you come to interview Muriel Rukeyser?

CS: Muriel participated in a study of creative writers in 1958 at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Frank Barron, my mentor and dissertation chair in graduate school, in 1979, at UC Santa Cruz, was in charge of the files of these writers. Each student in Frank’s 1979 Graduate Personality Assessment Seminar chose a writer upon whom to focus.  Hearing Muriel’s name, I recalled a favorite poem written by her, so guess who I chose?

ED: Muriel, of course!

I’d love to know more about Barron and the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research in Berkeley.  Another time!

CS: Deal! I dedicated my 2021 book to the memory of Muriel and Frank – stars of creativity in both the 20th and 21st centuries.  Anyway, Muriel just happened to be visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1979 and Frank arranged for the two of us to interview her; that interview, the 1958 case files, and other material formed the basis of my Master of Science Thesis on route to the Ph.D.  Then, as you know, Muriel died in early 1980. I had been considering other topics for my doctoral dissertation, but it seemed timely to continue studying Muriel by interviewing people who knew her well, while they were still alive.  And so I did, mostly in New York City.  I recently published the 1982 dissertation – forty years later as an e-book and paperback – hard cover on the way! I was then a Personality Research Psychologist.  I didn’t  become a clinician until retraining years later.  Currently I am a Licensed Psychologist with three decades of experience – and I now come to the case of Muriel, much more prepared to understand this complicated woman; although as we’ve discussed, Muriel is a mystery to some degree, to everyone who encounters her.

ED:  Yes, she certainly is!  By the way, I tend to think of and refer to her as Muriel Rukeyser; I’ve noticed you refer to her as Muriel, relatively informally. 

CS: Hmm.…a thought-provoking observation!  I hadn’t even realized that, but it’s true. Thank you because I pride myself on having good professional boundaries and being polite, respectful and appropriate.  Let me think….

First, I may be wrong but it might be that Psychologists tend to be comparatively less formal, and certainly we were in Santa Cruz.  I addressed Professor Barron as Frank and he called me Carolyn.  By 1979, Muriel and Frank had known one another for over 20 years, so they were on a first-name basis.  There was no suggestion on anyone’s part to do otherwise. In fact, at the end of the afternoon, Muriel and Frank, and Muriel and I exchanged a hug and a kiss.  After Muriel died and I began doing interviews with family and close friends on very personal, psychological topics, this informal style continued. Actually, I ‘m now referring to Houdini as Harry; maybe informality in a Muriel context is as contagious as Omicron.

ED:  Thanks for this explanation. So, what do you see as the clearest connection between Houdini and Muriel and what’s your take on why she chose to write this play?

CS: Well, I think the most dominant theme you and I have discussed is Muriel’s and Houdini’s shared fascination: becoming captive with the challenge of escaping, combined with an eventual successful escape.  I know the topic came up when I asked Muriel about her “jail time” during my 1979 interview.  What do you think, Elisabeth?

ED: I think the idea of IMPRISONMENT is an important context – one that Houdini and Muriel had in common.  Muriel felt imprisoned in her home, family, even country. 

CS: Wow.  Even country…

ED: Here’s a line from “This House, This Country” written in 1935:  “I have left forever / house and maternal river / given up sitting in that private tomb / quitted that land   that house   that velvet room.”  

CS:  Tell me more about her feeling imprisoned in her country.

ED: Well, “land” could mean a number of things in this poem, but if we take it as referring to the United States of America, a country that Rukeyser also had fervently idealistic feelings toward, I think of her experiences as a left-leaning, rebellious, young, queer, and Jewish woman, eager to spread her wings, to challenge political and aesthetic orthodoxies, to find her vocation, her voice—and that’s what she did when she went to Spain in 1936.

CS: So Interesting.  And what of Muriel’s fascination with Houdini, the man? In psychological terms I believe she identified with him. It might easily have been the other way around but Harry was born first and died when Muriel was only 12!

CS & ED: (Laughter!!!!). 

CS: Yes, Harry died in 1926 –  but there was so much Houdini activity in the New York City in which Muriel grew up. And what a legend he created – that lasted through her lifetime.  

So, identification – in personality and poetry – what else about Muriel’s interest in Harry?

ED: She could have mentioned him in “Waterlily Fire,” with Gyp the Blood, perhaps—but she doesn’t! The first written evidence of Muriel’s interest in Houdini came in in 1939, in a poem entitled “Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini.” None of the lines from that poem show up in the play, but I think it points us to an important historical and emotional context for Rukeyser’s Houdini fixation–the rise of fascism, the persecution of European Jews and other people declared ‘subhuman’ for reasons of race, sexuality, religion.  So, in my mind, Rukeyser turned to Houdini as a Jew who overcame his impoverished immigrant background and became a celebrity, a superhero challenging institutional authority and fighting the forces of fascism. 

CS: I love that superhero image – subhuman to superhero.

ED:  You make me curious about the 70s context of Rukeyser’s interest in Houdini as well.

CS: Well… I’m looking at Louise Kertesz’s pathbreaking The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, specifically at her chronology – and I see what surrounds the 1973 production of Houdini: Muriel had gone to jail for protesting in Washington DC in 1972  and published her book of poetry, Breaking Open, in 1973.  Two years later she traveled to protest imprisonment of Kim Chi-Ha in Korea.  And, then, of course there was Scottsboro back in 1933 – so throughout her life, this theme.  Elisabeth– Do we know when Muriel actually wrote Houdini?

ED: Archival evidence suggests that she worked on the play, on and off, for three decades.

CS: I guess the legend DID last a lifetime!

ED: The version that got published by Paris Press in 2002 is based on revisions she made after the Lenox production in 1973.  Allen Hughes, reviewing the performance on opening night for the New York Times found the musical “pointed and forceful in the first act, aimless and weak in the second.”

CS: Did she make many revisions and what kinds of  revisions did she make?

ED: That I don’t know yet—but I am eager to find out.  The archive will tell us!  Fortunately, we’ll have Stefania Heim and Jan Freeman as webinar speakers on March 20.  They’ll enlighten us!

CS:  Wonderful!  So . . . Related to the themes of imprisonment and breaking free in Muriel’s life and work and in the play . . . Shall I read some from my 1979 interview that involves these?

ED: Please do.

CS:  Ok.  I had asked Muriel to tell me about the experience of prison in Washington D.C. in 1972.  Here is her reply:

[Muriel] “…Well in the beginning it was a refusal to do anything else; the judge wanted me to pay instead of going to prison.  And I said that there wasn’t anything that money could do.  It wouldn’t say what I wanted to say, and that it would be better if I went to prison.  And I was handcuffed then, and taken across the street to the jail and put in with . . . a lot of women . . . Mostly a black jail, with black guards . . . And I came in under very favorable conditions, because I hadn’t been taken into jail the day that I appeared.  They weren’t ready for me.  And they hadn’t prepared the papers. So, they said to come back the next day.  And I went to the motel, and I stayed there.  I didn’t phone people, or anything.  Because I was supposed to be in jail.  And they had run a story on the front page of the STAR about me pulling some lines from the Scottsboro poem.  And it was that that saved me because that reached the jail before I got there.  And when I got there they asked me “Was (that?) you the poet?” . . . mostly negro women.  It was a jail for prowlers and for whoring.  Those were the main crimes.  And there were a few white women, two white women, mostly in jail for absconding with funds . . . and they tried to break me into the con game.  They said I’d be good.”

CS:      The three of us had a good laugh about this  – and then she continued…

            [Muriel]“…and I was flattered that they were willing to break me in.” 

CS:      And when asked if she had been in jail before Muriel responded:

            [Muriel} “That’s one of the questions that I can’t answer “yes” or “no” to, because I was arrested when I was nineteen at Scottsboro.  And there wasn’t any room in the jail because it was full of Scottsboro boys.  I wasn’t in jail but I should have been.”

CS:      So, Muriel seems to feel she deserved to go to jail and also to really have wanted to go to jail – and she seems to have welcomed the handcuffs as an honor . . . just as Houdini – in the play – according to Beatrice, in Act One/Scene Two, Harry … “LIKES BEING LOADED DOWN AND CONFINED. HE LIKES EVEN MORE TO BREAK OUT.”

            And as with Muriel and those who wanted to break her into the con game, Whitsun in the play wants to teach Beatrice to become a pick pocket. He says  “TO BE AT THE TENT FLAP WHILE THE CROWD IS COMING IN. SOMETIMES THERE’S QUITE A BIT OF CASH…”. And Epictetus suggests “WELL,THEY’VE GOT POCKETS–? LOVELY AND DEEP.”

ED: That’s marvelous! I love these passages from your interview! But the reference to Scottsboro is also perplexing.  I thought she contracted typhus while in jail! So, what are we to believe?

CS: Excellent question!  Remember I am a scientist. Psychological data is always tricky but exponentially so with our Muriel!  As one of my interviewees said “you could have chosen much easier characters to study . . . there are so many inconsistencies and contradictions in the things I am saying to you because that was the way she was . . . some things about her were impossible to explain.”  

Can you say more about Houdini and your changing view of his complexity that you have mentioned?

ED: The more I read about Houdini, the more complex he becomes—not just his relationships to his mother and Bess, and in Rukeyser’s play to his assistant (who I assume is pure invention on Muriel’s part)  but also his vendetta against spiritualism and his simultaneous promise to Bess that if he found a way through from death, he’d let her know (so she held annual séances for ten years after this death). I wonder if Muriel’s own complexity expresses itself through all the characters. She is both Houdini and Bess, perhaps? And Volonty? Perhaps Volonty is who she’d like to be? A high wire artist not constrained by gravity–a sort of female Houdini? Her name, in French–volonté–means “will,” “will power” or “persistence, and also “wish” or “desire.”

 CS: Thank you for hearing Muriel as at least three voices in the play.  In my 1979 interview with Muriel I brought up one of my favorite poems “Effort at Speech Between Two People.” I asked if it was intended to be a monologue or a dialogue. She answered ““Well I think they’re two real voices… but of course they’re both my voice.”  So here is Muriel making actual voices – three or more – in the writing of this play.

ED: Yes.  So, how do you see Muriel’s identification with Houdini?

CS: First, I use the term identification very loosely as a largely unconscious process when one associates oneself closely with another’s characteristics, profession, points-of-view and/or  behaviors. Beyond what we’ve already discussed – that both Muriel and Harry were European Jews, and escape artists, entertainers and illusionists, here are a few more commonalities. Both were leaders–organizers–presidents! Harry for the Society of American Magicians and Muriel for American P.E.N.  Curiously both were interested in aviation–in the early 20th century!  Hmm . . . I think of your earlier words about the high wire artist . . .

ED: Yes–Volonty –“not constrained by gravity.”

CS: That’s it!

ED:  It’s interesting to think of Rukeyser as an “escape artist” and an “illusionist.” Perhaps artists, by nature of their craft and passion, become experts at escape? In my mind Rukeyser wasn’t interested in escapes from reality—on the contrary, her art compels us to experience what’s real in a heightened, visceral, and imaginative way. Houdini’s escapes strike me as very down to earth—how to get out of handcuffs, a prison cell, a locked box, a milk can, a straight jacket. These are confines that the people who watched him recognized and perhaps identified with.  I know he was also an illusionist, but in her play Muriel seems more interested in his passion for first locking and then freeing himself.  And this makes me wonder—Rukeyser was often intrigued by the sorts of conventions that can lock us in, as women, above all marriage and motherhood.  She got out of her one marriage after only a few months, and she refused to be limited, in her creative life, by motherhood. That’s quite a feat!

CS: Indeed, Muriel was a superhero! Both Muriel and Harry strike me as strong, high energy people.  Neither fit society’s physical ideal as Muriel was heavy and Houdini was short for a man – but they certainly made up for these superficial qualities by being STRONG.  Harry was very fit and strong physically, as well as in character. And, of course, I see strength in multiple ways as central to Muriel: I titled the book Muriel Rukeyser, Strength and Weakness for a reason!

They were both STRONG: courageous, daring  and rarely if ever outwardly fearful, as well as persistent, persevering and determined — even stubborn.  And, Both were energetic: physically – active, engaged , alert– and energetic emotionally – as enthusiastic and deeply  passionate people. Both were independent – fierce individuals, very intelligent  and highly competent.

ED:  What about weakness?  I know you discuss weakness in Muriel – but how about Houdini?

CS:  A critical question, Elisabeth, for despite all these strengths, their weakness-in-common was their failing to realize they were not 100% superhero – but HUMAN.  Both neglected their health and this played a role in both of their deaths—which were early deaths —  Muriel at age 66 and Harry at 52.  According to some of my dissertation interviewees, Muriel had many health concerns which she ignored. She refused to do what her doctors advised and actually fired some who wanted her to do what she did not wish to do. For example, she failed to take proper care of her diabetes including refusing to take insulin. She would attend events and travel when it was ill advised.  One such occasion was “A day in honor of Muriel Rukeyser” at Sarah Lawrence: she attended when she should have been resting and collapsed at the end of the day and had to be hospitalized.   

ED:  I’ve heard about that and there was a similar situation for Houdini who could not complete his last performance.  I know he died of an appendicitis or its complications.

CS: Exactly. Peritonitis or an inflamed abdomen, secondary to a ruptured appendix.  Harry had developed excruciating pain but insisted on going “on with the show” and refused to see a doctor. When he finally did, he was diagnosed with an acute appendicitis and advised to have surgery immediately. Ignoring this,  he went on,  struggling, with a fever of 104 degrees. By the time the surgery was finally done, his appendix had ruptured and complications which killed him had arisen.

ED:  Since for both of them the body played such a crucial role, it’s puzzling that they did not ‘listen’ to it more . . .

CS:  Sadly so . . .

Returning to the lives of these strong – and weak characters, Elisabeth – could you say more about complexity?  Earlier you said you see Houdini as more complex, the more you learn.

ED: Perhaps a better word than complexity is contradictions.  By all accounts, Houdini was an incredible showman with a gigantic ego and given to hyperbole. He did not just re-invent himself when he morphed from Ehrich Weiss, a poor Hungarian Jewish immigrant, to Harry Houdini. He also invented stories about himself and his exploits—there’s a photo of him as a young man, which shows him with a whole barrage of athletic awards.  Only one of these awards was actually his own. You might say he was a liar. 

CS:  Hmmm . . . a complex relationship to the truth . . .

ED: At the same time, he was intent on exposing mediums and séances as fraud—regardless of the fact that he himself had worked as a medium, which is, of course, how he knew they were fraudulent. The full extent of these contradictions may not have been known when Rukeyser began working on Houdini—or they did not interest her. The contradiction in Houdini’s character that does interest her, very much, is his skill at getting himself out of tight places and his utter inability to break the hold on him of his father and, especially, his mother Cecilia.

CS: I didn’t know his father had a hold on him as well.  Maybe we can take this up in a Part II of this blog? 

        Now I would like to discuss our complicated Muriel.

ED:  Yes.

CS: On our Zooms, you and I look at one another and smile when we think of our woman of mystery, Muriel, and her complex and contrasting selves. Muriel could be a performer – even somewhat exhibitionistic–  but she could also be very shy and as if hiding. Muriel and Harry – both illusionists – making an audience believe in magic when there was none really. Making what was but natural look supernatural. The disappearing Elephant was an illusion created with mirrors.  Apparently, the locks on trunks had removeable hinges.

ED: This is a fascinating topic! Houdini insisted he did not have supernatural powers; and he sometimes revealed how he did some of his ‘illusions.’  He insisted that it was all a matter of knowing something about human perception.  I do think there’s something magical about art (and both MR and Houdini were artists), especially its ability to make the imaginary seem as, or even more, real than anything else.

CS: Interesting.

        Well both of them certainly knew how to draw attention to themselves. Let me read from my book:  “Muriel’s habit of and ability to shock and surprise people is the most unusual and mysterious feature in her behavioral repertoire. . . .” During the 1958 study, a psychologist who administered some psychological tests, suggested that Muriel “seeks to surprise people and throw them off balance.” 

        According to my interviewees who knew Muriel well, she would “set up shocking situations so she could sit back and watch the reactions” and “she enjoyed shocking . . . there was a kind of gleam in her eye when she did some of these things. . . .”

ED: Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. She was a modernist, after all! Modernist art sought to shock viewers out of their complacencies, whether ethical or aesthetic—or political!

CS: Oh . . . I see. 

        I have a few stories, circa early-mid 1970’s, about Muriel disappearing into a bathroom or back room in the middle of small dinner parties with another person – apparently for sex.  To add some historical perspective, I used the word “person” in my 1982 work, instead of woman, not wanting to “out” Muriel or her still living, more conservative partner as QUEER: back then, when QUEER was still considered literally queer.  However, two women disappearing for sex in the middle of a straight dinner party would have, unquestionably, been a shock – now nearly a half century ago.

ED:  And you are going to write more, are you not? Forty years later, now a clinical psychologist, about Muriel’s being queer?

CS: I hope to, yes. 

Oh, I wanted to add that Muriel’s surprises were also positive, and were used to make people feel special. During the interview, Frank and I believed she was telling us secrets; these were not  widely known but were not complete secrets either –or something she had not revealed to anyone else.  Apparently because we were psychologists, Muriel said to us “You’ve had the truth all along.  You’ve wanted the truth.”  She spoke of us to her partner who was there that day, as not ordinary, not from a magazine: we were different! Indeed, Frank and I felt very special when we left that afternoon!

ED: I am so intrigued by that. It seems she offered her stories like jewels–special, even intimate, gifts designed to make the recipient feel special and well disposed toward her.

CS:  Yes. 
Before we wrap up, I wanted to share a part in the play which I absolutely love. In Act Two, Scene One, Beatrice asks “What would happen If one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

And Harry, a true feminist, at least in Muriel’s play, suggests “It has. Now I’m going after it –all pieces.”

This is a man – although created by a woman – who gets it. And, I love the reappearance of what has become a well-known quote of Muriel’s. Did you know Hillary Clinton uses it in her post 2016 election book, What Happened? (on Page 146).

ED:  I had no idea, but I am not surprised. I think all of us can identify with it.  There is still so much we don’t say about our lives—perhaps don’t know how or don’t dare to say! It’s curious though, isn’t it, that this important comment comes from Bess, whose role in the play pales besides Harry’s—until that one moment, at the very end of Act One, where she let’s loose and gives him a piece of her mind—“What are you trying to do—God Jesus! Killing everything—And the goddamn fucking sun, what about the sunlight?  And me and me?” I look forward to delving into the play’s feminist and queer subtext a bit more in future conversations with you, and with Jan and Stefania—and the audience!

CS: I can’t wait!  And, a perfect note upon which to end.  Thanks so much, Elisabeth, for making this conversation – and this play – possible! 

Please cite this conversation and the quoted material as: Stroebe, Carolyn, and Elisabeth Däumer, “A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini,” http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/02/20/a-conversation-about-muriel-rukeyser-and-harry-houdini-between/.

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Susanna Ansorge, Rat Elegy–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies

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Preface

Muriel Rukeyser’s Elegies challenges readers with an array of complicated literary devices and historical references as a way of digesting a thoroughly grueling time in world history, as she lived through it. Since the work isn’t reflecting on the past, but rather a historical present, Elegies stands as especially relevant for readers experiencing unprecedented times. Even as one of those readers, I still had a lot of difficulty interpreting Rukeyser’s ambitious collection. As that’s the case, I wanted to emulate her as a way of understanding the work. If I can at least reconstruct how these elegies were written, I might have an easier time reading them. However, when I went back to reread them closely, I realized how much I tried to take on and decided to emulate just two of the devices I noticed in Elegies, what I’m calling: modernist montage and idiosyncratic nouns.

Montage is a film technique where two scenes or sets of images are juxtaposed with one another in a swiftly moving sequence. This technique requires viewers (or readers) to forge a connection between radically disparate subjects. Modernist art rose to prominence after World War I and, narrowly speaking, was interested in cutting down to the bones of art as a way of processing the horror of the modern age. Hemingway’s work illustrates this movement fairly well. His stories use extremely simple vocabulary and lightly organized descriptions that leave readers with the challenge to try figuring out what’s going on, like being blindfolded while trying to distinguish grapes from eyeballs. Modernist art is disorienting and visceral, much like the times the artists were living in. Therefore, modernist montage is a technique where imagery is juxtaposed with the aim of exploring disorientation, where it comes from and what it can mean. This technique is prominent in all of Rukeyser’s elegies, but for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to look at an instance of montage in the first elegy, “River Elegy”:

Gaudy sadistic streets, dishonest avenues
where every face has bargained for its eyes.
And they come down to the river, driven down.
And all the faces fly out of my city.
The rich streets full of empty coats parading
and one adolescent protesting violin. (34)

In the first line, Rukeyser brings readers to a town that looks deplorable. It’s “gaudy,” so overdressed and in poor taste. Combined with “sadistic” and “dishonest,” the streets come into focus as blood splattered and broken. The kind of place full of dark alleyways. In the second line, the speaker confirms that this place is familiar with its sadism. “Every face” has had to prove its worth, in exchange for keeping basic abilities such as sight. The third line pulls readers out of the streets and near the riverbed. The frame fills with a crowd made of wounds and rags, “driven down” by desperation or by force. The fourth line confirms their evacuation out of, presumably, the speaker’s city. Then the fifth line immediately yanks readers back to the streets. The streets are rich with empty coats, instead of wealth. The city is war-torn, after all. The frame centers a river of fur, cloth, and military insignia as it “parades” through the “dishonest avenues.” The last line pushes the coats into the background while the foreground features a teen playing his violin’s heart out, seemingly the only resident left. With each line, the image never settles. In each line, Rukeyser hands another brimming photograph. And before readers can really inspect it, she places another one. For the sake of some continuity, I assumed all these images originated in the same city, but they could just as easily only share a day or an event or a central theme. Readers have no anchor. The stanza doesn’t follow the violin boy. He visits at the end and leaves right after. The stanza doesn’t perch us on an eagle, viewing it all from a distance. Instead, readers are practically drowning in the city’s blood. Readers aren’t told for a second where to look or what to look for. Rukeyser simply places another photograph. However, instead of revealing ramble soup, unpacking each image shows the theme as it forms in each reader’s mind. Readers may have no anchor, but they have the ocean. They can still feel the pulsing waves below the deck, catch their power, and move from there. This passage could be interpreted as the fear and chaos created when a city is bombed. This passage is concerned fully with the city’s citizens. Without a warning or a plan, everyone is taking what measures they can come up with. People run to the river. People gather their belongings, even if it’s just a coat. People try to make some merry out of the nightmare. The boy and his fiddle are described as “protesting,” perhaps that protest is a refusal to be afraid. Montage is formed from a longer uninterrupted film strip being cut up into smaller pieces that are then strung together. Perhaps these montages were created by fleshing out whole scenes and then cutting them down to a summary or a close examination of a few key segments. Therefore, montage works mainly by implications and within an unexplained greater context.

Part of the puzzle in Rukeyser’s Elegies is distinguishing what the historical context of each elegy is and in what unique way she is framing that context. Rather than simply borrowing from how people were discussing her times, she came at it from as new of an angle as she felt was useful. One of the ways she accomplished that new angle was by estranging certain nouns from their conventional use and re-using them in her own related but idiosyncratic context. For example in the fifth elegy “A Turning Wind,” Rukeyser writes, 

following charts of moving constellations.  
Charts of country of all visions, imperishable  
stars of our dreams : process, which having neither
             sorrow nor joy 
remains as promise, the embryo in the fire. (31)

As a noun, “chart” refers to a “sheet of information in the form of a table, graph, or diagram,” (Google). A “constellation” is a “group of stars in a recognizable pattern,” and a “vision” is either being able to see or to “think about or plan the future,” (Google). But within the context of this passage, how do those definitions help? Their conventional usages leave these nouns as static objects. Within the passage, the constellations are not just recognizable patterns, they’re moving. The other chart is “of country of all visions”, not simply the ability to see. So I asked myself, in what context would someone need living star charts and access to an array of predictions? Like a lot of questions Elegies raises, the answer lies in the historical present of the 1940s. During the 1940s, black southern Americans were mass migrating to the north, an event known as “The Second Great Migration.” The First Great Migration started in 1916 and surged until the 1970s as a response to the era of Jim Crow legislation following Reconstruction. Black Americans were finally given some legal rights during Reconstruction, but white Americans pushed back as violently as they could. This cruel push back resulted in the majority of black Americans moving up north, where there was less overt racism, hoping to get a fresh start and a stable life. “A Turning Wind” mourns the difficulty of the travel and of attempting to plant roots in a less explicitly racist part of a fundamentally racist country. This passage cited above uses charts to refer to specifically the kind of information people had to draw on to accomplish their journey. They had to gather as much advice as they could to avoid sun-down towns and the rebranded slave-patrol, aka the police. They had to rely on the stars to guide their grueling path. All that time and effort and pain was for the sake of the “imperishable stars of [their] dreams.” While the stars are aspirational, they act as a motivator, solely for the freedom they represent, for example the north star. Furthermore, the process itself is so long and arduous that it produces “neither sorrow nor joy,” only dogged persistence to preserve the “promise” of a better fairer life for themselves and especially their children. Their children who, if left in the south, might have been “embryo[s] in the fire.” Without knowing about America’s Great Migration, this passage might come off as garbled. Unprepared readers can parse only bits and pieces, which leads to a swiss-cheesed view of the subject. However, with knowledge of that context, the work and its nouns represent their subject from its rich insides, its struggles, beliefs, and hopes. That inside angle invoked so fully in “A Turning Wind” would have been, and still is, ignored by the majority of white Americans, who prefer to think of the travelers as parasitic. Rukeyser’s angle on black migrants considers their humanity not only in enduring cruelty, but as dreamers as well. In this elegy, they are people who are capable of the one divine human trait, the ability to hope, to envision a better future, and to act upon both, which reflects precisely who those migrants were then, and who migrants are today. They are people looking for a better home, for themselves and mostly for their children.

Traditional elegies focus on mourning. They accept loss by giving it space on the page. Rukeyser’s work mourns open wounds as they’re being made. She doesn’t simply cry out bitterly. She insists on giving her gruesome present not just a gravestone but a siren. Along with imitating her techniques, I hope to imitate the wounded center of her elegies. We live in a present that’s being eviscerated at all angles with aging knives, knives Rukeyser would have recognized. Rather than just mourn, to only hold pain, I hope to reveal the knives too and a spirit that’s willing to fight back.

Rat Elegy

Trash bags, blood, and rust seal my windowsill.
I forget exactly why but beyond the glass, there's eyes,
green, and metal, and blue, and red eyes,
searching for a reason to send hands.
I've cleaned my bathroom three times now.
Rust, yellow stains, some melting plastic.
Colors collect on my rags and they never wash out.
I live alone. I really didn't always.
Orange hands grip pens
When someone asks if his orange head could weep for the nurses,
his orange eyes flick left.
He's handing out pens.
There's blood in his teeth.

I'm hide with eyes, daring to stare into the glass
 again.
Trucks with human husks hum.
Cages sprayed with rash inducing poison that settles on brown skin (guaranteed™) sit.
Children asking about what a "judge" is a few hours before facing trial, alone.
Rainbows of tents bled for ransom.
Storms of maskless "model citizens" demanding their king be king.
Black body after black body smeared on the ground.
My mother keeps asking when I'm going to talk to her.
Oh, but didn't she tell me? "The economy needs air before anyone else."
Orange smug, orange hands folded.
Orange puppeteers pass another law.
He pulls the spotlight back to his
orange mouth asking human ears to drink bleach.
He's gold with teeth.
I'm hide with eyes. I have one question.
Did they burn Eden too?
When they stripped Eve, when they crowned Adam,
did they burn Eden too?
The ashes must have been worth so much.

***

Moon 1, They shuttered us.
Moon 2, I greeted and cleaned.
Moon 3, They sent us back.
Moon 4, They raised the limit until everyone swore they'd quit.
Moon 5, They took our carts. They left the fridge, and the desk.
Moon 6, We retrained everyone.
Moon 7, We trained everyone they sent in.
Moon 8, 192 orders in a day, every day.
Moon 9, 150 orders. The line snakes the store and
Moon 10, you can only beg for so long.
Moon 1, homeschool, again.
Moon 2, spring with the shutters on.
Moon 3, I'm sleeping in my summer dresses.
Moon 4, I'm parallel parking in the movie lot soon to be a walmart, something that will last.
Moon 5, Dad's buying burgers.
Moon 6, Dave made my lemon dress.
Moon 7, Dad's buying more burgers. I missed a meeting.
Moon 8, Memoirs, poems, old American tomes, and psych textbooks.
Moon 9, Memoirs, poems, old American tomes, and psych textbooks.
Moon 10, You can only beg for so long.
Moon 1, 41,446 died.
Moon 2, 192,301 died.
Moon 3, 134,972 died.
Moon 4, 133,785 died.
Moon 5, 160,765 died.
Moon 6, 175,519 died.
Moon 7, 164,002 died.
Moon 8, 181,193 died.
Moon 9, 272,338 died.
Moon 10, You can only beg for so long.
Moon 1, I'm arrogant.
Moon 2, I'm afraid of air.
Moon 3, I'm sorry.
Moon 4, How can I give this time to you?
Moon 5, I can't remember my face.
Moon 6, How can I possibly mourn you?
Moon 7, My headphones are my ears.
Moon 8, I'm sorry I spent it like that.
Moon 9, This box is my hide and this glass is my eyes.
Moon 10, You can only beg for so long.

***

Shouldn't you be crying?
Shouldn't you be screaming?
I swear I can hear you anyway.
I swear I know where the liquid on your skin came from.

I only closed my eyes.
I didn't stumble in here.
I didn't walk here.
Yet here I am, swimming, same as you.

I can't place this place.
I can't feel its edges, its defining features.
I'm swimming, same as you.

There should be a ledge, maybe.
Something to grip, maybe.
Maybe then, we'll remember how we got here.
Maybe then, we'll find a way to stay out.

Stay out.
Stay in a day where you don't need to remember this.
I'll work to seal it, until the work grinds my fingers down.

Works Cited

Google. “Chart Definition.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=chart+definition&oq=chart+def&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l8.2371j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Accessed  1 Apr. 2021.

Google. “Constellation Definition.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=constellation+definition&ei=Lk9mYN_7DOXrtQa3_qOYDw&oq=constedefinition Accessed 1 Apr. 2021.

Google. “Vision Definition.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=vision+definition&ei=hlBmYJrNI8TLtQbEz6aQDw&oq=vision+definition Accessed 1 Apr. 2021.

Our World Data. “Daily New Confirmed Covid-19 Deaths.”

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..2020-03-31&country=~OWID_WRL&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=daily&hideControls=true&smoothing=0&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc Accessed 4 Dec. 2020.

Rukeyser, Muriel. Elegies. New Directions. 1949.

To cite this creative response in MLA, 8th edition: Ansorge, Susanna. “Rat Elegy”–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies. http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2022/01/17/susanna-ansorge-rat-elegy–a-creative-response-to-rukeysers-elegies/

Bill Rukeyser, Interviewed by Dennis Bernstein, February 16, 2021, KPFA Flashpoints

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Dennis: It’s a pleasure and an honor to welcome William L. Rukeyser, son of the late poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser, who we are honoring, studying, remembering, during this extended two-day webinar at Eastern Michigan University.  Eastern Michigan University is creating an archive for the great work of the biographer and poetry of Muriel Rukeyser.  And her son, William, has agreed to talk a little bit about his mom and what it’s like to grow up as the son of a great poet and a visionary. 

Dennis: So, welcome, William Rukeyser, to “Flashpoints”, and it is very good to have you with us.  And we should let people know that you are the William L. Rukeyser.  There is another William Rukeyser, who was very close to your mom, but we are glad to have you with us.  So, welcome.

Bill: Well, I’m glad to be here with you, Dennis.

Dennis: All right.  Well, why don’t we begin at the beginning.  Tell us a little bit about how you came to understand that your mom was a poet, a famous poet, that a great many people cared about, many loved, and some weren’t crazy about.  Give us some background there.

Bill:  Yeah.  That’s absolutely true.  And obviously, as a kid, as a little kid, I first understood that books were incredibly important in her life, in our lives.  This was – when I was quite young, like three, four, before I understood her relationships with books, I saw them all around.  And I remember, shortly after we moved back to New York City, that we were in a small basement apartment, and it was small enough that she had to, very reluctantly, get rid of many of her books, simply to make space.  And I remember piles of books on the floor, when she was sorting them, and the fact that it was with a good deal of reluctance that she was selling them.  So, that was my first introduction. 

And then, in the next apartment, when we moved out of the basement and were on the first floor in a New York brownstone, what I remember is the huge table, worktable that she had, made out of a door on a couple of sawhorses, and the fact that she spent a lot of time writing.  And back then, a lot of her writing was done in longhand, with an old pen.  I’m not talking about a quill pen, dipping it in ink, but a fountain pen, which, even in the early ‘50s, was something that was going out of style.  But she used a fountain pen with a very distinctive color of ink that she would seek out at stationery stores.  And she would spend a lot of time, working, revising, crossing things out, trying to get the writing just right. 

As far as the fame, that was something that I understood much, much later.  And you have to understand that over the course of her career, she was kinda like Sergeant Pepper’s Band.  She kept going in and out of style.  And frankly, the early ‘50s were not a high point in terms of her public acceptance.  That really was much earlier, when she was in her early 20s.  For a few years, she was like a shooting star.  Then, styles of criticism, currents in politics, wending in other directions, and so, I understood that the writing was important.  I understood that there were vast disappointments in terms of her dealings with publishers. 

And later on, in the ’60s, in the late ‘60s into the ‘70s, as the Women’s Movement gained steam, her career ascended again, in terms of an appreciative audience.  But it was very, very cyclical.  It was something that she dealt with, and she got – like many poets, she wrote from an inner need.  She certainly didn’t write poetry to earn a living.

Dennis:  And talk a little bit about the way in which she considered herself.  You were – it was – she was a single-parent mom.  I’m wondering how that made its way into your life and how that impacted on her writing.

Bill:  Well, I think that the first thing to recognize is that, in the late ‘40s, in even a place like the Bay Area, being a single-parent mom was not a popular choice.  It was not a socially acceptable choice.  She told stories about life during her pregnancy and how very supportive friends of hers – and I’m not talking about people who disapproved of her choice to get pregnant and take it to term, I’m talking about people who were supportive – warned her about the challenges ahead, said, ‘You know, if you decide that this is not the choice for you, we will take care of your baby.  We will adopt your baby, if necessary.’  So, this was not a choice made at one, single time.  It was a choice that was repeatedly made. 

And she had a difficult delivery in Berkeley.  This was a time when mortality among mothers and babies was not unheard of.  It was certainly a lot more common back then, than it is now.  So, these were realities that she dealt with.  The financial realities, I think came as a bit of a shock to her.  And the long hours that a parent would have to put in, especially a single parent, in the years of cloth diapers and formula that you mixed by hand, I think that that was definitely a real challenge, more of a challenge than she had anticipated. 

Luckily, she had good friends in San Francisco, who helped with my upbringing and then, admirers who helped her financially.  And that made a huge difference to her and made a – obviously, an important difference in my life.

Dennis: How did – were you aware of perhaps how this might have affected not just her work but her relationships, say her relationships with her family and her parents?  Was this a part of it?  Did you, at a certain point, become aware of this as perhaps both a problem and an interesting situation? [laughs]

Bill:  Absolutely.  She came from a family which had been quite prosperous when she was young, that was hit by the crash of 1929 and some economic ups and downs that preceded that, in the construction business and the real estate business of New York City, which is what her father was involved in.  And if people take a look at her literary style or her politics or both and don’t know about her upbringing, it may come as quite a surprise, but her parents were both politically and culturally quite conservative.  She thought of them as very unsupportive, although in retrospect their choices of where to send her to school, their choices in terms of helping out at difficult points in her early life, may not support that view entirely.

Dennis:  You know, there’s a – I’m blanking on the name.  It has ‘Quarry’ in it, but the – in the first – in the first book of poems that won the Yale Younger Poets Series, there’s this incredible poem about her, with her father, at  —

Bill:  And her father, at a Long Island quarry, I believe you’re referring to [crosstalk]

Dennis:   — can you tell me the story of that?  Yes.

Bill:  Sure.  Her father, my grandfather, came from Milwaukee, and, like a lot of people in the late 19th century and very early 20th century, moved to New York to seek their fortune, if not their fame.  And he ran into an Italian immigrant, and between them, with some ideas of business and with a few resources, like a horse-drawn wagon and connections to quarrying men, got into the sand and gravel business and later expanded to get into the ready-mix concrete business.  And the company was Colonial Stone and Gravel.  And this was the time when New York was shooting skyward, and concrete was a very important part of the construction business. 

It was also a time of a lot of municipal projects.  And one of the business skills that these two guys had was knowing exactly who to bribe in the New York City government and how much it would take to keep them bribed.  And that led to all sorts of municipal contracts.  One of the benefits was that if you altered the mix of the ready-mix concrete, just a little bit, you could build on – you can bid on the same job three or five years later, because you’d assure the – yourself that the concrete would crumble during that time, and they would have to rebuild whatever street or dock you had bid on originally. 

So, in terms of money, things were very good for the Rukeyser family in the 19-teens and ‘20s.  A cousin of ours, who was the father of Louis Rukeyser and the – really, the Louis Rukeyser of American media in the 1930s, his name was Merryle Rukeyser, once said, ‘The only thing that surprised me about your grandfather was that he died in bed.’  His partner was, if not a made man, at least had a lot of associates in the Mob.  And so, the combination of knowing who to bribe, knowing enforcers if bribes didn’t work, made them very successful economically. 

One day, my grandfather went into work, and his partner said to him, ‘We’re buying you out.’  And it was not an offer.  It was not a question.  It was a statement, and he was smart enough to simply pick up the box that had been left on his desk, walk out of the office, and never look back.  Things could’ve ended up quite differently. 

But in any case, getting back to – that’s a long digression.  Getting back to your question about single parenthood and how it affected her relations with her family, not well.  She made up stories about why there wasn’t a father on the scene.  I don’t think that her parents believed her.  Things were quite frosty, for years.  And things were different with her younger sister, who – they had a quite interesting relationship.  They in some ways resembled each other, in some ways were quite different and quite competitive and chose different vectors in their lives. 

But what interested me and my cousin, my mother’s sister’s daughter, was the fact that my mother decided to get pregnant almost at the same time that her sister had her first child.  So, you know, in terms of whether this was sisterly competition or simply emulation, we couldn’t speculate on that.  But it was certainly a factor.  And her sister was on Manhattan, and when we moved to New York, they were much more important in each other’s lives than my grandparents were in my mother’s life.

Dennis: And you’re listening to an interview with William L. Rukeyser.  That’s the son of the late poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser.  He is a part of this beautiful webinar being organized at Eastern Michigan University.  And they are creating an archive to the late and great poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser, and this is a part of that honoring of her work.  Let me ask you this.  Did she consider herself a feminist, a political poet?  What was her response when people sort of wanted to – like myself, wanted that — for me, she was at first a political poet, an activist.  But how did she think about that, in terms of her own life?

Bill: Yeah.  And of course, you knew her in her last years.  Obviously, the Civil Rights experience was fresh in people’s minds.  The Vietnam War experience was very fresh as well.  So, I think, in a lot of ways, she was viewed through a political lens.  She had just been the head of the PEN American Center and in that role had gone to South Korea, because of a political prisoner, who was also a poet or a poet who was also a prisoner, because of his political writing.  And of course, she wrote about politics or politically related things during her entire career, some decades more so than others, and she was active politically. 

But in terms of how she thought of herself, she definitely resisted labels and resisted categorization.  And I think even more than she actually felt, she would verbally resist or downplay categorization.  Was she a feminist writer?  Clearly, she was a feminist writer.  Was she political?  Absolutely.  You know, she broke ground in terms of writing about personal life and sexuality, things that were startling in the ‘30s and ‘40s.  But she absolutely resisted categorization. 

And she also resisted what I think of as ‘office politics’, within the poetry world.  And she did so to such an extent that it probably cost her, in terms of the associations that a lot of creative people depend on, if not emotionally and intellectually, at least to get their careers on a smooth track.  Her career was not one that followed a smooth track.

Dennis: I remember I [laughs] – I asked her the question once, right after – I guess it was right after she came back from Korea, and she was working on “The Gates” or had just finished “The Gates”.  And I said, ‘Are you a political poet?’ [laughs] And she said something [laughs] I’m not sure I still understand.  She said, ‘Well, let me ask you this, Dennis.  When the athletes in 1968 raised their fists above their heads in the Black Power salute, were they athletes or political people?’ [laughs]

Bill: Yeah.  That – that sounds like a very typical answer from her.  I’m not surprised.

Dennis: Let me jump ahead a little bit here.  You mentioned the politics and the other things.  I wanna – a core at the center of her life was went down to join the Republicans and stand against the Fascists in Spain.  Did she ever talk about that to you?  What – from your perspective, what did that mean to her, that journey?

Bill: It was an incredibly important experience that stuck with her in her entire life.  And she actually had gone to Spain on assignment from an English magazine.  She was dispatched before the Civil War began, and the reason that she was sent to Barcelona was because this was the summer of ’36, when the Nazis were hosting the Olympics in Berlin.  And a number of countries, including this one, had talked about boycotting the Nazi Olympics.  Unfortunately, we did not, but a number of individual athletes, primarily Leftists, were not going to Berlin.  They went to join what was referred to as the Popular Olympiad in Barcelona, organized by the Catalan government that year. 

So, she was going to report on this Olympiad, which was gonna include athletics, cultural events, a number of things, which would be all over Barcelona that summer.  Well, the Popular Olympics never occurred, because the Fascists attempted a coup, which was resisted.  And that resulted in the Spanish Civil War.  So, she was actually in far Northern Catalonia, the day that the Civil War began.  She got to observe some of the initial combat in what was then the countryside, now really the suburbs of Barcelona.  She got stuck there with this train that had had its locomotive taken away from it for several days.  Finally, a Leftist group organized a convoy of trucks and took the passengers into Barcelona, and she got to observe the first days of the fighting there. 

And one story that she always told was going to the U.S. Consulate and asking for assistance, because, you know, that’s what the foreigners were doing.  The British people on the train went to the English Consulate, and they said, ‘Yeah.  There will be a Royal Navy ship to take you out.’  And she told the story of going to the U.S. Consulate, and the Consul there said, ‘Well, I can give you a Letter of Safe Conduct.’  And she said, you know, ‘Well, what does that do?’  And she wasn’t the only American asking for help.  It didn’t do anything.  ‘We’ll give you a piece of paper.’ 

And luckily, she had met some Belgians on the train, and they said, ‘Our government is chartering a ship.’  It was the “Ciudad de Ibiza”.  She never forgot the name of the ship.  The Belgians had chartered this Spanish ship.  They loaded all the Belgians who wanted to go.  There was still room.  She got on the “Ciudad de Ibiza”, and it went up the coast to the first French port north of the border.  The six or seven days that she was there, at the beginning of the war, incredibly important, a life-changing experience for her.  She wrote about it, a poem and a thinly disguised memoir, which was listed as a novel. 

But it remained an important turning point for her life.  It energized her politically.  She clearly saw the Spanish Civil War as a dress rehearsal for World War II, and she – you know, it remained a major event for her.  I can recall, in the early ‘60s, traveling with her.  She went to that little port in Southern France called Sette [sounds like] and visited places she had seen in 1936.  We drove down to the Spanish border.  She refused to go across.  It was still when Franco was ruling Spain. 

She was friends with Spanish exiles.  She collaborated on a book with an Austrian artist who fought in the Civil War.  She knew a number of people who had fought on the Republican side.  Coincidentally, one of my best friends in high school was the son of a minister from the Spanish Republican government, who went into exile in New York City.  So, it was clearly a defining point for her that she carried with her for her entire life.

Dennis: Is that where she met and became friends with Pablo Neruda, or was that later on?  Because this certainly was a part of his life as well.

Bill: No, I – I don’t believe so.  And I really would have to check the records.  I know that she was a great admirer of Neruda and wrote a poem about him.  I don’t know about their meeting.  I believe that there was a story about a conference, but not in Spain.  A lot of the people who went to Spain because of the Civil War, as a matter of fact, all of them who went because of the Civil War got there after she left.  The closest collaboration that I can remember was the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who was in Spain for the Republicans.  But they met in the Bay Area, during the ‘40s.

Dennis: We’re speaking with William Rukeyser.  We’re talking in the context of this wonderful webinar being produced by Eastern Michigan University, where many of the archives and some of the archival work of Muriel is being collected and honored.  And this is a part of that honoring.  I – let me – I remember, I was interviewing Muriel.  This was a promotion I was doing for Pacifica Radio, leading up to Muriel Rukeyser Day at Sarah Lawrence College.  And as a part of the promotion, I actually showed up [laughs] – I think she was staying with a friend of hers, Monica McCall, up on the Upper East Side.  And —

Bill: Yeah.  Who was – who was actually her – both her literary agent and her partner for almost 30 years.

Dennis: — 30 years [laughs].  Yeah [laughs].  It seemed [laughs] like – and I remember the – you know, she had been using enlarged copies of her books, because she was having trouble with her eyes.  But somehow, the books weren’t around.  So, she sent me to the shelf, and she said, ‘You wanna do a little reading?  Just grab whatever books you want.  Sit in front of me.’  I tied her microphone to a broom, which she loved [laughs].  She said, ‘Invent!  I love when we invent!’  I didn’t have a microphone, so I’m just holding the broom up, with the microphone.  And I mention this because it was just before her collected poems were coming out, and she came to the poem, “Neruda the Wine”. 

Bill: Yes.

Dennis: And she read the – she read the poem about Neruda, and she comes to the end, and she’s looking for more poem, and she turns the pages, and she says to me [laughs], she says, ‘I swear this poem was a lot longer.’  And me being naïve and sort of silly and not knowing what to say, I said, ‘Well, maybe’ – in a little, peepish voice, ‘Maybe, Muriel, you haven’t written – finished writing this poem.’  And she comes [laughs] alive.  She almost falls off her chair. 

She says, ‘That’s – that’s it!  I’ve been struggling.  Here I am, a woman, about to have her collected poems published, and I – I don’t know where to go next, because for me, collected poems were always by men and by dead [with emphasis] men.  And here I am, a woman about to have collected poems, and not knowing where that poem ends tells me where I should go and write next.  I’ve been having a struggle, saying, “What poem do I write next?  What one poem do I write next?”  And now [laughs], seeing this tells me where [laughs] I have to go.’

Bill: Yeah.  And of course, you knew her during a point that was very painful for her.  You know, she had her first stroke when she was only 50, and then, a – as you know, a series after that, in the next 15 years.  And it was – she made a remarkable comeback, after the first one.  It had affected her speech very badly.  And I can remember, I was in high school, she worked on recovering her speech, because she considered the oral presentation of poetry as an intrinsic part of what she did.  And so, she was very concerned about losing her ability, first of all to speak intelligibly, and second of all to speak and convey art and emotion.  So, she made a very thorough comeback from that.  But the later strokes really diminished her, and that fact angered and saddened her.

Dennis: I bet.  And anybody who goes and listens to the earlier work understands that she was clearly a visionary poet, but she was also an orator.  And the delivery of those poems and of her work and of her very complicated, extraordinarily exquisite work and imagery required an orator to carry it off.  Anybody who’s tried to read some of those poems, those earlier poems, those longer, more complicated poems, the “Ajanta” poems, knows that you have to [laughs] really have a lot going, to be able to deliver those poems publicly because of the exquisite nature of the writing.

Bill: Yeah.  That’s absolutely – and one thing I should mention was that she, like you, believed in the power of radio.  Back in the late ‘40s, when I was a toddler, she briefly had her own radio show on a local Bay Area station.  And it was somewhat experimental at the time.  She tried to combine poetry, talking about poetry, and music in ways that she felt the two things complemented and reinforced each other.  So, definitely, she did not think of poetry as being static or solely on the printed page.

Dennis: Bill, did she ever tell you the story – I don’t know [laughs] if she made this up or I’m [laughs] making it up.  But she told me a story about how she got fired or reprimanded for nudity on the radio?  Did you ever hear that one?

Bill: Well, tell me that, because I know that the – the show didn’t last as long as it might have, but —

Dennis: [laughs]

Bill: — I don’t know what happened to it.

Dennis: I think she was reading a D.H. Lawrence, very seductive story.  Which one was it?  “Son” or something like that, and the way I understood it, second, third hand, I think she told me this story, is that she just – you know, it – there was a very touching moment that was very seductive, and it got her in trouble with censors.  Nudity on the radio.

Bill: Well, I’m not surprised.  I mean, you know, one of the things about the ‘40s, especially after the end of the war, was that the U.S. took a sharp turn to the right, both politically and in terms of conformity.  And that was something that weighted very heavily on her, and of course, back then, the FCC was much more restrictive.  This was pre-Lenny Bruce, much more restrictive, in terms of what could be said on the air.  And on top of that, this station, KDFC, was brand-new.  It didn’t have a huge budget, and I don’t even know if they had a staff attorney.  So, yeah.  That does not surprise me.

Dennis:  All right.  I wanna – just one or two more questions.  I appreciate your patience.

Bill: Sure.

Dennis: And I’m sure everybody’s going to love hearing this.  It’s gonna mean a lot to the folks participating in this webinar.  I wanna ask you about the poem “Double Ode”. 

Bill: Yes.

Dennis: And if I remember correctly, it – the last verse ends – and she repeats it three times.  It’s on the page.  “Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.  Beware of the guardians.  There are no guardians.  It’s built into me.  Do I move toward form?  Do I use all my fear?”  I believe this poem was devoted to you and your wife.  What do you suppose she meant by that?  “Do I move toward form?  Do I use all my fear?”

Bill: Well, you know, I think that that is really reflective – clearly refined, but really reflective of things that she said my entire life as a kid and a teenager and into my 20s.  She was both very appreciative and very resentful of formal education and the gatekeepers of our society.  You know, she – she was able to see things from a variety of perspectives simultaneously.  And so, on one hand, she would advocate an absolutely freewheeling, be-your-own-person type of attitude, and at the same time, recognize the importance of intellectual discipline that you acquired from some of the same cultural gatekeepers that she distrusted. 

And let me just tell you one story that she may have told you, when you were interviewing her.  This was a childhood memory of hers, and it was from the Ethical Culture School in New York.  And that is one of the indications I take that her parents were really interested in her intellectual development, that they chose that school for her.  But in any case, the story goes that in one of her classes, there was one boy who was known for being a cut-up and a kid who would not take orders.  And so, one day, the teacher comes in and says, ‘Class, settle down.’  Little Danny or whatever his name was is being a cut-up, won’t settle down. 

The teacher speaks sharply to him.  Things escalate just surprisingly quickly, and all of a sudden, she grabs him by the collar and says, ‘You can’t do that.  I’m taking you down to the Principal’s office.’  Hauls him out of the room, he’s kicking and screaming.  She slams the door, two minutes later, comes back and says to the class, ‘Little Danny is going to be in a load of trouble, and the Principal is gonna be investigating this thoroughly.  I need each and every one of you to write down exactly what happened, so that I’ve got the evidence to present to the teacher – to the Principal.’ 

And so, they all do that, and she says, ‘Now I wanna – a few of you to read to me what you wrote.’  And so, she calls on a couple of different students.  They all saw the same thing, and they it down in different ways.  “Little Danny started the argument.”  “The teacher was mean to little Danny.”  “Little Danny hit the teacher.”  “The teacher hit little Danny.”  All these varying recollections, and so, the teacher goes, knocks on the door, little Danny comes in smiling.  The whole thing had been pre-rehearsed, and the teacher says, ‘We’re now gonna begin our study of the American Revolution, using firsthand original documents.’ 

And the point was, you can see – everybody can see the same thing and yet, they all see different things.  And this was a very important part of her outlook on life.  And maybe it wasn’t the little Danny incident that gave her this perspective, but it was certainly something that she referred to a lot.

Dennis: All right.  Well, we are gonna leave it right there for now.  We have been speaking with William L. Rukeyser in the context of this webinar at Eastern Michigan University, being sponsored by Professor Elizabeth Dalma [sounds like].  This is going to be an archive of some of the Muriel Rukeyser papers, sound, and some of the great works she’s done.  We thank you, Bill Rukeyser, if I can call you Bill —

Bill: Absolutely.

Dennis: — as we say goodbye, for making this beautiful contribution.  Anything else perhaps I forgot to ask, that you’d like to share with us, or —

Bill: No, I think that covers it very nicely.  And I’ll see you on Friday.

Dennis: — sounds good.  Looking forward to it.  Please be careful.  And we will see you soon.  Bye-bye, now.

Bill: Okay.  Take care.  Bye.

Mike:  All right.  Let me hit save.

Discovering Muriel Rukeyser as a Young Writer

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Posted on September 8, 2014 by Laura Passin

On her 16th birthday, my best friend Jess received a copy of Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser from her mother. Jess and I didn’t live in the same state, so we were avid letter writers; after that birthday, her letters always included at least a snippet of mesmerizing, spiky poetry:

For sensual friction
is largely fiction
and partly fact
and so is tact
and so is love,
and so is love.

The best way to describe my reaction to Rukeyser’s poetry is to say I got a raging crush on it, the kind of crush only teenagers get. I would turn lines over in my head and try to figure out how the unsettling oddness of the punctuation and spacing worked with the powerful emotions the poem created in me.

“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man.      You didn’t say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women
too. Everyone knows that.”       She said, “That’s what
you think.”

I started scouring bookstores and libraries for Rukeyser, eventually finding a copy of Out of Silence at a Borders, nestled into the tiny poetry section whose spines I had already memorized. Many of the poems in it were beyond my understanding, though they still captivated me with their unusual music and imagery. It was Kate Daniels’s introduction, though, that brought Rukeyser into my personal history. I was a budding feminist, an aspiring writer, and a semi-out queer girl living in the South, lonely as hell and wondering if there really was a world where I would get to be myself without apology. Here was an openly bisexual woman who lived life entirely on her own terms, even when the political and social costs to her career were staggering. I read Out of Silence until it started to fall apart. It was more than a book: it was proof. I could be a poet; I could be smart and political without being cruel; I could find a community; I could love women as well as men. I could choose my life.

 

Out of Silence: Selected Poems
My battered copy: dog-eared, note-littered, spine-broken.

 

Of course, not everything worked out exactly as planned — but those things I learned from Rukeyser were all true. I am a poet; in fact, I’m a professor of literature, and I teach Rukeyser whenever I get the chance. I am an out queer woman; I am part of a lively world of feminist writers online. I took off the masks and mythologies that seemed inevitable when I was a teenage girl, and I became myself.

Part of the joy of studying Rukeyser’s work is becoming part of an ad hoc community of scholars, all of whom arrive at her poetry and prose through different stories. Some, like me, stumbled onto her poems by accident; others find her name popping up again and again in the history of second wave feminists like Adrienne Rich, who reclaimed her as a kind of living patron saint for women writers. What continues to astonish me about Rukeyser’s writing is that it doesn’t feel dated; my college students, reading her for the first time a century after her birth, find her as revelatory as I did. As I wrote in an essay for The Toast, Rukeyser scholars also tend to be devotees:

I recently attended a symposium celebrating the 100th anniversary of Rukeyser’s birth, and let me tell you, you have not really experienced academia until you’ve found yourself at a conference where you realize that everyone is secretly a fangirl as well as a scholar. You let your guard down. You imagine extravagant, international galas celebrating your idol. You talk honestly about what a privilege it is to teach something this brilliant, and you enjoy your own humility. (My student, last quarter, on reading “The Book of the Dead“: “I’ve never read poetry like this. I’ve never read anything like this.”)

One of my former students, a poet himself, changed his cover photo on Facebook to a black and white photo of Rukeyser. She watched over his digital world.

Now that I’m no longer that misfit teenager, my relationship to the poems in Out of Silence (and, of course, the indispensable Collected Poems, edited by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman) has changed. Rukeyser’s writing about speech and silence has new meaning for me after watching my mother suffer from dementia—I can no longer read “The Speed of Darkness,” with its complex celebration of individual life in the midst of mass death and war, without thinking of my mother, born during WWII, losing her own singular voice. Rukeyser implores us to recognize that silence can also be a presence—“this same silence is become speech / With the speed of darkness.” Reading this poem for me now, as a 35-year-old woman, becomes a reminder that being fully present for another human being is to take a powerful stand against oblivion:

I look across at the real
vulnerable       involved     naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of its history leading to this moment.

I read Rukeyser for many reasons, but I teach her to answer this call. She’s been an integral part of my personal history for twenty years; I owe it not to her, but to “the present of all I care for” to continue her legacy.

Muriel Rukeyser and Other Writers

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Posted on May 19, 2014 by Catherine Gander

 In just a few days, I will have the pleasure of chairing a panel at the American Literature Association’s annual conference at Washington, DC. The panel, organised by Elisabeth Däumer (herself a force of intellectual connectivity of the sort Rukeyser celebrated) will bring together five established and emerging Rukeyser scholars including myself and Professor Däumer: Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, whose diligent scholarship recently brought Rukeyser’s ‘lost novel’ Savage Coast to light and publication; Laura Passin, whose work on the politico-aesthetic strains of contemporary American poetry traces valuable lines of influence to the lyrical, subjective voice of earlier confessional verse, and Stefania Heim, whose attention to Rukeyser’s mythic historicism has uncovered illuminating points of contact with the experimental hybrid writings of (to my mind) one of the greatest living literary innovators, Susan Howe.

As Däumer has explained, this wonderfully diverse and interconnected panel is assembled in response to Rukeyser’s own multivalence. Resisting classification into any strict subset of writer, scholar or activist, Rukeyser embodied and espoused a pluralism that at once related her to, and set her apart from, most of her peers.  As the majority of scholarship on Rukeyser (including my own) addresses in some way the elements of her temporal and ideological dislocation – enforced most strongly by her being a lion-hearted, strong-voiced woman as well as a Jew – I will not linger on the matter here. The panel, and the work that runs into and out of it, intends to celebrate and explore the rhizomatic nature of Rukeyser’s work in all of its pragmatic inclusivity.

I use the word ‘pragmatic’ because it strikes me that Rukeyser’s legacy is one to be used. Rukeyser’s richly original and intellectually provocative text, The Life of Poetry, emerged in 1949 as a meeting-place (I employ Rukeyser’s term to avoid the word ‘collection’ due to the book’s overriding dialogic spirit) of ideas, lectures and essays previously gathered under the title ‘the usable truth: communication and poetry’. I have written elsewhere about Rukeyser’s commitment to the use-value of poetry, her tireless crusading for the overcoming of the fear of it, embedded in the conviction that the systems of the social can be addressed at root in the workings of the individual; that the failures of democracy can be located in the fears of the unconscious self. In a 1941 essay for Poetry magazine entitled ‘The Usable Truth’, Rukeyser bemoaned the fact that despite its pragmatic tradition, American education retained an attitude to poetry that located it as something ‘to be memorised and stored…[but] not to be used’:

There is just this one learning, this one branch of your heritage, left. It is very precious, it is to be preserved – in fact, it preserves us, whole ages are given to us by its grace alone… This, of course, is poetry. In a utilitarian culture, this one knowledge is to be taught as being Not for Use.[i]

Rukeyser’s words here connect strongly with Heim’s understanding of her living legacy in Howe. If ‘whole ages are given to us’ through poetry, we are, according to Rukeyser, able to live and learn through the biographies of our ancestors, absorbing and using their words and lives to educate and inform our own.  As Heim rightly acknowledges, Rukeyser blends myth and history, shaping the lives of representative others into symbols and paths for present and future generations. Rukeyser’s poetic biographies – her series of ‘Lives’ that include Anne Burlak, Käthe Kollwitz, Akiba and Albert Pinkham Ryder – are such symbols and sign-posts; as are her prose biographies on Wendell Willkie, Willard Gibbs and Thomas Hariot.  Heim connects Rukeyser’s aim towards ‘collecting the lives of the dead’ with Howe’s invocation, after Creon in Antigone, to ‘go to the dead and love them’; her approach sets Rukeyser’s neglected play Houdini alongside Howe’s The Liberties (1990) to explore the ways in which, in Heim’s words, ‘these two texts attest that biography has as much to do with the life of the communal imagination, myth, and mind, as it does with the lived lives of the individuals in question; as much to do with the stories we make up and tell each other, as with what has taken place.’ In this way, then, Rukeyser’s own exemplary life joins the host of known and anonymous dead, the ‘packed and leafdrift earth of centuries of falling lives, fallen under our feet’[ii] that constitutes the grounding of all future imaginative experience.

Currently working on a separate (albeit related) project involving pragmatism and intermedial artworks, I can see how Rukeyser’s deeply pragmatic stance to the life of poetry aligns with what Richard Shusterman, in the tradition of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has termed ‘somaesthetics’: ‘a critical, meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning’ that impacts on the self’s relation to society.[iii] Much of Rukeyser’s poetry stems from the memory or documentation of her on-site experience of social realities. As Jane Cooper has noted, ‘she wanted to be there. One way of witnessing was to write. Another was to put her body on the line, literally.’[iv] Forging a meeting place of practice and imagination, site and sight, Rukeyser dismantled traditional mind/body dualisms just as she demolished established binaries of art and science, poetry and prose, myth and history. Like the revisionary, feminist and repossessed voice of the poem ‘Absalom’, Rukeyser spoke an embodied and empowered poetry: ‘I have gained mastery over my heart/I have gained mastery over my two hands… I open out a way.’  Through her work, as Heim attests, Rukeyser reveals the ‘potential for enacting knowledge beyond the borders of the strictly aesthetic’; more than this, Rukeyser resituates poetry as a site and enactment of all human experience, understanding the inextricability of art from the practice of everyday life in a manner championed by Dewey as the key to individual and social improvement (Art as Experience, 1934).

Deweyan pragmatism (Rukeyser was an avid reader of both Dewey and William James) involves a blending of the immediate moment with past experience:

The process of living… is an everlastingly renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity.[v]

Rukeyser’s approach to poetry, which is also her approach to being-in-the-world, is Deweyan at core. The reason for this is related to her strong conviction, also shared with Dewey, that our tendency to separate the experience of everyday human existence from the discourse of art and aesthetic experience creates a dangerous isolationism that locks art away in institutions, ossifies poetry, and disables us from treating life artistically. When I read Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, steeped as they are in the importance of positive valence in emotive responses to the world, I am reminded always of Rukeyser’s imperative to strip the fear from the experience of poetry: ‘Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms.’[vi]  Rukeyser’s life’s works are what Dewey calls ‘cumulative continuity’, continually enacting her dynamic interaction with her environment and others, and constituting a lesson in living and a celebration of it that extends to a renewed relation with the reader – or, to use Rukeyser’s preferred word, the witness.  Her writing is profoundly informed by immediate and by past experience, and although she was, in her own words, an ‘axiom-breaker’, she was also profoundly concerned with the vitality of tradition, with the lives of the ‘many-born’ who ripple through oceans of time, and charge ‘our latest moment with their wave.’[vii]

Rukeyser argues in The Life of Poetry that freedom (a human right) involves the ability to ‘choose a tradition,’ and select representatives of that tradition.[viii] In an essay entitled ‘Under Forty’ (1944) for a Jewish publication, Rukeyser expounds on the idea: ‘if one is free, freedom can extend to a certain degree into the past, and one may choose one’s ancestors, to go with their wishes and their fight.’[ix] Her position chimes with Martin Buber’s, whose writings Rukeyser also read and absorbed. Buber argued that ‘tradition does not consist in letting contents and forms pass on, finished and inflexible,’ but that ‘a generation can only receive the teachings in the sense that it renews them.’[x]  Rukeyser’s commitment to renewing and choosing a tradition – an ancestry – relates her in many ways to T.S. Eliot, with whose poetics she had a complex relationship. Elisabeth Däumer’s paper addresses Rukeyser’s readings of Eliot, tracing his rhythms and resonances in her writings, and exploring her reformulations of his criticism, including his attention to ‘the place of tradition, the limitations of art, and his theory of emotion.’ Däumer’s scrutiny falls particularly on this latter aspect, rethinking standard critical responses to Eliot’s objectivism by reading his interest in the affective agencies of poetry in the light of Rukeyser’s ‘concept of total response.’

Affective and somatic aesthetics in the context of tradition also provide pathways into Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s and Laura Passin’s papers. Kennedy-Epstein focuses on the cross-currents between the lives of Rukeyser and Virginia Woolf, tracing the lines of connection through shared fields of ‘textual, sexual and political radicalism’ and aligning both women’s treatments of the experimental novel as an arena for the espousal of new ways of thinking about war, nationalism and art in times of social upheaval.  Rukeyser’s Savage Coast and Woolf’s The Pargiters – daring works of genre hybridity and radical thought, documenting ‘the lives of women in contexts of war, nationalism, education and sexual subjectivity’ – were both ultimately abandoned by their authors, their ideas unpicked and rewoven into the fabric of other, more publishable works (Woolf’s Three Guineas, Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry and several poems). Kennedy-Epstein explores the position of the female experimental writer as offering vital (yet largely ignored) perceptions of state violence and sexual hierarchies.

Passin’s perspective on Plath returns us to feminist revisions of mythology in which Rukeyser advocates a strong female voice arising out of the maternal body (see ‘Absalom’ in its entirety, for example). Critics have tended to position Plath and Rukeyser at opposite ends of the somatic spectrum when it comes to creative impulses, particularly in relation to motherhood. Louise Kertesz, for example, has noted how Rukeyser’s attentions to the subject are ‘quite different’ from the ‘horror’ and ‘lost belief in the value of living’ that accompanies the ‘motherhood poems’ of Plath and Anne Sexton, quoting a line from Rukeyser’s ‘Breaking Open’ to reinforce her point: ‘I’d rather be Muriel than be dead and be Ariel.’[xi] Passin, however, wishes to recontextualise Rukeyser’s responses, addressing her ‘suicide poems’ in particular, and arguing that through these poems, Rukeyser ‘frames and revises the cultural narratives around Plath.’

Both Kennedy-Epstein’s and Passin’s approaches can be said to examine Rukeyser’s Deweyan commitment to art as experiment and experience, her proclivity for embodying and questioning the multiplicity of social selves that one’s interaction with the world requires and enables.  Reference to the act of suicide becomes, conversely, an act of creation for Rukeyser, for her reimagining connects to her wider understanding of the poem as a continually renewing process: as an ongoing event, not a finished object.  The interconnected variety of the ALA panel brings me, therefore, to another unfinished project of Rukeyser’s, and one that – one day – I hope to be able to bring to light in a more accessible form. In the Rukeyser archives at the Library of Congress is a work, suitably in-progress, entitled In the Beginning. The proposed book is, according to Rukeyser, ‘an anthology of creation’, bringing together extracts of works from a wealth of writers, thinkers, scientists, filmmakers and artists. Rukeyser explains the importance of humankind’s ‘glimpses of understanding’ of the nature of creation:

Whether it is the root in fire or in word, in the lightning flash or the great dreaming and active cycle that springs out of central rest, whether we see it reflected in the act of love or the entrance of birth, it illuminates the world and ourselves to us.[xii]

In the end, In the Beginning allows us our own glimpse of what the ALA panel will no doubt bring into more sustained focus: that the way to understand and illuminate ‘the world and ourselves to us’ is not through aesthetic enclosure or the possessive grasping of knowledge, but through active, intersubjective experience, and the forging of new, creative paths that share our lives with the living words and images of others.

 

 


[i] Rukeyser, ‘The Usable Truth’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 58 (July, 1941), 206-209, 206.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, second edition (Roman and Littlefield, 1992; 2000), 267.

[iv] Cooper, ‘And Everything a Witness of the Buried Life’, in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, eds. Herzog and Kaufman (New York, 1999), 3-16, 7.

[v] John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934) (Perigee Books, 2005), 108

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, eds. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 182.

[viii] The Life of Poetry (1949) (Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press, 1996), x.

[ix] Ibid, x; Rukeyser, ‘Under Forty’, Contemporary Jewish Record, VII (February, 1944), 4-9, 8.

[x] Buber, ‘Teaching and Deed’, in Will Herberg, ed., The Writings of Martin Buber (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 317-324, 318.

[xi] Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 225, 344.

[xii] MR Papers, Library of Congress, 1:21.