The Idea–a Remix
This is a remix of Muriel Rukeyser's poem "The Return" created by EMU Creative Writing student Ned Randolph. Download Audio: MP3
PoemTalk 78: “Ballad of Orange and Grape”
This is a Penn Sound PoemTalk, a 30-min. discussion of Muriel Rukeyser's "Ballad of Orange and Grape" with Amy Kind, Mytili Jagannathan, and David Abel, organized and introduced by the founder of PennSound and PoemTalk, Al Filreis.
Helen Engelhardt: Muriel: In Memoriam
MURIEL: IN MEMORIAM 1 You left us in FebruaryYou left us two days before Valentine’s. In the morning I heard myself say, “No more.Do not call me anymore.” I listened to your lifetime. In the afternoon I was warned: “Saturnis slipping into Libra. Do not alteryour alliances. Mars is conjunct Jupiter.” You were the teacher I never hadThe poet who wrote my poems before I thought of them. In the evening I stared at the eastern skyand dared the two spots of light to harm me. December wrapped children have the secret sealed in their bones:the earth does not die [...]
Order The Book of the Dead
Order The Book of the Dead from West Virginia University Press.
Song : Love In Whose Rich Honor
Originally published in The Speed (1968) Love in whose rich honor I stand looking from my window over the starved trees of a dry September Love deep and so far forbidden is bringing me a gift to claw at my skin to break open my eyes the gift longed for so long The power to write out of the desperate ecstasy at last death and madness
Heather Macpherson–She Sings the Body Electric: Soundscape in Two “Songs” by Muriel Rukeyser
In “Dream Drumming,” an interview with Pearl London from February 22, 1978, Muriel Rukeyser responds to the “processes of craft,” providing a provocative and telling explanation of what she felt was the most important aspect of poetry writing: It’s very hard to talk about the rewriting that goes into [poems] because the major rewriting is likely to be in the matter of sound, the sound that is deep in the structure, almost a crystalline structure of sound in the poem. (28-29) Sound is both pronounced and buried in Rukeyser’s poetry, initiating multiple conversations yet begging to be revealed. When reading [...]
Vivian Pollak and Alexandra Swanson–Charles Naginski Timeline
May 29, 1909: "Betzabel" (later Charles) Naginski is born in Cairo, Egypt, where there is a substantial community of East European Jewish immigrants who benefit from the comparative liberality of the Sultan's regime. His parents, Abraham and Nahema Naginsky, speak Yiddish at home. As a child, Betzabel studies piano with his father and begins composing at an early age. 1925: Abraham and Nahema Naginsky emigrate to the U. S. with their children, but Betzabel remains in Egypt, perhaps to finish his education. March 30, 1927: "Betzabel Naginsky," age seventeen, "an artist," emigrates to New York City from Alexandria, Egypt. He [...]
Tim DeCelle–Lost in a City of Madness: Finding the Minotaur
“Deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad,” Rukeyser’s Minotaur stands in a maze, a “crooked city” (Collected Poems) whose apparent order masks a subterranean sphere of madness. We are brought into and through, again and again, the dead-ends and never-ending walls of confinement and isolation. By invoking the imagery of seclusion and despair, Rukeyser may well be directing us towards the ways that ideological systems impose order on madness, trapping citizens into a Minotaur-like existence. In “Letter to the Front,” Rukeyser notes that being Jewish in the twentieth century may involve “Full agonies: / Your evening deep in the [...]
