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] [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Vivian Pollak–“The Minotaur” and the Trouble with Normal
© 2016 Vivian Pollak In the fall of 2016, the same semester that Washington University hosted a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I began teaching a fifteen-person seminar organized around the theme "American Women Poets and the Trouble with Normal." There was a lot of energy and [...]
Helen Engelhardt: Muriel’s Gift–Rukeyser’s Poems on Jewish Themes
© Helen Engelhardt To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. So begins the most well-known and beloved of the poems written by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), who was astonished when the Reform synagogue movement included it in their revised prayerbooks in the 1940s. “To [...]
Walter Hogan–Rukeyser’s “The Outer Banks”
Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 collection, The Speed of Darkness, begins with four dozen short poems, and concludes with several longer poems, of which “The Outer Banks” is the first. (It is followed by “Akiba,” “Käthe Kollwitz,” and the title poem, “The Speed of Darkness.”) “The Outer Banks” consists of 183 [...]
Adam Mitts: The Vocabulary of Silence: Voice and Disability in “The Speed of Darkness”
In 1964, the poet Muriel Rukeyser suffered a stroke. Four years later, in 1968, she published a poem called “The Speed of Darkness.” Over the years, this poem has been interpreted in a number of ways. A common interpretation is that the poem is about a woman finding her voice [...]
Assignment: Place, History, Voice
By Joe Sacksteder Both the Honors College at Eastern Michigan University and our interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program put a lot of emphasis on community involvement. So, when I was given the privilege of teaching two honors sections this semester, I decided to design a writing assignment that would encourage student [...]
Adam Mitts: The Book of the Dead–Rukeyser’s Map of America
Muriel Rukeyser begins The Book of the Dead by writing, “These are roads to take when you think of your country,” explicitly linking geography and history to the poem’s central concern, the painful silicosis and death of hundreds of workers in West Virginia from 1932-1935. When Rukeyser writes that “these [...]
Charlotte Mandel: Muriel Rukeyser’s Rabbi Akiba Inheritance
By Charlotte Mandel Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry allows no canonical containment. She was born in New York Cityin 1913 and died in that city on Lincoln’s Birthday, 1980. Her lifetime encompasses both World Wars, the Great Depression, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War. “Whatever can come to a woman [...]
Elisabeth Däumer: “Ajanta”–An Introduction
© Elisabeth Däumer Cite this essay: Däumer, Elisabeth. "Ajanta--An Introduction." The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive, 3 Sep. 2014, https://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/2014/09/03/elisabeth-daumer-ajanta-an-introduction/. Part One: Although Rukeyser never visited the Indian Caves of Ajanta, her sequence poem Ajanta, first published in 1944, evokes the atmosphere of the caves and glimpses of their paintings in [...]
Laura Passin: The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser
This essay is, in itself, evidence of a slight derangement in my scholarly life: I am obsessed with two lines by Muriel Rukeyser. I will explore the connections suggested by those lines and the complex ways Rukeyser grapples with gender, history, and mythology in her poetry. Those two lines are, [...]
Dara Barnat: Finding Muriel
I did some thirty years of living before encountering the work of Muriel Rukeyser. I don’t remember the exact day when I came upon this subversive Jewish-American poet, but my affinity to her is so strong that I think of her as “Muriel,” as opposed to the more formal “Rukeyser.” [...]
Elisabeth Däumer: A Muriel Rukeyser Website–Creating an Accessible Critical Tradition
Thoughts prepared for 1913 MLA Special Session: Muriel Rukeyser at One Hundred “There is no substitute for Critical Tradition: A continuum of understanding, early commenced,” Hugh Kenner observed, when he compared the reception of Eliot’s and Pound’s work. When The Waste Land appeared in 1922, readers responded immediately; the first [...]
Elisabeth Däumer: Muriel Rukeyser’s Presumptions
Introduction to the Journal of Narrative Theory Special Issue on Muriel Rukeyser, 43.4 (Fall 2013): 247-257. Muriel Rukeyser was presumptuous. Her presumptions were multifold and risky. They involved contentious claims for poetry’s many “uses”—emotional, intellectual, and cultural; for its kinship with science, particularly “abstract science”; and for its value as [...]
