Muriel Rukeyser

"How old were you when you knew that there were living poets? Do you remember? In this culture a great many people don't know that there are living poets, or didn't know when I was growing up."

"There are the questions of love and religion that have to enter, along with the social bonds between us, into everything we do."

"I've always thought of two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence."

"at college there was so much more freedom, and an access to materials and to people who were more than I had thought people could be. It was there that everything opened again, but I left college because my father had gone bankrupt and could not afford to have a daughter at Vassar."

"I don't believe that poetry can save the world. I do believe that the forces in our wish to share something of our experience by turning it into something and giving it to somebody: that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far as my life is concerned, poetry has saved me again and again."

"In rewriting, I have tried always to strengthen the sound structure and to make a dense fabric, of sound, of fact, of reality and truth."

"The movement of meaning is surely the music of poetry. There isn't any music as we mean music, but there is that movement in the body and the soul, if you like. And one longs for it; it is a deep pleasure and a deep life to us, and there is this union of a physical life and a mental life that comes to us in poetry, and the physical life is bound up with sound in that way. The movement of our breathing is why we take pleasure in hearing poets read, even though most poets are abominable readers, as you know."

"it seems to me that the invitation of poetry is to bring your whole life to this moment, this moment is real, this moment is what we have, this moment in which we face each other, and if a poem is any damn good at all, it invites you to bring your whole life to that moment, and we are good poets inasmuch as we bring that invitation to you, and you are good readers inasmuch as you bring your whole life to the reading of the poem."

"Anger I would like to talk about, too. All my life I have protested in anger against what was happening, in rebellion, about wanting to make a new society and change the world, but I know underneath that I am a person who makes things much more than a person who protests. And I finally came to the point of saying, "I will protest all my life but every time I protest, I will make a poem, or I will plant, or I will feed children, or I will try to help a building, I will make something.""

"Muriel Rukeyser gave me the notion, the promise of what art could be....Nothing stopped her, neither war nor fear, shame or confusion. She knew fear but did not give into it. She went through fear as she went through hatred, coming out the other side into hope and I took her life as an ideal.... It was from her that I learned that art-poetry, fiction, story-art is not product, art is life itself. The use of poetry, she said, is usable truth and such was the nature of her passionate courage she made me believe her. I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope. Lifesaving. Indispensable. And even now when I feel myself overcome with my own fears and confusion, she draws me out every time.... She is life-saving still."

"Muriel Rukeyser's first poem in her first book of poetry published in 1935 begins: "Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry." And in her tribute to the German graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, Rukeyser asked: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?" And answered: "The world would split open." This is not the poetry of contrivance; this is the poetry of naming, of philosophy, framing a set of ideas through which to interpret our realities as women."

"Muriel Rukeyser is an essential and defining voice. Few poets have combined rigorous perspective with ethical witness in the way her work manages to do. Few poets manage to love the world in as challenging and musical a language as she provides."

"the writers Muriel Rukeyser and Ruth Seid (pen name: Jo Sinclair), two strongly Jewish-identified, anti-racist white lesbians."

"This book ranks among essential works of twentieth century literature; it is saving, challenging. In The Life of Poetry Rukeyser examines the ways in which poetry can revive democracy and improve the quality of life for the people of the United States, and for poets, artists, and creative individuals everywhere...The Life of Poetry is not a book of criticism nor is it a literary treatise. It is a book that breaks boundaries and assumptions about the place of literature and the arts in American life. Rukeyser suggests that by living with the senses and the imagination open, living with poetry, human beings can prosper and attain peace. Remarkably, Rukeyser's words are as necessary and provocative now as when the book was first published, in 1949."

"Rukeyser was the most courageous poet of her brilliant generation. Her example and her greatest works are indispensable to our understanding of America, and to our own ability to say the truth."

"one of the twentieth century's germinal writers."

"An "American genius," our "twentieth-century Whitman." Anne Sexton and Erica Jong both referred to Muriel Rukeyser as "the mother of everyone.""

"In a time like this we need all the wisdom and nourishment we can get, and we have gathered today to share these things. I invoke one of the wisest, bravest voices of our century: the late Muriel Rukeyser, poet, activist, Jew, lesbian, relentless fighter for freedom...Muriel Rukeyser, again, wrote in 1944, "To be a Jew in the 20th century is to be offered a gift." Let us seize this gift."

"An awfully long time ago and a very short time ago, in one of the early books, Muriel wrote that "poems flowered from the bone." I always think of that line because it somehow seems to be both a prophecy and a summing up of all the work that has taken place in the books that came later."

"Muriel Rukeyser unspools one of the most passionate arguments I've ever read for the notion that art creates meeting places, that poetry creates democracy."

"One of the most important poets of our time.... Her originality, her genius, her courage illuminate our century."

"Muriel Rukeyser was always a political person and a sad loss for some of us-for all of us, but particularly for those who knew her. She was a total poet, totally involved in literature, and she took a beating as a woman and as a poet who was not part of the elite that began to develop after the forties knocked the thirties on their head. She and somebody like Meridel Le Sueur were doubly wounded. They were wounded as women by their own political men-something like black women are-and wounded again by the literary elite, who were for the birds. But on the other hand Muriel lived very deeply in literature and with literary people. She knew them from an early age; she was close to Mexican poets, American poets, and she was political at the same time. When she got to be president of PEN she went to Korea even though she could hardly walk by then; she was very brave. [Rukeyser died of a heart attack in 1980.] So there are people who manage to do the whole thing."

"I'd say the other major influences in late adolescence were Muriel Rukeyser and William Butler Yeats. Muriel was very important to me, as a writer who wrote honestly, passionately, and well about being a woman, as a writer with politics, as a writer whose work was written to be said aloud."

"Sisyphus is not, finally, a useful image. You don't roll some unitary boulder of language or justice uphill; you try with others to assist in cutting and laying many stones, designing a foundation. One of the stonecutter-architects I met was Muriel Rukeyser, whose work I had begun reading in depth in the 1980s. Through her prose Rukeyser had engaged me intellectually; her poetry, however, in its range and daring, held me first and last. "Her Vision" is a tribute to the mentorship of her work."

"The radical poet Muriel Rukeyser said long ago, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." Choosing the stories you, yourself, are made of is crucial work as we enter this unfinished story of how human beings responded to the greatest emergency our species has ever faced."

"Muriel Rukeyser loved poetry more than anyone I've ever known. She also believed it could change us, move the world."

"American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser...Muriel Rukeyser in her classic The Life of Poetry laid bare the democratic aspirations of exploited working people in their creative expressions."

"Muriel Rukeyser, who opened much of the forbidden territory where poets can now move with ease. Here, for a new generation, the full range of the capacious poet who gave twentieth-century women's poetry its mottoes and its most audacious exemplar, and poetry of witness and moral passion its most ardent and urgent American voice."

"To enter her work is to enter a life of tremendous scope, the consciousness of a woman who was a full actor and creator in her time. But in many ways Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time-and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country's psychic geography. It's no exaggeration to say that in the work of Muriel Rukeyser we discover new and powerful perspectives on the culture of the United States in the twentieth century, "the first century of world wars," as she called it."

"From a young age she seems to have understood herself as living in history-not as a static pattern but as a confluence of dynamic currents, always changing yet faithful to sources, a fluid process that is constantly shaping us and that we have the possibility of shaping. The critic Louise Kertesz, a close reader of Rukeyser and her context, notes that "no woman poet makes the successful fusion of personal and social themes in a modern prosody before Rukeyser." She traces a North American white women's tradition in Lola Ridge, Marya Zaturenska and Genevieve Taggard, all born at the end of the nineteenth century and all struggling to desentimentalize the personal lyric and to write from urban, revolutionary, and working-class experience."

"Any sketch of her life suggests the vitality of a woman who was by nature a participant, as well as an inspired observer, and the risk-taking of one who trusted the unexpected, the fortuitous, without relinquishing choice or sense of direction."

"Rukeyser's work attracted slashing hostility and scorn (of a kind that suggests just how unsettling her work and her example could be) but also honor and praise. Kenneth Rexroth, patriarch of the San Francisco Renaissance, called her "the best poet of her exact generation." At the other end of the critical spectrum, for the London Times Literary Supplement she was "one of America's greatest living poets.""

"In her lifetime she was a teacher of many poets, and readers of poetry, and some scientists paid tribute to her vision of science as inseparable from art and history. But she has largely been read and admired in pieces-in part because most readers come to her out of the very separations that her work, in all its phases, steadfastly resists."

"We call her prose "poetic" without referring to her own definitions of what poetry actually is an exchange of energy, a system of relationships."

"Rukeyser was unclassifiable, thus difficult for canon-makers and anthologists. She was not a "left wing" poet simply, though her sympathies more often than not intersected with those of the organized left, or the various lefts, of her time. Her insistence on the value of the unquantifiable and unverifiable ran counter to mainstream "scientific attitudes" and to plodding forms of materialism. She explored and valued myth but came to recognize that mythologies can rule us unless we pierce through them, that we need to criticize them in order to move beyond them. She wrote at the age of thirty-one: "My themes and the use I have made of them have depended on my life as a poet, as a woman, as an American, and as a Jew." She saw the self-impoverishment of assimilation in her family and in the Jews she grew up among; she also recognized the vulnerability and the historical and contemporary "stone agonies" endured by the Jewish people. She remained a secular visionary with a strongly political sense of her Jewish identity. She wrote out of a woman's sexual longings, pregnancy, night-feedings, in a time when it was courageous to do so, especially as she did it-unapologetically, as a big woman alive in mind and body, capable of violence and despair as well as desire."

"I never came to know her well; New York has a way of sweeping even the like-spirited into different scenes. But there was an undeniable sense of female power that came onto any platform along with Muriel Rukeyser. She carried her large body and strongly molded head with enormous pride, and stood with presence behind her words. Her poems ranged from political witness to the erotic to the mordantly witty to the visionary. Even struggling back from a stroke, she appeared inexhaustible. She was, in the originality of her nature and achievement, as much an American classic as Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Du Bois, or Hurston."

"Elsewhere her heroes are Willard Gibbs, the mathematical physicist, Albert Pinkham Ryder, painter of the sea, John Jay Chapman, man of letters, Ann Burlak, labor organizer, Charles Ives, composer on American themes; and John Brown (abolitionist) and Wendell Willkie, political visionaries who seemed, at their historical moments, to fail; Houdini and Lord Timothy Dexter, anomalies in any pantheon. How many of their stories are familiar to us, even now? Of all these she made biographies, in verse or prose or mixed media-the series of "Lives" that would occupy her to the end. All were Americans. Of the first five she pointed out, in 1939, that they were also New Englanders, "whose value to our generation is very great and only partly acknowledged." She never wanted to write extensively about anyone who had already received his or her due, and it's worth noting how rarely any of her subjects is literary. For years she worked on a book, now lost, on Franz Boas, anthropologist who studied North American indigenous tribes. Only much later would she turn to several non-Americans, the last being Thomas Hariot, Elizabethan navigator, mathematician, naturalist, astronomer, who published the first Brief and True Report of Raleigh's Virginia, the "Indians" who lived there, and our native plants and animals."

"One of her favorite assignments was to ask everyone to complete the sentence "I could not tell...." For in what we cannot say to anyone, in our most secret conflicts, lie curled, she believed, our inescapable poems."

"Rukeyser proposes-following D'Arcy Thompson now as well as Gibbs-that the great poems are always organic, as forms in nature are organic. They grow by "clusters and combinations," through time; they find their true direction as they proceed; and they never stand still but "fly through, and over" any attempt to pin them down by analysis. They include material from the unconscious and welcome the unknown. More, "the work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy," from the poet through the poem to the fully responsible and responsive witness/reader. And now she takes a gigantic leap, tying the poet forever to the society and historical moment she or he shares with others: "I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions.""

"rarely will you encounter a mind or imagination of greater scope."

"she was a visionary. One of the great, necessary poets of our country and century, whose value to the present generation is only beginning to be acknowledged, like Whitman she was a poet of possibility."

"she was a "she-poet." As she told her interviewer in 1972, "Anything I bring to this is because I am a woman. And this is the thing that was left out of the Elizabethan world, the element that did not exist. Maybe, maybe, maybe that is what one can bring to life.""