Jews From The United States

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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'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."

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

"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."

"I was told by friends, when it was a matter of deciding to go ahead and have a child, that I would have to choose between the child and poetry, and I said no. I was not going to make that choice; I would choose both."

"The people in the fine apartment houses insisted that Hooverville be destroyed because it spoiled their view. It was clear to a growing child that the terrible, murderous differences between the ways people lived were being upheld all over the city, that if you moved one block in any direction you would find an entirely different order of life."

"it was suggested to me in my adolescence, it would be a good idea if I married a doctor, and when he was out on housecalls I could write my poems. Now of course we have no housecalls and we have women poets-the culture has changed to that extent."

"One opens, yes, and one's life keeps opening, and poets have always known that one's education has no edges, has no end, is not separated out and cannot be separated out in any way, and is full of strength because one refuses to have it separated out."

"O for God's sake they are connected underneath."

"How shall we venture home? How shall we tell each other of the poet? How can we meet the judgment on the poet, or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run? All those beginning to run?"

"We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake."

"Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values."

"I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane."

"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

"How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?"

"Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced. To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security."

"As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive. We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionary: Dare we win? All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us, the wounds, the young and the unborn-we will define that peace, we will live to fight its birth, to build these meanings, to sing these songs. Until the peace makes its people, its forests, and its living cities; in that burning central life, and wherever we live, there is the place for poetry. And then we will create another peace. ** p. 214"

"We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. They are everyday, these sources, as the sources of peace are everyday, infinite and commonplace as a look, as each new sun."

"To be against war is not enough, it is hardly a beginning."

"The great ideas are always emerging, to be available to all men and women. And one hope of our lives is the communication of these truths."

"The world of this creation, and its poetry, is not yet born. The possibility before us is that now we enter upon another time, again to choose. Its birth is tragic, but the process is ahead: we must be able to turn a time of war into a time of building."

"the making of a poem is the type of action which releases aggression. Since it is released appropriately, it is creation. For the last time here, I wish to say that we will not be saved by poetry. But poetry is the type of the creation in which we may live and which will save us."

"Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness."

"A society in motion, with many overlapping groups, in their dance. And above all, a society in which peace is not lack of war, but a drive toward unity."

"The identified spirit, man and woman identified, moves toward further identifications. In a time of long war, surrounded by the images of war, we imagine peace. Among the resistances, we imagine poetry. And what city makes the welcome, in what soil do these roots flourish? For our concern is with sources. The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness. If we look for the definitions of peace, we will find, in history, that they are very few. The treaties never define the peace they bargain for: their premise is only the lack of war. The languages sometimes offer a choice of words: in the choice is illumination. In one long-standing language there are two meanings for peace. These two provide a present alternative. One meaning of peace is offered as "rest, security." This is comparable to our "security, adjustment, peace of mind." The other definition of peace is this: peace is completeness. It seems to me that this belief in peace as completeness belongs to the same universe as the hope for the individual as full-valued. In what condition does poetry live? In all conditions, sometimes with honor, sometimes underground. That history is in our poems."

"The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice — even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved — that the questions raised are very pertinent. . . . The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem. These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes — for the moment — an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form. A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express."

"In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all of need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up our fullness; we turn, and act. We begin to be aware of correspondences, of the acknowledgement in us of necessity, and of the lands. And poetry, among all this — where is there a place for poetry? If poetry as it comes to us through action were all we had, it would be very much. For the dense and crucial moments, spoken under the stress of realization, full-bodied and compelling in their imagery, arrive with music, with our many kinds of theatre, and in the great prose. If we had these only, we would be open to the same influences, however diluted and applied. For these ways in which poetry reaches past the barriers set up by our culture, reaching toward those who refuse it in essential presence, are various, many-meaning, and certainly — in this period — more acceptable. They stand in the same relation to poetry as applied science to pure science."

"The continuity of film, in which the writer deals with a track of images moving at a given rate of speed, and a separate sound-track which is joined arbitrarily to the image-track, is closer to the continuity of poetry than anything else in art. But the heaviness of the collective work on a commercial film, the repressive codes and sanctions, unspoken and spoken, the company-town feeling raised to its highest, richest, most obsessive-compulsive level in Hollywood, puts the process at the end of any creative spectrum farthest from the making of a poem. At the same time, almost anything that can be said to make the difficulties of poetry dissolve for the reader, or even to make the reader want to deal with those "difficulties," can be said in terms of film. These images are like the action sequences of a well-made movie — a good thriller will use the excitement of timing, of action let in from several approaches, of crisis prepared for emotionally and intellectually, so that you can look back and recognize the way of its arrival; or, better, feel it coming until the moment of proof arrives, meeting your memory and your recognition. The cutting of films is a parable in the motion of any art that lives in time, as well as a parable in the ethics of communication."

"We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us."