Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser in 1945
Born
(1913-12-15)December 15, 1913 New York City
Died
February 12, 1980(1980-02-12) (aged 66) New York City
Occupation
poet, essayist, biographer
Citizenship
American
Subject
equality, feminism, social justice
One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems titled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life.[1]
Her literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry Theory of Flight, based on flying lessons she took, was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series.
Activism and writingedit
Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.
— Adrienne Rich, Essays on Art in Society, A Human Eye
Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 21, she covered the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals. She wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications, including Decision and Life & Letters Today, for which she covered the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out, the basis of her book Mediterranean. Rukeyser famously traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her poem sequence The Book of the Dead (poem). During and after World War II, she gave a number of striking public lectures, published in The Life of Poetry.[3] During the period of McCarthyism, the FBI had a thick file on her as a suspected Communist.[4] For much of her life, she taught university classes and led workshops, but she never became a career academic.
In 1996, Paris Press reissued The Life of Poetry, which was published in 1949 but had fallen out of print. In a publisher's note, Jan Freeman called it a book that "ranks among the most essential works of twentieth century literature." In it Rukeyser makes the case that poetry is essential to democracy, essential to human life and understanding.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when Rukeyser presided over PEN America, her feminism and opposition to the Vietnam War drew a new generation to her poetry. The title poem of her final book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death row in South Korea. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[5]
Rukeyser died in New York on February 12, 1980, from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing factor. She was 66.
In other mediaedit
In the television show Supernatural, Metatron the angel quotes an excerpt of Rukeyser's poem "Speed of Darkness": "The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
Rukeyser's translation of a poem by Octavio Paz was adapted by Eric Whitacre for his choral composition "Water Night." John Adams set one of her texts in his opera Doctor Atomic, and Libby Larsen set the poem "Looking at Each Other" in her choral work Love Songs.
Writer Marian Evans and composer Chris White are collaborating on a play about Rukeyser, Throat of These Hours, titled after a line in Rukeyser's Speed of Darkness.
The JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, a publication from Eastern Michigan University, dedicated a special issue to Rukeyser in Fall 2013.[6]
Rukeyser's 5-poem sequence "Käthe Kollwitz" (The Speed of Darkness, 1968, Random House)[7] was set by Tom Myron in his composition "Käthe Kollwitz for Soprano and String Quartet," "written in response to a commission from violist Julia Adams for a work celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Portland String Quartet in 1998."[8]
Rukeyser's poem "Gunday's Child" was set to music by the experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
Personal lifeedit
Rukeyser was bisexual. In 1936 she had traveled to Spain to cover the People's Olympiad for the literary journal Life and Letters. The Spanish Civil War broke out and during her five-day stay, she fell in love with Otto Boch, a German communist athlete who volunteered to fight the fascists, and who was later killed. That experience was evoked in "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century."
Also, her literary agent Monica McCall was her partner for decades.[9]
A Molna Elegy: Metamorphoses. Gunnar Ekelöf. With Leif Sjöberg. 2 volumes. Unicorn Press, 1984.
Edited collections of Rukeyser's works
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. McGraw, 1978.
Out of Silence: Selected Poems. Edited by Kate Daniels. Triquarterly Books, 1992.
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. Norton, 1994.
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
Referencesedit
^"On "To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century"". Modern American Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on August 20, 2008. Retrieved April 6, 2012.
^Unger, Leonard; Litz, A. Walton; Weigel, Molly; Bechler, Lea; Parini, Jay (January 1, 1974). American writers: a collection of literary biographies. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0684197855. OCLC 1041142.
^excerpts online at Archived July 6, 2008, at the Wayback Machine University of Illinois English Department
^Thurston, Michael (2006). Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 177–178. ISBN 9780807849798.
^"Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post
^"Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive". Eastern Michigan University. December 4, 2013. Archived from the original on January 17, 2014. Retrieved January 16, 2014.
^"Käthe Kollwitz". murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org. December 7, 2018. Retrieved March 1, 2020.
^"Darkness & Light, Vol. 3". dramonline.org. Retrieved March 1, 2020.
^https://jewishcurrents.org/muriels-gift/ "Muriel’s Gift".
February 11, 2016. Posted by Helen Engelhardt: Rukeyser’s Poems on Jewish Themes
by Helen Engelhardt, accessed December 15, 2019
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1940). The Soul and Body of John Brown.
^Rukeyser, Muriel; Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena (January 1, 2014). Savage coast. The Feminist Press at CUNY. ISBN 9781558618206. OCLC 887938693.
^"Muriel Rukeyser". Poetry Foundation. March 7, 2017. Retrieved March 8, 2017.
^Spangler, David; Rukeyser, Muriel (January 1, 2002). Houdini: a musical. Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press. ISBN 1930464045.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1955). Come back, Paul. New York: Harper. ISBN 9780916384111.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1967). Bubbles. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ISBN 9780152128302.
^Rukeyser, Muriel; Charles, Milton (January 1, 1970). Mazes. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 067165151X. OCLC 113139.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1981). More Night. Harper & Row. ISBN 9780060251277.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1965). The Orgy. London: Andre Deutsch. ISBN 0-9638183-2-5.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1949). The Life of Poetry. New York City: Current Books inc. ISBN 0-9638183-3-3.
Further readingedit
Barber, David S. "Finding Her Voice: Muriel Rukeyser's Poetic Development." Modern Poetry Studies 11, no. 1 (1982): 127–138
Barber, David S. "'The Poet of Unity': Muriel Rukeyser's Willard Gibbs." CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 12 (Fall 1982): 1–15; "Craft Interview with Muriel Rukeyser." New York Quarterly 11 (Summer 1972) and in The Craft of Poetry, edited by William Packard (1974)
Daniels, Kate, ed. Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1992), and "Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser." Poetry East 16/17 (Spring/Summer 1985): 70–93
Gander, Catherine. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (EUP, 2013)
Gardinier, Suzanne. "'A World That Will Hold All The People': On Muriel Rukeyser." Kenyon Review 14 (Summer 1992): 88–105
Herzog, Anne E. & Kaufman, Janet E. (1999) "But Not in the Study: Writing as a Jew" in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser.
Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age (1953)
Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (1980)
Levi, Jan Heller, ed. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1994)
Myles, Eileen, "Fear of Poetry Archived July 6, 2008, at the Wayback Machine." Review of The Life of Poetry, The Nation (April 14, 1997). This page includes several reviews, with much biographical information.
Pacernick, Gary. "Muriel Rukeyser: Prophet of Social and Political Justice." Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poets (1989)
Rosenthal, M.L. "Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems." In New Directions in Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin. Vol. 14 (1953): 202–229;
Rudnitsky, Lexi. "Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser's Theory of Flight and The Middle of the Air," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, v.27, n.2 (Fall 2008), pp. 237–257, DOI: 10.1353/tsw.0.0045
"A Special Issue on Muriel Rukeyser." Poetry East 16/17 (Spring/Summer 1985);
Thurston, Michael, "Biographical sketch Archived July 4, 2008, at the Wayback Machine." Modern American Poetry, retrieved January 30, 2006
Turner, Alberta. "Muriel Rukeyser." In Dictionary of Literary Biography 48, s.v. "American Poets, 1880–1945" (1986): 370–375; UJE;
"Under Forty." Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (February 1944): 4–9
Ware, Michele S. "Opening 'The Gates': Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness." Women's Studies: An Introductory Journal 22, no. 3 (1993): 297–308; WWWIA, 7.
External linksedit
Wikiquote has quotations related to Muriel Rukeyser.
Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive Ongoing project by Eastern Michigan University featuring creative content by Rukeyser as well as critical resources and creative responses by artists and scholars.