Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation," Anne Sexton famously described her as "mother of us all", while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."[1]
One of her most powerful pieces was the long poem 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.[2]
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 writing
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 was supposed to cover the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. Instead of reporting on the games, she witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War an experiences that she would describe as a "moment of proof," forming the basis of her rediscovered autobiographical novel, Savage Coast,[4] and the long poem Mediterranean. Rukeyser famously traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia with the filmmaker and photographer Nancy Naumburg, to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her modernist masterpiece the documentary poem The Book of the Dead (poem). During and after World War II she gave a series of lectures, entitled The Usable Truth, about art and politics in times of crisis, eventually published as The Life of Poetry.[5] From the end of the war through the period of McCarthyism, she was the target of sexist literary and political attacks which affected her career trajectory and publishing opportunities,[6] and the FBI compiled a thick file on her as a suspected Communist.[7] For much of her life, she taught university classes and led writing 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.[8]
Rukeyser died in New York on February 12, 1980, from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing factor. She was 66.
In other media
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.[9]
Rukeyser's 5-poem sequence "Käthe Kollwitz" (The Speed of Darkness, 1968, Random House)[10] 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."[11]
Rukeyser's poem "Gunday's Child" was set to music by the experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
Personal life
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.[12]
^Unger, Leonard; Litz, A. Walton; Weigel, Molly; Bechler, Lea; Parini, Jay (January 1, 1974). American writers: a collection of literary biographies. New York: Scribner. ISBN0684197855. OCLC1041142.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (2013). Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena (ed.). Savage Coast. The Feminist Press. ISBN9781558618206.
^Thurston, Michael (2006). Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 177–178. ISBN9780807849798.
^"Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post
^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 (1965). The Orgy. London: Andre Deutsch. ISBN0-9638183-2-5.
^Rukeyser, Muriel (1949). The Life of Poetry. New York City: Current Books inc. ISBN0-9638183-3-3.
Further reading
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)
Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (2022)
Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (1980)
Levi, Jan Heller, ed. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1994)
Myles, Eileen, "Fear of PoetryArchived 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)
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.
