The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive
As a “Living Archive,” our website is designed to engender lively interdisciplinary conversations about this important twentieth-century poet. We include a rotating number of selected poems by Muriel Rukeyser. Published with permission of Bill Rukeyser, the poet’s son, these offer a representative sample of her voluminous and variegated body of work. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog and available from the University of Pittsburgh Press, remains the most comprehensive collection of Rukeyser’s poetry. Please take a minute to acquaint yourself with the site. Also consider contributing responses–critical, pedagogical, or creative–to the website by contacting us here.
Lara Meintjes, “this word, this power”: Deixis and Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Witness in The Book of the Dead
The first poem in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is “The Road.” It describes not “the” road, but rather “these” roads. A plurality of roads knotted and weaving: a suburban road with “junction” and “fork” merges onto a “well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.” The description of this last six-lane conduit mimics the joining of roads and lanes in its stacked hyphenated words. The poet maps her readers away from their own neighborhood and into the broader world of what Rukeyser refers to as “your country,” thus establishing that there exists a world to which the reader belongs beyond their immediate surroundings.
While much work has been done on this poem, few critics have focused on the formal mechanisms underpinning the poem’s testimonial function. Scholars, beginning with Catherine Gander, have identified Rukeyser’s poem as a Deleuzian rhizome. Both poem and rhizome offer “a weedy tangle with multiple points of ingress and egress which can’t be flattened to any hierarchical schema.”[1] Despite this stated resistance to flattening, if interpreted as an image, this metaphor might resemble a map—a tangle of roads and rivers crossing the American continent hither and thither, manifesting innumerable points of connection.
Picking up on this suggestive map metaphor, Adam Mitts refers to The Book of the Dead as a “conceptual map of America” created by “mining recent history.” He argues that we “need to reorient our map of America to hers.”[2] Rukeyser, however, offers her reader not so much the bird’s-eye view of the traditional road map but rather a strikingly direct encounter with what was then recent history. Within this essay, I explore the formal techniques the poet uses to bridge the “conceptual map” which is by nature internal to the reader, and the sensation of physical presence that the poem creates. The impression of proximity is fundamental to the new readerly role that Rukeyser is intent on developing—the sense of being there that is active witnessing.
The Road
These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,
reading the papers with morning inquiry.
Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light
chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights
indicate future of road, your wish pursuing
past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,
well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.
Past your tall central city’s influence,
outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,
are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason.
These roads will take you into your own country.
Select the mountains, follow rivers back,
travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where
the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,
iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down
into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.
Rukeyser News
The third issue of the RUKEYSER BIANNUAL (No. 3, Spring 2025) is out now. It includes the annual bibliography of Rukeyser scholarship, two essays, Rukeyser news, and some marvelous photos of Rukeyser recently rediscovered by her son Bill.
Recordings of “‘The Way In’: Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness, and Poetry of the 1960s,” the first program in our new Muriel Rukeyser Reading Group series, are now available here: /news/the-way-in-muriel-rukeyser-the-speed-of-darkness-and-poetry-of-the-1960s/
The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, can now be ordered from Cornell University Press. The book makes available for the first time a wide range of Muriel Rukeyser’s prose, a rich and diverse archive of political, social, and aesthetic writings.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s groundbreaking book, Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is available from Cornell University Press.
Have a look at the recordings of the Houdini Webinar on March 20, 2022, and two performances of Rukeyser’s play on March 20 and 27. Feel free to leave comments.
In case you missed our February 19-20, 2021 webinar on Rukeyser’s Elegies, you can access video recordings of keynotes and presentations at Revisiting Muriel Rukeyser’s Elegies in Times Like These.
Also have a look at Dennis Bernstein’s interview with Bill Rukeyser, February 16, 2021.
Muriel Rukeyser: The Contemporary Reviews, 1935-1980 is available at Washington University Open Scholarship. Vivian Pollak put together this invaluable resource in collaboration with Washington University’s Digital Commons and Bepress.
Catherine Gander’s introduction to the Special Issue of Textual Practice centered on Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry can be accessed, free of charge, here.
Muriel Rukeyser’s iconic The Book of the Dead has been published as a free-standing volume from West Virginia University Press. The book, so Bill Rukeyser tells us, gets “as close as possible to realizing the 80-year old vision of both MR and [photographer] Nancy Naumburg that Book of the Dead be published as a photo/poetry work.” The book is beautifully introduced by writer and multi-media producer Catherine Venable Moore.
Our “Living Rukeyser Archive” is in its thirteenth year. We hope you consider joining the growing number of contributors and bloggers, who have enriched this living archive: Our bloggers have included writer and cultural activist Marian Evans, living and working in New Zealand; Catherine Gander, lecturer at Maynooth University, Ireland, and author of Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: the Poetics of Connection; EMU alumnus Adam Mitts (now a PhD student at SUNY Buffalo); poet and independent scholar Laura Passin; Canadian researcher and sound archivist Katherine McLeod, who produces monthly audio content for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts as part of The SpokenWeb Podcast feed; multi-media artist Joe Sacksteder, now teaching at Sweet Briar College; Trudi Witonsky, Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; and Jackie Campbell who just completed her dissertation on Rukeyser at Princeton University. We have published many critical essays, by established and emerging scholars and readers of Rukeyser’s work, among them, more recently, Vivian Pollak, Tim Decelle, Alexandra Swanson, Heather Macpherson, Aaron Pinnix, Trudi Witonsky, Eulàlia Busquets, Eric Keenaghan, Sam Buczkesmith, Modina Jackson, Vered Ornstein, Lily Pratt, Chloe Ross, Joely Byron Fitch, and Louise Kertesz. We’ve been lucky to receive wonderful creative contributions: Stephanie Strickland permitted us to post her poem “Striving All My Life”; Kellie Nadler, Ned Randolph, Victoria Emanuela Pozyczka produced sound remixes of Rukeyser poems. We are always looking for more!