Give them my regards when you go to the school reunion;
and at the marriage-supper, say that I’m thinking of them.
They’ll remember my name; I went to the movies with that one,
feeling the weight of their death where she sat at my elbow;
she never said a word,
but all of them were heard.

—Stanza One, More of a Corpse Than a Woman

When I first started my journey as an academic, as well as a budding poet, Rukeyser was a complete unknown poet to me. In high school, I considered myself knowledgeable when it came to women poets. By that, I mean I knew the usual line up: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, a bit of Maya Angelou, some Adrienne Rich for good measure.

Basically, my knowledge extended to Google’s results for “Female Poets.” Which is fine, because it was a start. I was only a teenager trying to make sense of my creative voice and my place as a woman in America. Plath and Sexton spoke to my emotional soul, and I thought my answers could always come from them.

And then I found myself in college, reading poets decidedly not Plath and Sexton, and I was unsure of what to do with myself. I had had a feminist awakening, frustration at the expectation of being a mother and a career woman further down the line building as I trudged to my classes and then to visit my boyfriend. While Plath still had a few answers for me, she no longer had every answer, and so I quit poetry for a spell.

The discovery of Rukeyser was a bit of an accident, if I’m being truthful. This mysterious woman came to the front of my awareness during a Jewish American literature course. I remember my eyes sliding past her name in the table of contents, past her usual anthologized poems: “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century”, “Islands”, and for a moment, my eyes latched onto a poem, before flicking on past.

It didn’t seem like a profound poem in any sense, even though the name called to me in that brief moment, made me wonder if this faceless poet had some wisdom to share with me. To this day, I wouldn’t have remembered this poem if Professor Martin Shichtman hadn’t assigned it for homework: “More of a Corpse Than a Woman.”

It’s a weird moment to find yourself in: seeing yourself on a page, eighty years removed. I read about the leaden woman and found my fears in her. I saw myself in the eyes of Rukeyser’s speaker… and it has been that poem that has kept me going in my education.