When less than a decade after Muriel Rukeyser’s death all of her poetry was out of print, Kate Daniels took it upon herself to bring Rukeyser back into circulation with her aptly entitled collection, Rukeyser: Out of Silence, published in 1992. 

What attracted Daniels to Rukeyser was her fierce individuality and unapologetically noncanonical poetry, forgoing formal purity in favor of social engagement and emotional truth. A poet herself, Daniels was intrigued by Rukeyser’s many refusals–her  “persistent refusal to do what was expected of her as a woman” (74); her refusal to write to the fashion or political tides; her refusal to “deny the primacy of her experience as a woman in writing poetry” (75). In her preface to Out of Silence, “In Order to Feel,” Daniels celebrates Rukeyser’s passionate pursuit of “the ecstasy of transformation from ‘not feeling to feeling,’” a process that promises “a way of living in more intense relation to the world and herself.” Deeply aware of how Rukeyser’s work had been distorted by hostile or indifferent critics, Daniels, in assembling the poems for Out of Silence, wanted to “map out the actual path a poet has taken, not the one the critics might have called for, nor the one that might have satisfied the literary fads of an earlier era.” Her collection was rightly praised for showcasing Rukeyser’s “life-long effort to deal squarely with large social forces as they rippled through one woman’s acute sensibility.” 

Kate Daniels was the first to attempt a biography of Rukeyser, and while she did not complete this daunting task, she did leave an instructive and moving testimony of her trials.  In “‘Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser,’” written during a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University, Daniels offers a frank account of what made writing about as idiosyncratic and multifaceted a woman as Rukeyser difficult for her. Among the many hurdles she also mentions the lack of support from feminist critics who challenged her “right” or “ability” to write about Rukeyser, a New York, left-leaning Jewish Woman, when she herself was from the South and at least nominally WASP.

Kate Daniels, a force within Rukeyser scholarship, is not defined by her work on Rukeyser. Highly educated and distinguished Edwin Mims Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University, Daniels is the author of a large body of work, comprising several collections of poetry, essays, literary criticism, and edited volumes. 

Her poems, like Rukeyser’s, stand on their own while also existing as singular points in a much larger journey of growth and transformation. Frequently biographical, they encompass the experiences of women in their many roles, desires, and struggles. Opening connective pathways between historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and personal tragedies including her son’s addiction, her poems speak vividly to readers whatever their own lived experience. 

Born in South Richmond to a working class family, Kate Daniels was a first generation college student, educated at the University of Virginia (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Columbia University (M.F.A. School of the Arts). The long arc of her academic career includes an early stint as nurse’s aid at the University of Virginia Medical Center that alerted her to the benefits of artistic expression for mental and emotional wellbeing. Fascinated by the intersection of medicine and art, and, as she once said, “obsessed by what people come up with to get through the difficulties of their lives,” she found ways to conjoin her medical and creative interests and assumed poet-in-residence positions at Duke University’s Medical Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  Kate Daniels now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Works

Rukeyser-related: 

Muriel Rukeyser: Out of Silence (Triquarterly books 1992/Northwestern University Press, 1994).

“Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser,” Poetry East, nos. 16-17, 1985, pp. 70-93.

“The Demise of the ‘Delicate Prisons’: The Women’s Movement in Twentieth-Century American Poetry.” A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991, pp. 224-253. 

“Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics.” Gendered Modernisms, edited by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 247–63. 

“‘O For God’s Sake’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Practical Idealism.” Field , no. 85, October 1, 2011, p. 37. 

Poetry:

The White Wave (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984)

The Niobe Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988)

Four Testimonies (Louisiana State Press, 1998)

A Walk in Victoria’s Secret: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2010)

Three Syllables Describing Addiction: Poems (Bull City Press, 2018)

In the Months of My Son’s Recovery: Poems (Louisiana State University, 2019)

Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis  (West Virginia University Press, 2022)

Recent Prose:

Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis  (West Virginia University Press, 2022)

 

To cite this entry: Aimee Fisher, “Rukeyser Trailblazer Kate Daniels,” Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, 2026, https://murielrukeyser.org/2026/09/04/rukeyser-trailblazer-kate-daniels/