Elisabeth Daumer, Author at Muriel Rukeyser

Elisabeth Däumer, From the Archives: The Four Fears

In the winter of 2023, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein shared with me a drawing by Rukeyser that would be featured on the cover of The Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, published later that year. The drawing depicts four massive figures surrounded by a wall of red. In the front, dwarfed by the gigantic figures, is a miniature version of Rukeyser herself, clad in a blue dress. In the lower right, if you look closely, you see the penciled words in Rukeyser’s distinctive handwriting, “The Four Fears, March 1955.” Rukeyser, The Four Fears. Drawing. Library of Congress. Shown with permission of the Rukeyser [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-07-02T15:40:33+00:00July 2, 2025|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

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 [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-01T03:00:06+00:00June 1, 2025|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Locks, Keys, Freedom: Houdini Makes a Comeback in Southeast Michigan

A reminder of the marvelous Houdini Performances in March of 2022 Ladies and Gentlemen—step this way and take your seats. You’re in for an amazing show! Coming to a theatre near you is the legendary escape artist Harry Houdini as imagined by Muriel Rukeyser, a prolific American author and among the most important post-WWII Jewish writers. First performed in 1973, with Christopher Walken as Houdini and Neva Small as Bess, the musical Houdini combines song and dance, comedy and pathos. While capturing Houdini’s transformation from Hungarian-born Eric Weisz, son of a rabbi, to the most celebrated escape artist of all [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-21T19:58:05+00:00March 24, 2025|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

It Is There

Muriel Rukeyser, from Breaking Open (1973) Yes, it is there, the city full of music, Flute music, sounds of children, voices of poets, The unknown bird in his long call. The bells of peace. Essential peace, it sounds across the water In the long parks where the lovers are walking. Along the lake with its island and pagoda, And a boy learning to fish. His father threads the line. Essential peace, it sounds and it stills. Cockcrow. It is there, the human place. On what does it depend, this music, the children’s games? A long tradition of rest? Meditation? What [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T18:43:57+00:00September 4, 2023|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

From Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, by Rowena Kennedy Epstein

Introduction Waste/Archives/Feminism Among all the waste there are the intense stories and tellers of stories --Muriel Rukeyser, "Letter to the Front" (1944) In a letter to Denise Levertov in 1965, Muriel Rukeyser writes, "I feel like being fat is a visible sign of my dark side." Levertov responds by qualifying, "You actually give the impression of lioness grandeur, of hugeness, but not of ugly fatness." When I first read this in my early twenties, I was struck by the wicked perniciousness of sexism--that two of the twentieth century's most exciting and radical women poets would spend time talking about their [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-21T19:59:53+00:00August 22, 2023|Resources|Comments Off

Louise Kertesz, Review of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s Unfinished Spirit, Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is itself a work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship. It’s fitting that Rukeyser’s work modeled those qualities when critics were dismissing them as inappropriate, even offensive in a woman writer. In her acknowledgments, K-E professes the deep connection she has forged with her subject: “Writing about Rukeyser has helped me think through our political, humanitarian, and environmental crises and to remain, as she models, a ‘vulgar optimist.’”

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-21T20:01:32+00:00July 12, 2023|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Wherever

Muriel Rukeyser, from Breaking Open 1973 Wherever we walk we will make Wherever we protest we will go planting Make poems seed grass feed a child growing build a house Whatever we stand against We will stand feeding and seeding Wherever I walk I will make

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:03:27+00:00September 9, 2022|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

It Is There

First published in Breaking Open (1973) Yes, it is there, the city full of music, Flute music, sounds of children, voices of poets, The unknown bird in his long call. The bells of peace. Essential peace, it sounds across the water in the long parks where the lovers are walking, Along the lake with its island and pagoda, And a boy learning to fish. His father threads the line. Essential peace, it sounds and it stills. Cockcrow. It is there, the human place. On what does it depend, this music, the children's games? A long tradition of rest? Meditation? What [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2022-08-15T12:26:28+00:00August 15, 2022|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

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