Elisabeth Daumer, Author at Muriel Rukeyser

Trudi Witonsky, Introducing Louise Kertesz, Friday February 19, 2021

I’m thrilled to introduce Louise Kertesz to you. I first came to read Muriel Rukeyser through Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and you get used to reading one sensibility, even as it evolves and breaks and innovates. But when you start reading someone new, someone as complicated as Rukeyser, it’s bewildering at first, and you need a guide. So, as many of you have done, I turned to Louise’s 1980 monograph, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, where as I read, I could see the patterns of the themes and images and processes come into coherent shape. Louise had had to rely [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:26:01+00:00May 24, 2021|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Louise Kertesz, “My Untamable Need”: Reading Rukeyser’s Elegies in Light of Some of Her Later Poems

Keynote Speech for the webinar Revisiting Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies in Times Like These, February 19, 2021. I wonder how many have come upon Rukeyser’s work – as I did —surprised that we’d not heard very much about her. In the early 1970s, I was a new PhD in English, reasonably acquainted with the work of despairing, self-destructive, suicidal poets (most of them men), whom critics and English courses focused on: Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke. The writing in this canon was undeniably brilliant. But after Berryman’s suicide in 1972 by jumping off a [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-08-20T18:51:20+00:00May 24, 2021|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

First Elegy: Rotten Lake

Originally published in A Turning Wind (1939) As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered the wrecked season, haunted by plans of salvage, snow, the closed door, footsteps and resurrections, machinery of sorrow. The warm grass gave to the feet and the stilltide water was floor of evening and magnetic light and reflection of wish, the black-haired beast with my eyes walking beside me. The green and yellow lights, the street of water standing point to the image of that house whose destruction I weep when I weep you. My door (no), poems, rest, (don’t say it!) untamable need. [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:27:44+00:00January 15, 2021|Long Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Modina Jackson, Activism and Shared Consciousness in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Breaking Open”

“Most demonstrators and marchers did not worry over fine points of strategy; they were simply ‘against the war’” (Bricks and Phelps 141). This sentiment of undirected defiance resonated with the radicalism that emerged in the 1960s protests of the Vietnam War. Even more pertinent, the same sentiments reverberate today. When I was first writing this essay, in the fall of 2019, there had been several protests in Hong Kong throughout the entire year. The citizens of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (HKSAR) were fighting for their democracy, which had been infringed upon by [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2020-10-11T16:33:20+00:00October 11, 2020|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Sam Buczeksmith, The ‘C’ Word

Perhaps I have become bitter. I have lived in the Palace now for three weeks, and I have begun to learn all of the Princess things. How to walk (apparently, I have been doing it wrong all of these years), how to talk, how to set flower arrangements, how to organize servants, how to organize a banquet, on and on…Still something feels off about all of it. My living here. I know some of the Maids scoff, Madame even found the idea pitiable to begin with. A servant becoming a Princess. I have heard them talk. A Common orphan becoming [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2020-10-17T15:22:57+00:00September 9, 2020|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Final Project: The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser

Professor Keenaghan Fall 2019 Note: Course assignments are the product of extensive intellectual labor; sharing them with others is a significant act of generosity. Please acknowledge Eric Keenaghan's assignment should you use it in your own teaching, research, and writing. To cite it: Eric Keenaghan. "Final Project: The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser." Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, /2020/09/07/aeng-awss-368-the-lives-of-muriel-rukeyser/ Final Project Specs and Instruction OVERVIEW The final project for our course provides an opportunity to develop a sustained engagement, in either an academic or creative form, with one primary literary text by Muriel Rukeyser. This is a culmination of our semester-long [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2020-09-09T12:37:03+00:00September 7, 2020|Resources|0 Comments

Syllabus: Women Writers–The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser

Professor Eric Keenaghan Fall 2019 Note: Syllabi are the product of extensive intellectual labor; sharing them with others is a significant act of generosity. Please acknowledge Eric Keenaghan's syllabus should you use it in your own teaching, research, and writing. Course Description Twentieth-century artist Muriel Rukeyser (born 1913, died 1980) believed that the purpose of art was, as she wrote in The Life of Poetry (1949), to bring its creators and audiences “toward the most human.” She was always activist minded, though she tried to avoid categorical definitions of her politics and most aspects of her identity. The few identities [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2020-09-07T15:02:27+00:00September 7, 2020|Resources, Scholarship|0 Comments

Eric Keenaghan, Total Imaginative Response: Five Undergraduate Studies from “The Lives of Muriel Rukeyser”

I do and I do. Life and this under-war. Deep under protest, make. For we are makers more. —Muriel Rukeyser, “Breaking Open” (Collected Poems 527) How should one approach Muriel Rukeyser’s vast body of work and multifaceted life? My first inclination is through her role as poet,one of the few identity categories she embraced, uncritically, alongside those of “American,” “woman,” and, after the birth of her son in 1947, “mother.” But given pervasive misconceptions about poetry’s apolitical or antipolitical nature, and given the variety of forms Rukeyser explored over her long career, even that identity seems too limiting. Other forms of [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2022-01-18T16:46:35+00:00September 5, 2020|Essays, Pedagogy|0 Comments

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Muriel Rukeyser

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