Elisabeth Daumer, Author at Muriel Rukeyser

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

Eulàlia Busquets, Returning to Savage Coast

Eulàlia Busquets, the translator, into Catalan, of Rukeyser's novel Savage Coast, explains the novel's pertinence to understandings of the Spanish Civil War and contemporary Catalan politics. And she describes her historical research in Moncada about the days that Rukeyser spent there in July 1936.

Elisabeth Daumer2020-09-09T12:49:12+00:00May 8, 2020|Essays, Scholarship|1 Comment

The Soul and Body of John Brown

Originally published in Beast in View (1944) Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! Joel III : 14 His life is in the body of the living. When they hanged him the first time, his image leaped into the blackened air. His grave was the floating faces of the crowd, and he refusing them release rose open-eyed to autumn, a fanatic beacon of fierceness leaping to meet them there, match the white prophets of the storm, the streaming meteors of the war. Dreaming Ezekiel, threaten me alive! Voices: Why don't you rip up that guitar? Or must we listen to [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2019-12-29T19:01:26+00:00December 29, 2019|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Trudi Witonsky and Elisabeth Daumer: A Visit with Louise Kertesz–Pioneer of Rukeyser Studies

When we told Louise she was a pioneer of Rukeyser Studies, she didn’t quite believe us. It took some time to convey to her just how influential her book, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, has been. Published in 1980, it has served as a touchstone for those of us who’d stumbled onto Rukeyser during our student days, and, wondering why no one had told or taught us about this remarkable poet, turned to Louise’s book, the first monograph devoted entirely to a serious discussion of Rukeyser’s sprawling oeuvre and its critical (mis)reception. After its publication, however, Louise disappeared from [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2021-02-13T17:33:26+00:00August 11, 2019|Ruke Blog|5 Comments

Aaron Pinnix, The Underwater Tidalectics of Rukeyser’s “Anemone”

Over the course of her career Rukeyser was consistently interested in the ocean as a space of possibilities. For instance, her first book of poems, Theory of Flight (1935), begins with overlapping references to drowned Sappho, Sacco (an Italian-American anarchist executed in 1927), and “Rebellion pioneered among our lives, / viewing from far-off many-branching deltas, / innumerable seas.”[1] Other poems in which Rukeyser engages with the ocean as a space of possibilities include “Child and Mother” (1935), “Ryder” (1939), “Sea Mercy” (1944), Elegies (1949), “On the Death of Her Mother” (1958), “The Birth of Venus” (1958), “The Outer Banks” (1968), [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-07-14T16:44:06+00:00March 1, 2019|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Anemone

Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968) You are looking into me with your waking look. My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing, my sex is opening. You are singing and offering : the way in. My life is closing, my life is opening. You are here. “Anemone,” by Thaerigen. Image in the Creative Commons, https://pixabay.com/en/anemone-water-sea-anemone-2874006

Elisabeth Daumer2019-02-10T12:51:15+00:00February 1, 2019|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

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Muriel Rukeyser

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