Elisabeth Daumer, Author at Muriel Rukeyser

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 Daumer2026-03-26T15:43:25+00:00September 7, 2020|Pedagogy, 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 identificatory nomenclature [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-03-26T15:41:18+00:00September 5, 2020|Essays, Pedagogy, Scholarship|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 Daumer2026-07-16T20:32:03+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

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