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), [...]
