mthunter22

© 2016 Vivian Pollak In the fall of 2016, the same semester that Washington University hosted a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I began teaching a fifteen-person seminar organized around the theme "American Women Poets and the Trouble with Normal." There was a lot of energy and excitement on campus, and Chancellor Wrighton sent an e-mail to the Wash U community urging us to remember "our shared values of mutual respect, inclusion and the celebration of differing perspectives." In what may have been an excess of caution, I felt reluctant to express my views about the candidates [...]

© Helen Engelhardt To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. So begins the most well-known and beloved of the poems written by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), who was astonished when the Reform synagogue movement included it in their revised prayerbooks in the 1940s. “To Be a Jew” also appears under the heading, “Israel’s Mission” in the 1975 edition of Gates of Prayer. “One feels that one has been absorbed into the line,” Rukeyser said of its inclusion, “and it’s very good.” Except for “a Bible on a bookshelf [and] a ceremonial goblet handed down [...]

  Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 collection, The Speed of Darkness, begins with four dozen short poems, and concludes with several longer poems, of which “The Outer Banks” is the first. (It is followed by “Akiba,” “Käthe Kollwitz,” and the title poem, “The Speed of Darkness.”) “The Outer Banks” consists of 183 lines of free verse, gathered in twelve numbered sections which vary in length from a single line (section #3), to the 27 lines of section #9, the longest. In general, sections 9-12 are longer, and fuller, than the first eight sections of the poem. The poem describes, celebrates, and meditates [...]

In 1964, the poet Muriel Rukeyser suffered a stroke. Four years later, in 1968, she published a poem called “The Speed of Darkness.” Over the years, this poem has been interpreted in a number of ways. A common interpretation is that the poem is about a woman finding her voice as a poet. The poem also links to a theme explored by Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry, which is how one writes poetry in a world that no longer values poetry, that, in Rukeyser’s thinking, actually fears poetry because poetry discloses areas of our selves we would rather ignore. [...]

Both the Honors College at Eastern Michigan University and our interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program put a lot of emphasis on community involvement. So, when I was given the privilege of teaching two honors sections this semester, I decided to design a writing assignment that would encourage student engagement with the community using Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead as a model. Although there was a lot of leeway, I listed four “field work” possibilities – service-based, community-based, research-based, and ekphrasis-based – and asked students to represent their experience via one or more pieces of non-fiction, poetry, or cross-genre work that [...]

Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry allows no canonical containment. She was born in New York Cityin 1913 and died in that city on Lincoln’s Birthday, 1980. Her lifetime encompasses both World Wars, the Great Depression, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War. “Whatever can come to a woman can come to me,” stated her poem “Waterlily Fire” in 1962 (Collected Poems 309). Her appetite for experience was omnivorous: Modernism came to her--as did Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, the Bible, Keats, the movies, Karl Marx, the daily violence in newspapers. Had H.D., Pound or Williams not preceded her, she nonetheless would have understood [...]