From Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, by Rowena Kennedy Epstein
Introduction Waste/Archives/Feminism Among all the waste there are the intense stories and tellers of stories --Muriel Rukeyser, "Letter to the Front" (1944) In a letter to Denise Levertov in 1965, Muriel Rukeyser writes, "I feel like being fat is a visible sign of my dark side." Levertov responds by qualifying, "You actually give the impression of lioness grandeur, of hugeness, but not of ugly fatness." When I first read this in my early twenties, I was struck by the wicked perniciousness of sexism--that two of the twentieth century's most exciting and radical women poets would spend time talking about their [...]