Scholarship

Adam Mitts: The Book of the Dead–Rukeyser’s Map of America

Muriel Rukeyser begins The Book of the Dead by writing, “These are roads to take when you think of your country,” explicitly linking geography and history to the poem’s central concern, the painful silicosis and death of hundreds of workers in West Virginia from 1932-1935. When Rukeyser writes that “these are roads to take when you think of your country” (italics mine), she is mining recent history to form a conceptual map of America. Rand McNally this isn’t. Rukeyser challenges to reimagine our atlas of the continent, taking in the blood-drenched soil of the continent while firmly keeping to the [...]

2021-02-11T15:11:10+00:00October 17, 2015|Essays, Resources, Scholarship|0 Comments

Laura Passin: The Power of Suicide and the Refusal of Mythology–Sylvia Plath and Muriel Rukeyser

This essay is, in itself, evidence of a slight derangement in my scholarly life: I am obsessed with two lines by Muriel Rukeyser. I will explore the connections suggested by those lines and the complex ways Rukeyser grapples with gender, history, and mythology in her poetry. Those two lines are, in fact, a whole poem. Here it is: Not to Be Printed, Not to Be Said, Not to Be Thought I’d rather be Muriel than be dead and be Ariel. (Collected Poems 554) Ariel, of course, is the title of the posthumous book that made Sylvia Plath’s name as a [...]

2023-09-04T20:04:12+00:00June 4, 2014|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Dara Barnat: Finding Muriel

I did some thirty years of living before encountering the work of Muriel Rukeyser. I don’t remember the exact day when I came upon this subversive Jewish-American poet, but my affinity to her is so strong that I think of her as “Muriel,” as opposed to the more formal “Rukeyser.” She was a pioneering poet, as well as a key influence on such writers as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Erica Jong, Sharon Olds, Denise Levertov, Gerald Stern, Marge Piercy, and Alicia Ostriker. Yet, owing to her gender (female), her political engagement (she was an outspoken socialist), her innovations in diction, [...]

2023-09-04T20:06:19+00:00April 16, 2014|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Elisabeth Däumer: A Muriel Rukeyser Website–Creating an Accessible Critical Tradition

Thoughts prepared for 1913 MLA Special Session: Muriel Rukeyser at One Hundred “There is no substitute for Critical Tradition: A continuum of understanding, early commenced,” Hugh Kenner observed, when he compared the reception of Eliot’s and Pound’s work. When The Waste Land appeared in 1922, readers responded immediately; the first generation of Canto readers, by contrast, were not yet born when the first cantos were published; the deferral in response created what Kenner described as the paradox of “an intensely topical poem [becoming] archaic without ever having been contemporary” (415). It may seem outlandish to begin a talk on Rukeyser [...]

2023-09-04T20:20:56+00:00January 15, 2014|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Elisabeth Däumer: Muriel Rukeyser’s Presumptions

Introduction to the Journal of Narrative Theory Special Issue on Muriel Rukeyser, 43.4 (Fall 2013): 247-257. Muriel Rukeyser was presumptuous. Her presumptions were multifold and risky. They involved contentious claims for poetry’s many “uses”—emotional, intellectual, and cultural; for its kinship with science, particularly “abstract science”; and for its value as “meeting place,” capable of linking not only different people, but also highly specialized disciplines and epistemologies in a common imaginative pursuit (Life of Poetry 103,159, 20).[1]For those of us coming to her work today, Rukeyser’s presumptions are a blessing. For one, she insisted on the necessity of audacity for the [...]

2023-09-04T20:26:42+00:00December 5, 2013|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Amy Hildreth Chen, Context for The Orgy

Presented at the 2013 Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Conference, March 14-16, 2013 © Photo by Amy HildrethMuriel Rukeyser’s only monograph-length travelogue, The Orgy (1965), depicts Puck Fair, an annual festival held in rural Killorglin, County Kerry, Ireland. The largest of Ireland’s annual horse and cattle festivals, Puck is celebrated from August 10 through 12 and is marketed as "Ireland's Oldest Fair.” Puck centers on the display of a goat crowned “the only King of Ireland” by the Queen of the Fair, a sixth grade girl from the local school. Following his coronation, King Puck is lifted onto the top of a [...]

2023-09-04T20:35:00+00:00October 5, 2013|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Trevor Snyder: Challenging Expert Authority

Presented at the 2013 Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Symposium, March 14-16, 2013, Eastern Michigan University Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead is a voice to the voiceless, a poem that seeks to give power to those devastatingly affected by the Hawk’s Nest Incident. In order to do so, it must not turn away from or fail to remind us of the power that they were up against, that they fell victim to. For the poem is also a sobering reminder not only of the danger of corruption, but also the potential hazard of blindly accepting the value of what one may consider [...]

2023-09-04T20:41:28+00:00August 14, 2013|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Kyle Evans: Muriel Rukeyser and Authorial Power in “The Book of the Dead”

Presented at the 2013 Muriel Rukeyser Centenary Symposium, March 14-16, 2013, Eastern Michigan University As we discuss the iterations of power revealed in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” I think it is important to consider the power that the poem itself represents. That is, Muriel Rukeyser’s authorial power. In Rukeyser’s documentary Poem of Witness we find that she incorporates real people and their actual testimonies. While this is a fantastic way to give a voice to the subjugated victims of the disaster at Hawk’s Nest Tunnel; I wonder whether the artistic liberty Rukeyser takes with the words of [...]

2023-09-04T20:39:54+00:00August 14, 2013|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments
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