Elisabeth Däumer, From the Archives: The Four Fears
In the winter of 2023, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein shared with me a drawing by Rukeyser that would be featured on the cover of The Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, published later that year. The drawing depicts four massive figures surrounded by a wall of red. In the front, dwarfed by the gigantic [...]
Lara Meintjes, “this word, this power”: Deixis and Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Witness in The Book of the Dead
The first poem in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is “The Road.” It describes not “the” road, but rather “these” roads. A plurality of roads knotted and weaving: a suburban road with “junction” and “fork” merges onto a “well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.” The description of this [...]
Louise Kertesz, Review of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s Unfinished Spirit, Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is itself a work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship. It’s fitting that Rukeyser’s work modeled those qualities when critics were dismissing them as inappropriate, even offensive in a woman writer. In her acknowledgments, K-E professes the deep connection she has forged with her subject: “Writing about Rukeyser has helped me think through our political, humanitarian, and environmental crises and to remain, as she models, a ‘vulgar optimist.’”
Trudi Witonsky, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot”: Some Context
Published 7/20/2022 The Vassar Encyclopedia's entry on Muriel Rukeyser contains part of a poem, originally published anonymously in the November 1933 issue of Con Spirito. Highly critical of T.S. Eliot, "Lecture by Mr. Eliot" was identified as Rukeyser's by Mary McCarthy, musing over the publication in her memoir, How I [...]
Elisabeth Däumer, Context for “Waterlily Fire”
By Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University Published 2012/05/10 Rukeyser composed this five-part poem over the span of four years (1958-1962) in response to a fire at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, which destroyed two of Monet's Waterlily paintings, one of them an 18-foot long panel attached to the [...]
Susanna Ansorge, Rat Elegy–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies
Preface Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies challenges readers with an array of complicated literary devices and historical references as a way of digesting a thoroughly grueling time in world history, as she lived through it. Since the work isn't reflecting on the past, but rather a historical present, Elegies stands as especially [...]
Joely Byron Fitch, The Marks of Her Knowing: On Muriel Rukeyser’s “Käthe Kollwitz”
There’s a line in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” next to which I write: this, the center of everything. That line, from the five-part poem’s second section, reads: “A woman pouring her opposites.” The poem is better-known for a question that Rukeyser later asks, then immediately answers: “What would happen [...]
Trudi Witonsky, Introducing Louise Kertesz, Friday February 19, 2021
I’m thrilled to introduce Louise Kertesz to you. I first came to read Muriel Rukeyser through Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and you get used to reading one sensibility, even as it evolves and breaks and innovates. But when you start reading someone new, someone as complicated as Rukeyser, it’s bewildering at [...]
Louise Kertesz, “My Untamable Need”: Reading Rukeyser’s Elegies in Light of Some of Her Later Poems
Keynote Speech for the webinar Revisiting Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies in Times Like These, February 19, 2021. I wonder how many have come upon Rukeyser’s work – as I did —surprised that we’d not heard very much about her. In the early 1970s, I was a new PhD in English, reasonably [...]
Chloe Ross, The Natural and the Imposed: The Presence of Barriers in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Waterlily Fire”
Fire is as much a tool and a representation of rebirth as it is a force of destruction. Water can represent the same, but also a freedom and a fear of the unknown. After all, who really knows what lurks under dark waters? Nothing in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem sequence “Waterlily [...]
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 [...]
Vered Ornstein, The Blood is Justified
CHARACTERS MURIEL: Muriel Rukeyser. An activist and poet, Jewish. Begins the play in her mid-thirties. FRIEND 1: A friend of Muriel’s, any gender, Jewish. FRIEND 2: Same as Friend 1. FRIEND 3: An activist friend of Muriel’s, Black, any gender. NEWSCASTER: A radio host, male. PRIME MINISTER: A future nondescript [...]
Lily Pratt, Another Day in the Life of a Persevering Woman
6:00 AM The alarm clock begins its song and dance promptly as the time strikes six, ringing out and shaking Marie out of her dreams. She rubs her eyes open, forcing herself up and swinging her legs around and over the side of the bed. The sunlight sneaks its way [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
