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 [...]
Eulàlia Busquets, Returning to Savage Coast
Eulàlia Busquets, the translator, into Catalan, of Rukeyser's novel Savage Coast, explains the novel's pertinence to understandings of the Spanish Civil War and contemporary Catalan politics. And she describes her historical research in Moncada about the days that Rukeyser spent there in July 1936.
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, / [...]
Heather Macpherson–She Sings the Body Electric: Soundscape in Two “Songs” by Muriel Rukeyser
In “Dream Drumming,” an interview with Pearl London from February 22, 1978, Muriel Rukeyser responds to the “processes of craft,” providing a provocative and telling explanation of what she felt was the most important aspect of poetry writing: It’s very hard to talk about the rewriting that goes into [poems] [...]
Vivian Pollak and Alexandra Swanson: Charles Naginski Timeline
May 29, 1909: "Betzabel" (later Charles) Naginski is born in Cairo, Egypt, where there is a substantial community of East European Jewish immigrants who benefit from the comparative liberality of the Sultan's regime. His parents, Abraham and Nahema Naginsky, speak Yiddish at home. As a child, Betzabel studies piano with [...]
Tim DeCelle, Lost in a City of Madness: Finding the Minotaur
“Deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad,” Rukeyser’s Minotaur stands in a maze, a “crooked city” (Collected Poems) whose apparent order masks a subterranean sphere of madness. We are brought into and through, again and again, the dead-ends and never-ending walls of confinement and isolation. By invoking the imagery [...]
Vivian Pollak–“The Minotaur” and the Trouble with Normal
© 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 [...]
Helen Engelhardt: Muriel’s Gift–Rukeyser’s Poems on Jewish Themes
© 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 [...]
Walter Hogan–Rukeyser’s “The Outer Banks”
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 [...]
Adam Mitts: The Vocabulary of Silence: Voice and Disability in “The Speed of Darkness”
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 [...]
Joe Sacksteder, Assignment: Place, History, Voice
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 [...]
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 [...]
Charlotte Mandel: Muriel Rukeyser’s Rabbi Akiba Inheritance
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 [...]
Elisabeth Däumer: “Ajanta”–An Introduction
Although Rukeyser never visited the Indian Caves of Ajanta, her sequence poem Ajanta, first published in 1944, evokes the atmosphere of the caves and glimpses of their paintings in stunning imagery. Her knowledge of the man-made caves was indebted to a portfolio of large-scale reproductions of the paintings and an [...]
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, [...]
