Muriel Rukeyser Archives - Page 2 of 3

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Preface Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies challenges readers with an array of complicated literary devices and historical references as a way of digesting a thoroughly grueling time in world history, as she lived through it.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 relevant for readers experiencing unprecedented times. Even as one of those readers, I still had a lot of difficulty interpreting Rukeyser's ambitious collection. As that's the case, I wanted to emulate her as a way of understanding the work. If I can at least reconstruct how these elegies were written, [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:25:01+00:00January 18, 2022|Essays, Ruke Blog|0 Comments

Bill Rukeyser, Interviewed by Dennis Bernstein, February 16, 2021, KPFA Flashpoints

Dennis: It’s a pleasure and an honor to welcome William L. Rukeyser, son of the late poet and biographer, Muriel Rukeyser, who we are honoring, studying, remembering, during this extended two-day webinar at Eastern Michigan University. Eastern Michigan University is creating an archive for the great work of the biographer and poetry of Muriel Rukeyser. And her son, William, has agreed to talk a little bit about his mom and what it’s like to grow up as the son of a great poet and a visionary. Dennis: So, welcome, William Rukeyser, to “Flashpoints”, and it is very good to have [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2021-06-02T15:22:31+00:00June 2, 2021|Ruke Blog|1 Comment

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 categories she embraced, uncritically, alongside those of “American,” “woman,” and, after the birth of her son in 1947, “mother.” But given pervasive misconceptions about poetry’s apolitical or antipolitical nature, and given the variety of forms Rukeyser explored over her long career, even that identity seems too limiting. Other forms of identificatory nomenclature [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-03-26T15:41:18+00:00September 5, 2020|Essays, Pedagogy, Scholarship|0 Comments

Song : Love In Whose Rich Honor

Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968) Love in whose rich honor I stand looking from my window over the starved trees of a dry September Love deep and so far forbidden is bringing me a gift to claw at my skin to break open my eyes the gift longed for so long The power to write out of the desperate ecstasy at last death and madness

mthunter222026-04-08T18:29:39+00:00November 18, 2018|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Laura Passin, Discovering Muriel Rukeyser as a Young Writer

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Laura Passin On her 16th birthday, my best friend Jess received a copy of Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser from her mother. Jess and I didn’t live in the same state, so we were avid letter writers; after that birthday, her letters always included at least a snippet of mesmerizing, spiky poetry: For sensual friction is largely fiction and partly fact and so is tact and so is love, and so is love. The best way to describe my reaction to Rukeyser’s poetry is to say I got a raging crush [...]

mthunter222025-03-26T12:09:18+00:00September 8, 2014|Ruke Blog|2 Comments

Muriel Rukeyser and Other Writers

Posted on May 19, 2014 by Catherine Gander In just a few days, I will have the pleasure of chairing a panel at the American Literature Association’s annual conference at Washington, DC. The panel, organised by Elisabeth Däumer (herself a force of intellectual connectivity of the sort Rukeyser celebrated) will bring together five established and emerging Rukeyser scholars including myself and Professor Däumer: Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, whose diligent scholarship recently brought Rukeyser’s ‘lost novel’ Savage Coast to light and publication; Laura Passin, whose work on the politico-aesthetic strains of contemporary American poetry traces valuable lines of influence to the lyrical, subjective [...]

mthunter222018-12-28T16:56:55+00:00May 19, 2014|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

Marian Evans, ‘Islands’: Dragging Our Heads Back

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Marian Evans The latest draft of the Throat of These Hours radio play, now with a rigorous reader, was hard and slow. I had to reduce – drop storylines, drop characters, drop themes, drop dialogue – and distill. Reduce and distill again. Sometimes I lost Muriel Rukeyser. Sometimes I lost the story. Sometimes I lost heart. Often I had to drag my head back to the play, most easily through listening to one of Christine White’s draft compositions, for part of The Speed of Darkness and for Then. What a blessing they've been. What a [...]

mthunter222025-06-06T15:37:15+00:00December 14, 2013|Ruke Blog, Throat of These Hours (play)|0 Comments

Crisis, hope, and the life of poetry

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Catherine Gander I’m delighted to be blogging for this website for several reasons. Foremost among them is the great pleasure I have in being part of a growing community of scholars, students, readers, writers, artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, activists and more who share a deep, inclusive appreciation for the life and legacy of Muriel Rukeyser. My first exposure to Rukeyser’s work was not to her poetry, but to her poetic philosophy. In a Master’s class at King’s College London, I had been assigned to read The Life of Poetry by someone who had once [...]

mthunter222013-10-03T14:33:48+00:00October 3, 2013|Ruke Blog|1 Comment

Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser

Additional Information

Recent Posts