Muriel Rukeyser

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Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox writer Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Anne Sexton famously described her as "beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone";<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

One of Rukeyser's most powerful pieces was the long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books - something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life

Muriel Rukeyser was born December 15, 1913 to Lawrence and Myra Lyons Rukeyser. Their family was Jewish.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in The Bronx, then Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. From 1930 to 1932, she attended Columbia University.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Her literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry Theory of Flight, based on flying lessons she took, was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Personal life

Rukeyser never spoke publicly about her sexuality, but had relationships with men and women throughout her life.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite web</ref> Her literary agent Monica McCall was her partner for decades.<ref>https://jewishcurrents.org/muriels-gift/ "Muriel’s Gift". February 11, 2016. Posted by Helen Engelhardt: Rukeyser’s Poems on Jewish Themes by Helen Engelhardt, accessed December 15, 2019</ref> She was briefly married in 1945. In 1947, she gave birth to her only child, William Rukeyser, whose father was not the man she had married.<ref name=":1" />

In 1936, Rukeyser traveled to Spain to cover the People's Olympiad for the literary journal Life and Letters when the Spanish Civil War broke out. During her five-day stay, Rukeyser fell in love with Otto Boch, a German communist athlete who volunteered to fight the fascists and was later killed. That experience was evoked in "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century."

Rukeyser died of a stroke on February 12, 1980 at age 66, in New York, with diabetes as a contributing factor.

Activism, teaching, and writing

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Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. In 1933, at age 21, she traveled to Scottsboro, Alabama to learn more about a case involving two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, who accused nine black boys of rape in 1931. The case had became known nationally as the Scottsboro case and the boys as the Scottsboro boys. Eight of the boys were convicted, even though the case lacked substantive, physical evidence.

Ultimately, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered new trials.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Rukeseyer's task was to cover the boys' appeal trial. She was working for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and writing for the Student Review, a journal of the National Student League.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> On her journey south, she remembers seeing slogans posted: "“There is terror in Alabama,” “Free the Scottsboro boys.” She also believed that this case extended beyond the immediate issue; it was linked to the problems of women in the workplace.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

During her visit in Scottsboro, local police detained her after seeing her talk with Black reporters. Rukeseyer documented that detention and concluded that “women must help in the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys as well as help to solve the problems that led to their trial.”<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Rukeseyser also wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications including Decision and Life & Letters Today, for which she was assigned to cover the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. Instead of reporting on the Olympiad, she witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War, an experience that she would describe as a "moment of proof." This formed the basis of her rediscovered autobiographical novel Savage Coast <ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and the long poem Mediterranean.

Rukeyser famously traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia with filmmaker and photographer Nancy Naumburg to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her modernist masterpiece, the documentary poem The Book of the Dead in her volume U.S. 1 (1938).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

With World War II on the horizon, she published A Turning Wind (1939). In it, she seems to reach back to her experiences during the Spanish Civil War and look ahead to the turmoil in Europe with poems such as "Correspondences." She also adds a section entitled Lives, in which she has poems about some of the individuals she later writes biographies about, such as Willard Gibbs.

Rukeseyer did not shy away from strong social or political positions. Even before the U.S. entered the conflict, she spoke to a group at Vassar College about how poetry can be “a kind of weapon that can best meet these enemies, the outer cloud, the stealthy inner silence of fear” (1a, emphasis original).<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

During the war, she publishes two volumes: Wake Island: A Poem (1942), and Beast in View (1944). As one would expect, these volumes, slim as they are, focus on the conflict underway.

During and after World War II she gave a series of lectures, entitled The Usable Truth, about art and politics in times of crisis. These were eventually published (1949) as The Life of Poetry.<ref>excerpts online at Template:Webarchive University of Illinois English Department</ref> In it, Rukeyser makes the case that poetry is essential to democracy, essential to human life and understanding. In a publisher's note, Jan Freeman called it a book that "ranks among the most essential works of twentieth century literature." In 1996, Paris Press reissued The Life of Poetry, which had fallen out of print since its 1949 publication.

From the end of the war through the period of McCarthyism, Rukeyser was the target of sexist literary and political attacks which affected her career trajectory and publishing opportunities,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and the FBI compiled a thick file on her as a suspected Communist.<ref name="Thurston 2001">Template:Cite book</ref>

Rukeyser taught university classes and led writing workshops for much of her life, but never became a career academic.[1] She worked at Sarah Lawrence College,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> California Labor School,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Teachers-Writer's Collective.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In the 1960s and 1970s, when Rukeyser presided over PEN America, her feminism and opposition to the Vietnam War drew a new generation to her poetry. The title poem of her final book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death row in South Korea. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.<ref>"Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post</ref>

In addition to poetry, she wrote a fictionalized memoir, The Orgy; plays, among them the musical Houdini; and screenplays. She also translated work by Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöf. She wrote biographies of Josiah Willard Gibbs, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas Hariot. In the early 1970s, Andrea Dworkin worked as her secretary. Also in the 1970s, Rukeyser served on the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, a New York City-based theatre group that wrote and produced plays on feminist issues.

In other media

In the television show Supernatural, Metatron the angel quotes an excerpt of Rukeyser's poem "Speed of Darkness": "The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

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Speed of Darkness

Jeanette Winterson's novel Gut Symmetries (1997) quotes Rukeyser's poem "King's Mountain."

Rukeyser's translation of "Aqua Nocturna," a poem by Octavio Paz, was adapted by Eric Whitacre for his choral composition "Water Night."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> John Adams set one of her texts in his opera Doctor Atomic, and Libby Larsen set the poem "Looking at Each Other" in her choral work Love Songs.

Writer Marian Evans and composer Chris White collaborated on a play about Rukeyser, Throat of These Hours, titled after a line in Rukeyser's Speed of Darkness.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory dedicated a special issue to Rukeyser in Fall 2013.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Rukeyser's 5-poem sequence "Käthe Kollwitz" (The Speed of Darkness, 1968, Random House)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> was set by Tom Myron in his composition "Käthe Kollwitz for Soprano and String Quartet," "written in response to a commission from violist Julia Adams for a work celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Portland String Quartet in 1998."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Rukeyser's poem "Gunday's Child" was set to music by the experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

Awards

Works

Rukeyser's original collections of poetry
  • Theory of Flight. Foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. New Haven: Yale Uni. Press, 1935. Won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1935.
  • Mediterranean. Writers and Artists Committee, Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1938.
  • U.S. 1: Poems. Covici, Friede, 1938.
  • A Turning Wind: Poems. Viking, 1939.
  • The Soul and Body of John Brown. Privately printed, 1940. With etchings by Rudolph von Ripper.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
  • Wake Island. Doubleday, 1942.
  • Beast in View. Doubleday, 1944.
  • The Green Wave: Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. Includes translations of Octavio Paz poems and rari.
  • Orpheus. Centaur Press, 1949. With the drawing "Orpheus" by Picasso.
  • Elegies. New Directions, 1949.
  • Selected Poems. New Directions, 1951.
  • Body of Waking: Poems. NY: Harper, 1958. Includes translated poems of Octavio Paz.
  • Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935-1962. NY: Macmillan, 1962.
  • The Outer Banks. Santa Barbara CA: Unicorn, 1967. 2nd rev. ed., 1980.
  • The Speed of Darkness: Poems. NY: Random House, 1968.
  • 29 Poems. Rapp & Whiting, 1972.
  • Breaking Open: New Poems. Random House, 1973.
  • The Gates: Poems. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
  • The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeseyser. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
Fiction by Rukeyser
Plays by Rukeyser
  • The Middle of the Air. Produced in Iowa City, IA, 1945.
  • The Colors of the Day: A Celebration of the Vassar Centennial. Produced in Poughkeepsie, NY, at Vassar College, June 10, 1961.
  • Houdini. Produced in Lenox, MA, at Lenox Arts Center, July 3, 1973.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Published as Houdini: A Musical, Paris Press, 2002.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Film written by Rukeyser
  • All the Way Home. Produced in New York City, NY, 1957.
Children's books
Memoirs by Rukeyser
  • The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation. London: Andre Deutsch, 1965; NY: Pocket Books, 1966; Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1997.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Works of criticism by Rukeyser
  • The Life of Poetry. NY: Current Books, 1949; Morrow, 1974; Paris Press, 1996.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Biographies by Rukeyser
  • Willard Gibbs: American Genius, 1942. Reprinted by the Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge CT. Biography of Josiah Willard Gibbs, physicist.<ref name=":0" />
  • One Life. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Biography of Wendell Willkie.
  • The Traces of Thomas Hariot. NY: Random House, 1971. Biography of Thomas Hariot.
Translations by Rukeyser
  • Selected Poems of Octavio Paz. Indiana University Press, 1963. Rev. ed. published as Early Poems 1935-1955, New Directions, 1973.
  • Sun Stone. Octavio Paz. New Directions, 1963.
  • Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf. With Leif Sjöberg. Twayne, 1967.
  • Three Poems. Gunnar Ekelöf. T. Williams, 1967.
  • Uncle Eddie's Moustache. Bertolt Brecht. Pantheon Books, 1974.
  • A Molna Elegy: Metamorphoses. Gunnar Ekelöf. With Leif Sjöberg. 2 volumes. Unicorn Press, 1984.
Edited collections of Rukeyser's works
  • The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. McGraw, 1978.
  • Out of Silence: Selected Poems. Edited by Kate Daniels. Triquarterly Books, 1992.
  • A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. Norton, 1994.
  • The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
  • The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. Eds. Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Cornell University Press, 2023.

See also

References

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Further reading

  • Barber, David S. "Finding Her Voice: Muriel Rukeyser's Poetic Development." Modern Poetry Studies 11, no. 1 (1982): 127–138
  • Barber, David S. "'The Poet of Unity': Muriel Rukeyser's Willard Gibbs." CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 12 (Fall 1982): 1–15; "Craft Interview with Muriel Rukeyser." New York Quarterly 11 (Summer 1972) and in The Craft of Poetry, edited by William Packard (1974)
  • Daniels, Kate, ed. Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1992), and "Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser." Poetry East 16/17 (Spring/Summer 1985): 70–93
  • Gander, Catherine. Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (EUP, 2013)
  • Gardinier, Suzanne. "'A World That Will Hold All The People': On Muriel Rukeyser." Kenyon Review 14 (Summer 1992): 88–105
  • Herzog, Anne E. & Kaufman, Janet E. (1999) "But Not in the Study: Writing as a Jew" in How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser.
  • Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age (1953)
  • Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (2022)
  • Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (1980)
  • Levi, Jan Heller, ed. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1994)
  • Myles, Eileen, "Fear of Poetry Template:Webarchive." Review of The Life of Poetry, The Nation (April 14, 1997). This page includes several reviews, with much biographical information.
  • Pacernick, Gary. "Muriel Rukeyser: Prophet of Social and Political Justice." Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poets (1989)
  • Rich, Adrienne. "Beginners." Kenyon Review 15 (Summer 1993): 12–19
  • Rosenthal, M.L. "Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems." In New Directions in Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin. Vol. 14 (1953): 202–229;
  • Rudnitsky, Lexi. "Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser's Theory of Flight and The Middle of the Air," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, v.27, n.2 (Fall 2008), pp. 237–257, DOI: 10.1353/tsw.0.0045
  • "A Special Issue on Muriel Rukeyser." Poetry East 16/17 (Spring/Summer 1985);
  • Thurston, Michael, "Biographical sketch Template:Webarchive." Modern American Poetry, retrieved January 30, 2006
  • Turner, Alberta. "Muriel Rukeyser." In Dictionary of Literary Biography 48, s.v. "American Poets, 1880–1945" (1986): 370–375; UJE;
  • "Under Forty." Contemporary Jewish Record 7 (February 1944): 4–9
  • Ware, Michele S. "Opening 'The Gates': Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness." Women's Studies: An Introductory Journal 22, no. 3 (1993): 297–308; WWWIA, 7.

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