Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Read online

  Song : Remembering Movies

  Work, for the Day Is Coming

  Recovering

  Parallel Invention

  Poem

  Not to Be Printed, Not to Be Said, Not to Be Thought

  Back Tooth

  Destruction of Grief

  Trinity Churchyard

  Burnishing, Oakland

  The Iris-Eaters

  Slow Death of the Dragon

  Mendings

  Then

  2

  The Gates

  1 - “Waiting to leave all day I hear the words”

  2 - “Walking the world to find the poet of these cries”

  3 - New Friends

  4 - “The Cabinet minister speaks of liberation”

  5 - “Among the days”

  6 - The Church of Galilee

  7 - The Dream of Galilee

  8 - Mother as Pitchfork

  9 - “You grief woman you gave me a scarlet coverlet”

  10 - “Air fills with fear and the kinds of fear”

  11 - “Long ago, soon after my son's birth”

  12 - “For that I cannot name the names”

  13 - “Crucified child—is he crucified? he is tortured”

  14 - “So I became very dark very large”

  15 - “All day the rain”

  Juvenilia

  Antigone

  Cities of the Morning

  Autumn in the Garden

  The Ballad of the Missing Lines

  November Sketches

  To a Lady Turning Middle-Aged

  Place-Poems: New York

  O City

  Fourteenth Street

  The New School for Social Research

  Sheridan Square Conversation

  The New Bridge

  Park Avenue

  College Special

  Empire State Tower

  “Dear place, sweet home”

  For an Aesthete

  Pastorale No. 2

  A New Poem

  An Unborn Poet

  Abbreviations

  Annotations

  Textual Notes

  Bibliography

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  Editors' Notes

  Rukeyser begins her preface to her 1978 Collected Poems: “‘All the poems is a very curious idea.” Indeed, that collection, which Rukeyser edited herself—to the best of her abilities, toward the end of her life and after she was debilitated by a series of illnesses and strokes—includes almost all the poems that Rukeyser published in her numerous volumes during her lifetime. As the coeditors of this newly envisioned Collected Poems, we have been acutely aware of the necessity of this new volume since we first began doctoral dissertations on Rukeyser in the early 1990s. It was frustrating at that time to realize that such a monumental figure of twentieth-century American poetry was no longer in print. Only readers who had access to libraries with extensive holdings or were motivated to pursue Rukeyser's work through used bookstores could piece together her poetry and prose works. Since that time, however, there has been a steady increase in new releases of portions of Rukeyser's writing: Kate Daniels's edition, Out of Silence: Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1992); Jan Heller Levi's poetry and prose collection, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1994); Jan Freeman and Paris Press's reissuing of The Life of Poetry (1996); The Orgy (1997); and Houdini: A Musical (2002); and most recently, Adrienne Rich's Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems (Library of America, 2004). The publication of our critical collection, “How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?”: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser (1999), along with the dozens of recent scholarly essays probing Rukeyser's work, all speak to the need for this newly edited and annotated Collected Poems. It is time that Rukeyser's oeuvre is more accessible, and we hope that this volume will continue to clarify the significance of Rukeyser as an American poet.

  Rukeyser's preface to her 1978 Collected Poems indicates her intent to make that book comprehensive. She opened by meditating on the notion of “All the poems” and elaborated: “all the poems are included; only the translations have been removed” (v). In fact, though she acknowledged a desire to make “cuts,” to rewrite and to leave out, she concluded: “…this is the truth of how the poems stand and how things formed for me” (v-vi). Throughout our work, we have striven to adhere to the spirit of openness and inclusivity Rukeyser professed when envisioning the 1978 Collected Poems. We have attempted to gather “all the poems,” even while realizing the impossibility of following this mandate. Among Rukeyser's papers, primarily in the Library of Congress archives and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, are drafts of poems written on scraps of paper, corners of envelopes, and backs of playbills. Some of these appear to be nearly completed. Other poems are handwritten on notebook paper with scribbled revisions penciled in. There are typed poems that were never published, but appear ready or near ready for publication, and drafts of tables of contents that include titles of poems we have not located. Additionally, there is a handful of poems that were published in journals and never appeared in Rukeyser's books. Ultimately, we determined that the transcription, analysis, and study of these previously unpublished, uncollected poems for the purpose of publication must wait for another project.

  From the beginning, it has been our intent to produce an edition that once again makes available Rukeyser's collected poetry as she envisioned it. Throughout her life, when she articulated what was most important to her about poetry, she asserted the significance of the writer/poem/reader triad: poems are created and exist because of a relationship between the poet and her audience. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser told the story of asking a student in her writing workshop to tear up a poem he had written, ostensibly destroying the visible copy, and then asked her students if the poem still existed. For Rukeyser, the poem still existed as a work of art because it had been brought alive within the relationship of poet and witnesses, not by the materiality of ink on paper. She wrote, “I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world…all are here…. and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created” (172). In presenting this collection with annotations, we hope to perpetuate and strengthen the exchange, the relation of poet, poem, and reader.

  We have chosen not to construct this book as a variorum that would track the multiple appearances in text of Rukeyser poems, but rather to emphasize the essential triad of poet, poem, and audience. While Rukeyser published many of her poems from first drafts, others went through multiple drafts and were sometimes revised from one printing to the next. In the majority of these cases, such revisions were small: a word change or a shift in punctuation or spacing. In a handful of poems, she made substantial revisions from a typescript or early journal printing to the publication in one of her books. In instances where we have identified substantial changes, we refer the reader to the source of the earlier printing within our textual notes. We leave questions of the analysis of Rukeyser's revision process to future scholars, and hope that this edition will inspire enough interest to make possible further publications of her work.

  Researching for this collection, we have made numerous discoveries and accompanying editorial decisions that result in an enriched Collected Poems, one that includes more poems than the 1978 edition. We have reproduced each of the twelve original volumes of poetry published in the 1978 Collected Poems in chronological order. To these, we have added translations, Wake Island, juvenilia, and a final poem of Rukeyser's that appeared in print just before her death. Additionally, we have included extensive annotations.

  Rukeyser's translations of Octavio Paz were published in The Green Wave (1948) and Breaking Open (1973), and a selection of translated Northern/Eskimo poems and rari poems was also published in The Green Wave. In other volumes, she published translations of individual poems of several other poets: Vicente Aleixand
re, Charles Morice, Te Hanh, Hans Carossa, and Gunnar Ekelöf. In a typescript of the table of contents for the 1978 Collected Poems, Rukeyser included these translations, though they were ultimately omitted. After the Collected Poems was published, Rukeyser referred to “that big book that holds back a big door,” and we suspect that publishing pressures to limit page length may have contributed to the decision to exclude the translations. Rukeyser gives us some clue to her ideas about translation in a few different places. In her endnote for the Northern Poems, she refers to her translation work as a type of “adaptation.” Poet-critic Kate Daniels notes in her introduction to a double-issue of Poetry East focused on Rukeyser that translation is a kind of metaphor for the way Rukeyser envisioned her own eclectic, disciplinary, and boundary crossing aesthetic. Explaining Rukeyser's interest in joining scientific thinking and poetry, Daniels wrote: “she was ‘translating’ the phase rule in physics into poetic rhythms” (6). In a 1970 talk entitled “The Music of Translation,” Rukeyser remarked that it takes a “mythological effort to bring a music over into another life” (The World of Translation 188). In typical Rukeyser fashion—her mind was constantly moving, refusing to remain wedded to any given position—she concludes at the end of her 1978 preface, “Only the translations have been taken out; and it now seems to me…might it not be that poetry and indeed all speech are a translation?” One can almost hear her questioning the rightness of leaving behind these translations. Or so we have heard her.

  Our research in the archives of the Library of Congress yielded other translations by Rukeyser, completed but never published, such as those of the German poet Christian Morgenstern and an entry in a table of contents draft for a translation of the Conference of the Birds by the Sufi mystic Attar. It was tempting to publish these poems because we took such pleasure in reading them; it was an additional delight to see the drawings that Rukeyser created to accompany the Morgenstern translations. One wishes to share such pleasure. However, because space remains an interminable problem with Rukeyser's life's writing, we included only translations that she had already published in her books. Looking at both the translations she published and those she did not, we apprehended once again Rukeyser's vast reach, her vital curiosity and imagination, the boldness with which she explored poetry from so many languages, cultures, and times. These translations speak to Rukeyser's determination to live as a poet and citizen of the world.

  The long poem Wake Island was published in its own slim edition in 1942, an omission from the 1978 Collected Poems for which no acknowledgement or explanation was given. When this poem was first published, Rukeyser was viciously attacked in various reviews, on ad hominem as well as literary and political grounds, for what was seen as her poem's naive rhetoric in response to the U.S. military conflict in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Though we found no comment on this matter in her personal papers, it seems likely that the resistance to Wake Island when it was first published contributed to Rukeyser's perception that it remained particularly vulnerable to adverse criticism and therefore could be left out of the Collected Poems. It is also possible, given Rukeyser's declining health preceding the book's publication, that the exclusion of Wake Island was no more than an oversight. In preparing this new edition we chose to include Wake Island, first because Rukeyser did indeed publish it as a book, and second, because it represents an important moment in her consideration of what it means to be an American poet. As both Jim Brock and Louise Kertesz have argued, while the poem does not represent the zenith of Rukeyser's poetic talent, it is consistent with her lifelong vision that poetry should respond to questions of social justice and freedom, as well as to the historical moment, not only within her own country but globally. Perhaps now when the moment is less charged, readers will be interested in reconsidering this poem in the trajectory of Rukeyser's writing and as part of the writing to emerge from World War II.

  Throughout her life, in poetry, prose, drama, biography, and fiction, Rukeyser experimented with genre and the boundaries of genre. In 1957, she published One Life, a book inspired by the life of the politician Wendell Willkie, which integrated prose, poems, prose poems, and sections of dialogue in verse. As Rukeyser wrote in her foreword to this work, she did not quite think of it as a biography, but rather, “a story, and a song” (xiii). When her first Collected Poems came out, Rukeyser included both poems and poem-like excerpts from One Life. The result was a large selection, comprising about one-sixth of the 1978 Collected Poems. Yet this selection is virtually inscrutable taken out of the context of One Life. Rukeyser herself, in a typescript titled “Note for One Life” that she left in her papers now housed in the Library of Congress, describes her ambivalence about including this selection. She writes: “The poems in this section [of the Collected Poems] are the poems in a book that is made of poems and documents, as well as these poems. But to tear the poems out, as has been done here, is to destroy the texture of the book and the arrangement which is edited as a film is edited, in those rhythms and sequences. I am glad to have the poems used here but both the sequence and the further meaning are destroyed. The arrangement is the life.” After great deliberation, we have decided to publish a smaller selection of the One Life poems: we have included the eighteen poems that Rukeyser herself selected from this volume to be reprinted in Body of Waking (1958), the year after One Life was published. We hope that the smaller selection is sufficient to give current readers a taste of the poetic ambition of One Life while creating a more balanced book, not overly weighted by poems that are “torn,” to use Rukeyser's term, from the larger work. The selection that Rukeyser included in the 1978 Collected Poems deserves to be explored in One Life itself, where the reader has the opportunity to grasp the intensity of Rukeyser's genre experimentation and her effort to make a place for poetry in an ostensibly prose text, just as she worked with prose and documentary materials in ostensibly poetic works throughout her life (see, for example, “The Book of the Dead”). We look forward to the republication of One Life in its entirety.

  The musical Houdini, written and revised by Rukeyser over the course of nearly forty years, represents a similar case. In 2002, Paris Press published what it considered to be the “completed” text, making Rukeyser's work on the song lyrics of this play available once again to readers. Interested readers may also wish to consider an alternate version published by Richard Jones and Kate Daniels. While we deeply admire the historical and imaginative work of the Houdini lyrics, we determined, as we did with the One Life poems, that excerpting from the work would diminish it.

  One of the most significant additions to the present volume is a section of juvenilia. These poems were written in Rukeyser's early and late adolescence, during her years at the Ethical Culture and Fieldston schools, and at Vassar, where she matriculated at the age of sixteen. In some, Rukeyser can be seen straddling the border between adolescence and adulthood, just prior to the publication of Theory of Flight, her first book, selected when she was twenty-one for the Yale Younger Poets prize. In each of the poems we chose to include, it is remarkable to note the distinctness of voice, the breadth of vision, and the early feminist and political perspective; each one is completely consistent with what one may appreciate in Rukeyser's later published books.

  The single substantive reordering we have done of the poems in this edition involves Rukeyser's elegies, a series of ten poems that she began publishing in clusters, first in A Turning Wind (1939), then in Beast in View (1944) and finally in The Green Wave (1948). In 1949, however, Rukeyser published Elegies—all ten poems together and by themselves for the first time—in a beautiful edition that highlights their continuity and progression. In her 1951 Selected Poems, Rukeyser again reprinted these elegies, again in their own separate grouping. Yet in the 1978 Collected Poems, the elegies were reprinted according to their original placement in three separate volumes. In considering the various groupings of these poems in print, we concluded that they are most powerful when presented together. Our conclusion
is confirmed by Rukeyser's shaping of Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935–1962, a selection of favorite poems from earlier volumes. While she could easily have positioned the individual elegies within the sections of Waterlily Fire dedicated to the volumes in which they first appeared, Rukeyser chose, rather, to create a separate section for her elegies, printing them together. Thus, we have followed Rukeyser's example from 1949 and 1951, taking care to indicate in the annotations where individual elegies first appeared within Rukeyser's books. The copy text for these poems is Waterlily Fire, as it most dependably reflects the printing of these poems separately in A Turning Wind, Beast in View, and Green Wave. However, the wide spaces in Waterlily Fire are bigger than in almost all other printings and thus we have worked between Waterlily Fire and the other versions to determine spacing.

  As a general rule, we have relied on Rukeyser's original volumes for copy texts. Although the 1978 Collected Poems was her last published book, we found it was not entirely reliable because of numerous errors and differences from the original volumes. Rukeyser was suffering from the effects of strokes and illness at the time she was preparing her Collected Poems; she did not always have the energy to edit this book with the same meticulousness that her son, William L. Rukeyser, reports she devoted to her earlier publications. Additionally, the editor with whom she was working on the Collected Poems left mid-project. Thus, after studying Rukeyser's individual volumes, we chose them as the copy texts. In some cases, we found spelling, punctuation, and word changes in the 1978 Collected Poems that appear to be corrections to previous printings; where we had evidence for these changes or found them to be clear corrections, we incorporated and documented them in our section for textual notes at the end of the book. Additionally, if an alteration in the Collected Poems seemed as if it could not have been a typographical or printing error, we retained it. In another handful of cases, we found variations of word or punctuation choice in the 1978 Collected Poems that were plausible but for which we have no evidence of Rukeyser's intention or confidence that they were intentional revisions. In these situations, and for reasons of consistency, we have printed the version from Rukeyser's original volumes in the body of the text and offer the Collected Poems' version in the textual notes section.