Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Read online

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been a collaborative effort and numerous individuals have helped bring it to completion. First, it has been an added privilege of our work on Muriel Rukeyser's writing to know William L. Rukeyser, her son. From the earliest conception of this book, Bill has supported our efforts and has been an active participant in the project. All along, he has offered us guidance and insight into Rukeyser's writing and editing process. He has generously shared personal history and assisted with our understanding of the poet's life, has read and helped to develop annotations, and has trusted us with his mother's work. We have been honored to work with Bill and are grateful for his partnership.

  Jan Heller Levi has been a consultant to us. She has contributed to the annotations and, as Rukeyser's biographer and a careful reader of her poetry, she has provided us with historical and personal details that would not have been accessible to us otherwise, helping us to make important connections between the details of Muriel Rukeyser's life and her poems. She has encouraged us to think about the scope and identity of this book, and her suggestions and challenges have strengthened the book.

  Many colleagues, mentors, and friends have guided us along the way, questioned with us, offered multiple ways to think about a given concern, suggested readings, looked over archival materials with us, read our writing, and affirmed the work of this project. Thus we thank Charles Berger, Dan Fink, Karen Fitts, Ed Folsom, Ed Ochester, Kate Northrop, Alicia Ostriker, Michael Peich, Michael Rudick, Nancy Rumfield, Maeera Shreiber, Tom Stillinger, Carla Verderame, Cheryl Wanko, Barry Weller, Rebecca Wilks, Eleanor Wilner, and Hyoejin Yoon. We also thank an anonymous reviewer for offering generous and important suggestions toward our final drafting.

  A number of research assistants have contributed to the formidable challenge of typing and formatting the poems, including Terri Borchers, Jason Pickavance, Rory Goughan, and Mark Hoefeletz. We are especially indebted to Eric Burger and Jocelyn Romano, whose eyes, commitment, and caring in the extensive preparation and review of the manuscript have made the completion of this project possible.

  Jeslyn Medoff worked with the Houghton Library's Rukeyser manuscript materials, proving to be a valuable traveling scholar whose work was essential to the editorial project. Jes's work enhanced our sense of Rukeyser's drafting process, and contributed to the accuracy of this collection.

  Alice Birney at the Library of Congress archives has guided us through Rukeyser's papers for many years, answered our questions, and made us feel welcome in the Library. It has been a pleasure and privilege to work with her. We thank the University Research Committee of the University of Utah, West Chester University's Graduate English Program, and West Chester University's CASSDA Grant for funding research assistance and for enabling our research trips to both the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library's Berg Collection.

  We thank Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, and especially Diana Burnham and Philip Milito, both of whom have kindly assisted us in accessing Rukeyser's papers at the Berg Reading Room. We thank the University of Utah and West Chester University librarians and, in particular, Dick Swain, Amanda Cain, Kimberly Klaus, Mary Sweeney, and Chris McCawley whose research expertise has provided us with access to materials that we could not locate on our own. We also appreciate the assistance of Ron Patkus and Dean Rogers, Vassar College Special Collections librarians, and Kathy Kienholz, the archivist at the Academy of Arts and Letters, who helped us with bits of research and offered levity.

  Our sincere thanks goes to Deborah Meade, senior editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her knowledgeable and careful responses to the final editing and production details for this book have been invaluable.

  From Janet: For Lynn, Andrew, and Karen Kaufman, whose love, passion, and commitment to living life with all its contradictions sustains me and has helped me read this poetry. And for Rachel, whose joy and questions keep me celebrating and searching.

  From Anne: My deepest gratitude to Emily, Lucas, and Hollis Graham, special ones, who have reminded me to laugh through the most intensive periods of completing this project. I also thank the extended Graham and Herzog families for their years of support and love. My work is dedicated to honoring and remembering the life of my father, Robert E. Herzog.

  The editors acknowledge the following people and institutions for permission to reprint the named materials.

  The following poems are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation:

  “The Street,” by Octavio Paz, translated by Muriel Rukeyser, from Early Poems 1935–1955, copyright © 1963, 1973 by Octavio Paz and Muriel Rukeyser.

  “Lovers,” “Spark,” and “The Bird” by Octavio Paz, translated by Muriel Rukeyser, from Early Poems 1935–1955, copyright © 1973 by Octavio Paz and Muriel Rukeyser.

  “Poet's Epitaph” and “Two Bodies” by Octavio Paz, translated by Muriel Rukeyser, from Selected Poems, copyright © 1973 by Octavio Paz and Muriel Rukeyser.

  Quotations from the following materials, including notes explicating the poems, appear courtesy of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations:

  “Antigone” (typescript, folder 6)

  “Autumn in the Garden” (typescript, folder 6)

  “The Ballad of the Missing Lines” (typescript, folder 9)

  “Cities of the Morning” (typescript, folder 17, juvenilia)

  “The Gates” (The Gates, folder 3)

  Samuel Silens interview with Muriel Rukeyser (transcript, U.S. 1 folder)

  Quotations from poems and other materials held by the Library of Congress appear courtesy of the Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

  The excerpt of Muriel Rukeyser's translation of “To the Unborn Child” by Hans Carossa appears with the permission of Eva Kampmann-Carossa.

  The translation of Leif Sjöberg and Muriel Rukeyser's translation of “Hypnogogic Figure” by Gunnar Ekelöf appears with the permission of Kaj Sjöberg.

  Introduction

  When you hold this book in your hand you hold a living thing.

  William Rose Benet

  Throughout her life, Muriel Rukeyser maintained that poetry proved an essential means of communicating and acting in the world, a way “to meet the moment with our lives” and invite “a total response” (Life of Poetry 8–11). Rukeyser was a prolific and important writer during her publishing years, 1935–1980. In addition to the fifteen volumes of poetry she left at her death, she published biographies of the scientist Willard Gibbs and the explorer Thomas Hariot, a book that she called “a story and a song” about the politician Wendell Willkie, the musical Houdini, and The Life of Poetry, a series of essays explaining her poetics that challenged what she viewed as a cultural “fear of poetry” and asserted the potential power and importance of poetry in our lives. Rukeyser also published translations, six children's books, two novels, and uncollected articles, essays, criticism, plays, and filmscripts. At the age of twenty-one, her first book, Theory of Flight, was published as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. This marked the beginning of a lifetime of recognition: the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award (1941), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1943), the Levinson Prize (1947), election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1967), the American Academy of Poets' Copernicus Prize (1977), the Shelley Prize (1977), and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

  For Rukeyser, work on the poem was work on the self. This book challenges us to use poetry as Rukeyser imagined when she wrote of the experience of art, “It will apply to your life; and it is more than likely to lead you to thought or action, that is, you are likely to want to go further into the world, further into yourself, toward further experience” (Life of Poetry 26). This book invites us into rel
ationship with the poems, with Rukeyser, and with ourselves.

  While Rukeyser was much lauded during her lifetime, her place in modern American poetry has not been secure. Rukeyser was defined early as a Left-identified, political poet—ultimately a vexed identity for any American poet writing throughout the twentieth century. For while the 1930s—the decade her first volume of poetry was published—was a period in which poetry seeking to address public and political issues was taken seriously, in many ways it was also the peak decade of such openness within the literary history of the twentieth-century United States. As Michael Thurston explains in Making Something Happen, the unfolding of that period brought a “decoupling of poetry and politics” resulting from a variety of factors: “national politics, especially the anti-Communist inquisition…and literary politics, where new formalist methodologies wrought deep changes in the institutions that publish, recirculate, evaluate, and preserve literary works” (7).

  We need look no further than the FBI file of more than one hundred pages focused on Rukeyser, the agency's labeling of her as a ‘concealed Communist’ (Dayton 12), or the House Un-American Activities Committee's censure of Sarah Lawrence College in November 1958 for employing her (Folsom 11) to appreciate the international reputation she earned as a powerful voice against the violence of war, poverty, racism, gender discrimination, and numerous other causes of the American Left. Yet even in terms of her political allegiances, Rukeyser never fit easily into prescriptive categories. She never functioned as a spokesperson for any partisan organization and never was a “card-carrying member” of the Communist Party as she was thought to be. Indeed, one of the most publicly humiliating events she experienced as a poet came at the hands of the Partisan Review editors in 1942, who mocked what they viewed as her overly patriotic stance in her book-length poem, Wake Island. Rukeyser wrote in response to her own vision, not the party line of the Partisan Review or any other editorial board. This vision was expansive, eclectic, and boundary crossing. Kenneth Rexroth wrote: “Her poems were the opposite of agitation and propaganda. They were expressions of responsibility, of abiding moral concern. As such they were part of a wider and more coherent life philosophy” (124). After Rukeyser's death, Denise Levertov wrote, “more than any other poet I know of (including Pablo Neruda) [Rukeyser] consistently fused lyricism and overt social and political concern” (189). Finally, in her introduction to the 1996 republication of The Life of Poetry, friend and fellow poet Jane Cooper asserted: “Reader, rarely will you encounter a mind or imagination of greater scope” (xxvi).

  The opening line of Rukeyser's great poem “Käthe Kollwitz” tells us that Rukeyser viewed her lifetime as being “held between wars,” and indeed, she was born on December 15, 1913, on the eve of World War I, and died on February 12, 1980, having lived through the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. She lived, as she wrote elsewhere, “in the first century of world wars” (“Poem”). Rukeyser benefited from a solid education in traditional literature and classics at the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan and the Fieldston School in the Bronx. Her mother worked as a bookkeeper and her father was a cofounder of Colonial Sand and Stone, which was at one time the biggest construction supply firm in the United States. Her family became quite wealthy during the formative years of her childhood. From a young age, Rukeyser was troubled by the discrepancy between her comfortable, sheltered childhood and what she learned from playing with members of street gangs, seeing prostitutes on the street, or hearing about the chauffeur's private life; she had a secret life apart from her parents, and it included “the wild, noisy, other world” of New York City (Life of Poetry 195). She developed an acute sense of the privileges and confinements of her social class. Reflecting on this period in her childhood, she writes, “It was clear to a growing child that the terrible, murderous differences between the way people lived were being upheld all over the city, that if you moved one block in any direction you would find an entirely different order of life” (“Education of a Poet” 221). Rukeyser's political consciousness was forged by her fascination for the difference that socioeconomic class made in people's lives and resulted in a lifelong concern for social justice.

  Rukeyser matriculated at Vassar College when she was seventeen; she never graduated, due largely to her father's financial difficulties. At nineteen, she left college and traveled to Alabama to witness the Scottsboro trial of nine African American youths who were unjustly convicted of raping two white women. That venture marked the beginning of many such journeys. She went to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to report as a journalist on the vast industrial tragedy of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel construction project in which approximately two thousand migrant workers, mostly of African American descent, died of silicosis as a direct result of unhealthy working conditions. She traveled to Spain in 1936 to report on the People's Olympiad, an alternative, antifascist Olympics, and instead witnessed and wrote about the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In 1975 she went to South Korea to protest the imprisonment and death sentence of the poet Kim Chi-Ha, traveling in her official capacity as president of the P.E.N. American Center, an organization of writers promoting literature and reading and defending free expression.

  Ultimately, Rukeyser viewed poetry as carrying tremendous power for witnessing on the part of both poet and audience. For the poet this meant testifying to one's perceptions of the world; for the reader this meant becoming accountable, responding with the writer through observations and personal experience, and by “the act of giving evidence” (Life of Poetry 175). We see Rukeyser's commitment to this conception of witnessing from the early years of her writing until the very end. She introduced The Life of Poetry with a story she frequently returned to at later points of her life: While evacuating Spain by boat at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, she was asked, “And poetry—among all this—where is there a place for poetry?” Rukeyser wrote: “Then I began to say what I believe” (3). In the concluding and title poem of Speed of Darkness, she issues a collective call for witnessing, “Who will speak these days, / if not I, / if not you?” And in her much quoted poetic question and answer in her biographical poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” Rukeyser asks: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” In each of these lines, Rukeyser makes clear her intention to claim poetry's place off the page, outside the book, and within the larger world.

  Even as she earned her impressive reputation as a political poet (e.g., “Poem Out of Childhood,” “The Book of the Dead,” “St. Roach,” “The Backside of the Academy,” “The Gates,” and so many others), Rukeyser maintained a very fluid sense of the “political.” Filmed in a 1978 documentary on three women artists, They Are Their Own Gifts, she stated, “I don't know what political is…it seems to me it's the thick of life…and it's the references and associations of life…I think it means the network of our lives, the ways in which we depend on each other and love and hate each other.” Rukeyser simply did not accept conventional understandings of the political as a category separate from and defined in opposition to the personal. Perhaps she had an early appreciation of the feminist maxim brought to prominence in the 1960s: “The personal is political.” Her Collected Poems, page by page, challenges the fracturing of political poetry from what some may view as private poetry and posits instead a world of poetic and political, personal and public, merging.

  On more than one occasion, Rukeyser spoke of the origins of her first poems as a response to “the silence at home” (“Craft Interview” 153), and many of her poems speak to personal silences she felt and her yearning for language to fill them (e.g., “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” “Four in a Family,” “Asleep and Awake,” “The Poem as Mask,” “In Our Time,” “The Speed of Darkness,” “Double Ode,” “The Gates”). Rukeyser's parents were both born in the United States, of German-Jewish and Romanian-Jewish descent. In regard to religion, she wrote: “There was not a trace of Jewish culture that I could fe
el—no stories, no songs, no special food—but then there was not any culture background that could make itself felt.” She viewed her parents as part of what Margaret Mead called “second generation” culture—“split with the parent culture, leaning over backward to be ‘American’ at its most acceptable” (“Under Forty” 4–5). Yet we also know that Rukeyser cherished her mother's story that her family was descended from the great second-century scholar and martyr, Rabbi Akiba (see “Akiba”). Indeed, Rukeyser claims that she first fell in love with the poetry of the Bible when she turned to it during the Reform services her mother began taking her to at Temple Emanuel in New York City—the Bible, with “its clash and poetry and nakedness…. [was] closer to the city than anything that was going on or could possibly go on in the Temple” (“Under Forty” 7). Jo-Ann Mort links Rukeyser's political aesthetic to her Judaism, tracing Rukeyser's passion for social justice to the Deuteronomic call “intrinsic to Judaism”: “‘Justice, justice shalt thou follow, that thou mayst live, and inherit the land which the Lord thy God gaveth thee’” (20). Similarly, Robert Shulman frames Rukeyser's Jewish identity as “inseparable from her political radicalism…integral to her imagination” (34). In 1944, when she was only thirty and at the very beginning of her writing career, Rukeyser wrote: “To live as poet, woman, American, and Jew—this chalks in my position. If the four come together in one person, each strengthens the others” (“Under Forty” 8).

  Still, Rukeyser resisted any turn toward religion for reassurance and comfort and sought a religious identity that would require an engaged struggle with both herself and the world. Thus she wrote that the value of her Jewish heritage was its value as a guarantee: “not only against fascism, but against many kinds of temptation to close the spirit” (“Under Forty” 9). Here again, we see her asserting a relationship between a term of political, institutional oppression—“fascism”—with the word “spirit,” a term often relegated to personal, spiritual experience. Not so for Rukeyser. In a 1972 interview, Rukeyser commented on her essentially relational perspective, “It isn't that one brings life together—it's that one will not allow it to be torn apart” (“Craft Interview” 171).