Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Read online

  Two other related facets of Rukeyser's work have complicated the critical assessment of her as a twentieth-century poet. First, she rejected some of the central developments of New Criticism, which rose in influence in the 1940s. Second, she maintained throughout her life an essentially visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language. The New Critical formalist emphasis, with its framing of the poem as a discrete art object separate from its historical-cultural context, was never consonant with Rukeyser's poetics, in particular because she emphasized the motion within language and the film-like elements of form. She stated that we, readers, should approach language and poetry “as we use it—as a process in which motion and relationship are always present…” She also recommended unequivocally that “we dismiss every static pronouncement and every verdict which treats poetry as static” (Life of Poetry 166–67). For Rukeyser, who resisted the fixedness essential to the New Critical idea of the poem-as-object, and who wrote poetry particular to its place, time, and political context, a critical approach seeking to detach a poem from its larger context would be mismatched. Rukeyser's later books do show a certain shift from the denser and more sprawling poems of her earlier volumes, perhaps a response to New Criticism's influence, yet she never completely turned away from the Whitmanesque lines of her youth. She insisted on writing poetry that emerged from—and was part and parcel of—distinct cultural, political, and historical moments.

  Rukeyser's belief that poetry could enact change in the larger world shares no affinity for the ironic stance and world weariness of many high modernists. From her earliest poems, like “Theory of Flight,” where she wrote, “Say yes, people. / Say yes. / YES,” to her last book, where, in the poem “The Gates,” addressing the political situation of imprisoned poet Kim Chi-Ha, she wrote, “How shall we free him? / How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run? / All those beginning to run?” Rukeyser writes from a position of hope, community, optimism, and faith in humanity. She concluded The Life of Poetry with the following assertion, “As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive” (214). From a position of cynicism, these lines would be trivialized and dismissed as naive. However, for readers who can entertain Rukeyser's sensibility, such lines throughout her writing are consistent with her courage and perseverance in trying to use poetry—the one kind of knowledge, she wrote in The Life of Poetry, that we are taught early not to use.

  The resistance Rukeyser's poetry sometimes faced suggests that it touched deep nerves about what poetry and poets should be. For those who saw themselves as the guardians of the culture of poetry, the keepers of the gate, Rukeyser challenged notions of poetic propriety. In keeping with her integrated politicalpoetic aesthetic, Rukeyser's poems were accepted for publication in a wide array of journals, from left-wing publications such as New Masses, Partisan Review, and The Nation, to the more mainstream Poetry and Harper's. With fellow students Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Eleanor Clark, Rukeyser founded an alternative literary magazine at Vassar, Con Spirito; at roughly the same period, she also began writing for the Student Review, a publication “sponsored by the National Student League, ‘the militant vanguard of student revolt against war and reaction’” (Shulman 34). She published frequently in Twice-a-Year: a Journal of Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties and was for a time associate editor of Decision, a journal dedicated to exploring a “new humanism.” She was regularly reviewed in an equally broad array of publications, from Anvil and Common Sense to the New Yorker, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, and the Yale Review. Her work was taken seriously but not always praised. As Louise Kertesz points out, Rukeyser was accused early on of having “romantic, bourgeois” concerns and, at the same time, “was hailed as an asset to the Communists” (58). She was, at times, accused of being obscure, erratic, complicated, too political, and for not reaching the heights of female lyricism. But as Kate Daniels has persuasively argued: “Rukeyser's politics and poetic imagination,…were far more complicated—and stubbornly individualistic—than any of her early critics realized. Her disinclination to conform to the dictates of any aesthetic or political program was not, as a number of later critics were to suggest, a carelessness or lack of intellectual rigor on her part. Throughout her life, she found herself astonished at the inability of most literary critics to consider work that departed from the conventions of a particular school or norm, and in her own critical writings she demonstrated her ability to transcend the contemporary and topical contexts of a work in favor of what she considered its more enduring artistic qualities” (“Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics” 250). Similarly, Richard Flynn states, “Rukeyser is far too risky and unusual a poet to fit neatly into our various master narratives of literary history; neither the conservative (and now largely discredited) New Critical version of modernism, nor a ‘revisionist mythmaking’ too narrowly based on identity politics has treated her work with any seriousness when they have treated it at all” (265).

  On the other side of resistance, enormous admiration endures from critics, fellow poets, and students. Rukeyser has been called “an American genius,” and “our twentieth-century Whitman.” Kenneth Rexroth, leading poet of the San Francisco Renaissance, called her “the best poet of her exact generation” and Anne Sexton dubbed her “the mother of us all.” Her words in “The Poem as Mask”—“No more masks! No more mythologies!—inspired the titles for two of the first anthologies of women's poetry in the 1970s—Florence Howe and Ellen Bass's No More Masks! and Louise Bernikow's The World Split Open. However, until recently, Rukeyser was virtually unacknowledged as a primary influence on writers who emerged during the last thirty years of the twentieth century in response to the women's movement. Grace Paley once recounted her excitement, while still a young girl, at finding Rukeyser's picture in a 1943 poetry anthology. She thought, “Well, there it is, a girl and a poet, it's a possibility at least—” (McEwen 1). Paley was born in 1922, a near contemporary of Rukeyser's; her remark reflects the anomaly of Rukeyser as an accomplished woman poet in what was then, unlike today, a tremendously male-dominated field. In her preface to the 1978 Collected Poems (reprinted in the annotations to this volume), reflecting on her love for reading other writers' collected poems, Rukeyser commented, “There were two differences then from today's books: the poets were all dead, and all were men.” In some ways, it is difficult for readers today to appreciate the singularity of Rukeyser's accomplishments as a woman poet precisely because poetry now is enriched with great diversity, gendered and otherwise. It is important to remember that Rukeyser was born before women could vote in this country, and she was almost seventy years old when she died in 1980. Yet she broke silence in her poems about sex, lesbian erotics, motherhood, daughterhood, breastfeeding, menstruation, depression, and other experiences common among women that had rarely, if ever, been treated as suitable content for an American poet (see, among many others, “Effort at Speech,” “Four in a Family,” “Night Feeding,” “Orgy,” “Nine Poems,” “More of a Corpse than a Woman,” “The Question,” “The Power of Suicide,” “Looking at Each Other,” and “For My Son”).

  Rukeyser lived her life, always writing and making her own, often unconventional, choices along the way. At sixteen, fascinated by the science and technology of aviation and wishing she could learn to fly, she enrolled in the Roosevelt School of Air to learn about flight mechanics. The title of Theory of Flight reflects this, and metaphors from flight to describe the human capacity to expand and connect, to find a “meeting-place” as the airplane does between air and earth, are prominent in her poems. In 1947 she became pregnant by a man who was never after involved in her or her child's life. When told that she could not both write and raise a child, that she had to choose between, she insisted on doing both (see “Nine Poems”). Not supported by her parents, she raised her son alone. She taught at the California Labor School in
the early 1940s; in the 1950s and 1960s she taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where she invited the custodians to study along with the students. In that period she also worked and wrote closely with the well-known Jungian analyst Frances Wickes. She taught children in Harlem and adults in an array of schools, YWHA night programs, and community workshops. She wrote filmscripts and plays and designed exhibit plans for the San Francisco Exploratorium. She read widely among her contemporaries, irrespective of their national origins. Thus, she was well prepared to work closely with Octavio Paz on the first English translations of his poetry, and also to translate French, Vietnamese, Swedish, Spanish, Arabic, and German poets. In 1972, accompanied by Denise Levertov and Jane Hart, she traveled to downtown Hanoi, Vietnam, to protest the U.S. bombing. She was arrested for protesting on behalf of Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. In 1978, only two years before her death, she planned to address a special session of the Modern Language Association on the topic “Lesbians and Literature,” an address that would have made public her relationship with Monica McCall, her agent, but ultimately she could not attend due to illness.

  She crossed boundaries at the life-sustaining intersections of all the various fields of human endeavor—science, history, modern dance, jazz, psychoanalysis, theater—and the connections among them enter her poetry. She searched everywhere for sources to feed her poetry and her own spirit. But truly remarkable—and indeed, postmodern before there was any such critical emphasis—is the way she dug deeply for the “buried voices” of this country's diverse history: Native American chants, mining songs, strike songs, Eskimo songs, African American spirituals, the songs of Chinese workmen building the American railway, the calypsos and ballads that made their way to jukeboxes and the roots of the American southern blues tradition. She wrote, “The continent in its voices is full of song; it is not to be heard easily, it must be listened for; among its shapes and weathers, the country is singing, among the lives of its people, its industries, its wild flamboyant venture, its waste, its buried search” (Life of Poetry 90). The relationship between poetry and the academy as it has evolved today would have been disconcerting to Rukeyser because of what is inevitably unheard and undiscovered in the process. A reading of her poem “The Backside of the Academy” makes clear her preference for the color and uncontained street life outside of the American Academy of Arts and Letters “Five brick panels, three small windows, six lions' heads with rings in their mouths, five pairs of closed bronze doors—.”

  The epigraph opening this introduction quotes from William Rose Benet's review of Rukeyser's first book, Theory of Flight: “When you hold this book in your hand you hold a living thing.” If it was true of Rukeyser's first book, it most certainly can be said of these Collected Poems. Moving through the decades of Rukeyser's poems, we find the details of her life set in relation to individuals, cities, nations, cultures, wars—a vast list including John Brown, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Allies Advance, Tom Mooney, Ann Burlak, Gauley Bridge, Bunk Johnson, Chiapas, Hallie Flanagan, Willard Gibbs, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Vietnam War, and the Outer Banks. It is clear that Rukeyser viewed her poems as living, and she wanted them to go on living. She stated as much and more than once, echoing Walt Whitman's desire for his voice to reach beyond his lifetime: “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles…I stop somewhere waiting for you” (“Song of Myself,” section 52). In “Then,” from her final volume The Gates (1976), Rukeyser writes: “When I am dead, even then / I am still listening to you. / I will still be making poems for you.” And from 1964, handwritten on a piece of paper in Rukeyser's archives, is a piece she labeled “Dedication,” written after the first of a series of strokes she suffered:

  My songs are for you

  And my silences.

  We are one life.

  We are many songs.

  My songs are for you.

  Lovers, the unborn—

  For you, stranger

  Now sing your songs.

  Here, in two brief stanzas, we see Rukeyser's vision: her constant faith in the “we” of her readership, her awareness of the simultaneous singularity and multiplicity of human experience, and her hope for the future—strangers, lovers, and children alike. Rukeyser never faltered in her effort to speak directly to her readers, to make contact across silence and through speech, and to trust in poetry. The poems are here. She is waiting.

  Theory of Flight

  1935

  1 Poem Out of Childhood

  POEM OUT OF CHILDHOOD

  1

  Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry :

  Not Angles, angels : and the magnificent past

  shot deep illuminations into high-school.

  I opened the door into the concert-hall

  and a rush of triumphant violins answered me

  while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face

  intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident

  the girl's brother was killed, but her father had just died :

  she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,

  dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and

  I went into the corridor for a drink of water.

  These bandages of image wrap my head

  when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.

  We sat on the steps of the unrented house

  raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold,

  creating again how they removed his glasses

  and philosophically slit his throat.

  They who manipulated and misused our youth,

  smearing those centuries upon our hands,

  trapping us in a welter of dead names,

  snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth….

  We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil

  the bough's gold shade advancing forever with us,

  entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;

  Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,

  weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing

  the temples' ardent fruit :

  Not Sappho, Sacco.

  Rebellion pioneered among our lives,

  viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,

  innumerable seas.

  2

  In adolescence I knew travellers

  speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,

  bearing the unequivocal sunny word.

  Prinzip's year bore us : see us turning at breast

  quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo

  after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.

  How could they know what sinister knowledge finds

  its way among our brains' wet palpitance,

  what words would nudge and giggle at our spine,

  what murders dance?

  These horrors have approached the growing child;

  now that the factory is sealed-up brick

  the kids throw stones, smashing the windows,

  membranes of uselessness in desolation.

  We grew older quickly, watching the father shave

  and the splatter of lather hardening on the glass,

  playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis,

  being victimized by fataller sly things.

  “Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “what will you be?”

  “Maybe : something : like : Joan : of : Arc….”

  Allies Advance, we see,

  Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums.

  Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,

  the leafy years all somber with foreign war.

  How could we know what exposed guts resembled?

  A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins

  from Asia to Far Rockaway spiralling

  among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.

  Disturbed by war we pedalled bicycles

  breakneck down the decline, until the treads

  conquered our speed and pulled our fe
et behind them,

  and pulled our heads.

  We never knew the war, standing so small

  looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching

  the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;

  see Galahad unaided by puberty.

  Ratat a drum upon the armistice,

  Kodak As You Go : photo : they danced late,

  and we were a generation of grim children

  leaning over the bedroom sills, watching

  the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,

  laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night

  wide out from cover.

  The child's curls blow in a forgotten wind,

  immortal ivy trembles on the wall:

  the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall

  shadows remember time cannot rescind.

  3

  Organize the full results of that rich past

  open the windows : potent catalyst,

  harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles

  crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,

  inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.

  Dialectically our youth unfolds :

  the pale child walking to the river, passional

  in ignorance in loneliness demanding

  its habitation for the leaping dream, kissing

  quick air, the vibrations of transient light,

  not knowing substance or reserve, walking