Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Contributing Editors:
Cary Nelson and Janet Kaufman

Classroom Issues and Strategies

The earliest poem here, taken from Rukeyser's second book, dates from 1938; the most recent poems, taken from her last book, date from 1976. These poems thus range across forty years of a career and forty years of American culture and American history. Though there are very strong continuities in Rukeyser's work, it would be a mistake to imagine that all these poems were written by a single consciousness in a single historical moment. Their diverse forms and rhetorical styles represent the work of a poet who sustained her core beliefs and commitments while responding to changing historical, aesthetic, and cultural opportunities and pressures. She wrote long sequence poems, documentary poems, short lyrics, and elegies. Of all the responses one might make to this selection, the simplest one--and the one most to be hoped for-- is the decision to read more widely in her work. That is, in a way, almost necessitated by this particular selection, since two of the poems, "Absalom," and " Les Tendresses Bestiales," are taken from longer poem sequences. Certainly the instructor should read those sequences in their entirety and give the class some sense of each poem's context. The sequences, "The Book of the Dead" and "Ajanta," are available in both her Collected Poems (1979) and the Selected Poems (1992). Readers should be warned that her earlier Selected Poems is not a very successful representation of her work.

Since a number of these poems combine states of consciousness and physical sensation, it is important for students not only to analyze them rhetorically but also to place themselves empathetically inside the poems and read them phenomenologically. What does it feel like to be the mother in "Absalom" who has lost her family to industrial exploitation? What does it feel like to speak in the two very different voices Rukeyser gives her? How can one elaborate on the closing lines of "Martin Luther King, Malcolm X": "bleeding of my right hand/my black voice bleeding." What is the effect of identifying with the visionary and erotic ecstasy of "Poem White Page White Page Poem"? These poems are at once gifts to the reader and demands made of us. In "Then," a poem published shortly before her death, Rukeyser wrote, "When I am dead, even then,/I will still love you, I will wait in these poems."

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues

Some of Rukeyser's major concerns are summarized in the headnote to the poems themselves. Her biography, however, is not, so we sketch it briefly here: Rukeyser was the elder child of upwardly mobile, Jewish, American-born parents. In 1944, at the very moment when the outlines of the Holocaust were becoming known, she opened the seventh poem in her sequence "Letter to the Front" with the startling lines, "To be a Jew in the twentieth century/Is to be offered a gift." Her father was a partner in a sand-and-gravel company in New York. Seeing the concrete poured for sidewalks and skyscrapers made her feel part of the city; later, somewhat like Hart Crane, she would celebrate technology. From the Ethical Cultural and Fieldston Schools in New York, she went on to study at Vassar and Columbia until her father's supposed bankruptcy prevented her from continuing. Her mother had expected her to marry and write poetry only as an avocation. Instead, Rukeyser made poetry the focus of her life, traveled, lived in New York and California, and bore and raised a son as a single mother.

Her career as an activist began when she traveled to Alabama to cover the trial of the Scottsboro boys and was arrested. In 1972 she went to Vietnam with Denise Levertov on an unofficial writers' peace mission. She taught at the California Labor School in the mid-forties and from the mid-fifties through the sixties at Sarah Lawrence. She taught children in Harlem and led writing classes for women in the seventies. Especially in her later years Rukeyser broke taboos about female sexuality. In poems like "Waiting for Icarus" and "Myth" she rewrote classical myths from a woman's perspective. Here in "Rite" she dramatizes the culture's investments in gender and in "The Poem as Mask" overturns gender dichotomy by treating it as a constructed myth. In a culture that does not recognize the sexuality of old age, Rukeyser celebrated it. She never labeled her sexuality, but in poetry and letters she celebrated her intimate relations with both women and men.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

"Absalom" is the ninth of twenty poems in Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" in her 1938 book U.S. 1. A number of the poems are given over to the perspective of individual figures in the Gauley Tunnel tragedy. Stylistically, the poem is unusual for shifting from journalistic reportage to interior monologue to lyrical description. It mixes public rhetoric and private speech, judges America's history and its contemporary institutions, and interrogates natural and industrial power. It is one of the most important modern poems in mixed forms and one of the major achievements of her career.

" Les Tendresses Bestiales " is the third of five poems in Rukeyser's "Ajanta" sequence in her 1944 book Beast in View. The Ajanta caves in India are a series of twenty-nine Buddhist cave-temples and monasteries cut into cliffs in the north, near Ajanta, Maharashtra. Built over several centuries beginning in the second century b.c., they were abandoned in the seventh century and rediscovered in 1819. Most of the cave walls have large-scale tempura murals depicting the lives of the Buddha, while the ceilings are decorated with flowers and animals. The compositions are rhythmic, naturalistic, and generally drawn with soft, curving lines. Rukeyser had not see the caves themselves, basing her descriptions, as in " Les Tendresses Bestiales," on a large portfolio of reproductions. In her sequence the caves are not only a space for collective narrative representation but also a space of the body and of the self.

Questions for Reading and Discussion/ Approaches to Writing

As with all socially conscious and progressive poetry read within a discipline that has doubts about its viability, it is important to raise both general intellectual issues and questions that lead students to read closely. Here are a few examples:

1. Compare and contrast how several white poets and several black poets deal with issues of race--perhaps Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Kay Boyle, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Bennett, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes.

2. Rukeyser's "Absalom" is a 1930s poem that would have been read at the time as part of the proletarian literature movement. Compare this with the 1930s poems in " Modern Period."

3. Read about the classical myths behind "The Minotaur" and "The Poem as Mask: Orpheus" and discuss how Rukeyser adapts and transforms them.

4. What model of political action is put forward in "How We Did It"? What does the poem say about means and ends?

5. "Rite" manages with its economical phrasing to both describe a rite and enact one. Are they different?