{"id":125969,"date":"2018-05-30T11:00:20","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T15:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125969"},"modified":"2018-05-30T12:44:58","modified_gmt":"2018-05-30T16:44:58","slug":"muriel-rukeyser-mother-of-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/30\/muriel-rukeyser-mother-of-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Muriel Rukeyser, Mother of Everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory. Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s \u201cPoem<\/a>,\u201d originally published in The Speed of Darkness <\/em>fifty years ago this month, is in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external:<\/p>\n

I lived in the first century of world wars.
\nMost mornings I would be more or less insane,
\nThe newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
\nThe news would pour out of various devices
\nInterrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since 2016, \u201cPoem\u201d has become a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment, an equivocal fate for any artifact but one Rukeyser would not likely have chafed against. Throughout her career, she remained sensitized to a political and cultural landscape that was changing rapidly. When The Speed of Darkness <\/em>appeared in 1968, that landscape was more crowded than ever and more vividly perceived: the civil rights movement had given way to Black Power, the women\u2019s and gay liberation movements were coalescing, the Cold War raged on, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, despite being the most thoroughly reported and divisive military conflict since the Civil War one hundred years before it. The speaker of \u201cPoem\u201d can\u2019t opt out of this deluge, as the vitality of her art depends on its responsiveness to the world it enters. But neither can art concede to that world\u2019s terms: \u201cSlowly I would get to pen and paper, \/ Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.\u201d Rukeyser struggles, here and elsewhere, to write toward the poem\u2019s divergent \u201cunseen\u201d: an anticipated future audience of poetry and that other living audience already in thrall to newspapers, TV, and the various devices through which the world tries to reach us.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Both this highly mediated landscape and the writer\u2019s difficulty apprehending it seem essential to the poem\u2019s renewed appeal. Online, it\u2019s shared as either earnest consolation (\u201cShe wrote this for us, for days like this,\u201d a bookstore tweeted on election night) or inspiration (\u201cIt is time to reach beyond ourselves, as she suggests here,\u201d a poet encouraged the following day), but the poem\u2019s speaker is less certain of her success than these invocations imply. The poem\u2019s circulation on Twitter restages its fundamental challenge: how to fish this datum from the stream of a feed and be fully present with it, reading it deeply, without forgetting the feed that brought it to your screen.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Interest in Rukeyser\u2019s early work has been resuscitated in recent years by a handful of new publications. Her autobiographical novel,\u00a0Savage Coast<\/em>, begun in 1936 after Rukeyser returned from a reporting trip to Europe where she\u2019d witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War, was published by the Feminist Press for the first time in 2013; that same year, New Directions reissued Elegies, <\/em>a series developed across three collections and first assembled for republication in 1949. This past February, West Virginia University Press published a new edition of the poem cycle The Book of the Dead<\/em>, originally included in her 1938 volume U.S. 1 <\/em>and composed from testimony by the victims of the Hawk\u2019s Nest Tunnel disaster in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, which caused the deaths of hundreds of workers, most of them black and destitute. These new editions include extensive introductory essays describing Rukeyser\u2019s unique melding of documentary realism with subjective lyricism, a sensibility that made her an important figure for both U.S. Modernism and the literary Left. In the preface to her first Collected Poems <\/em>(1978), Rukeyser characterizes this approach as \u201ctwo kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep.\u201d<\/p>\n

Written thirty years after those early innovations, The Speed of Darkness <\/em>at once extends this project and transforms it. Although it contains few poems we might call \u201cdocumentary,\u201d throughout the volume, Rukeyser strives to represent the obligations and demands of a dense public world from the private vantage of intimate experience. The wars with which \u201cPoem\u201d opens are literal and unprecedented in scale\u2014World Wars I and II, the Spanish Civil War, and U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam each preoccupied Rukeyser in turn. Over the course of the poem, however, the project of self-realization takes its place alongside \u201cthese wars,\u201d promising a more peaceful way of living. In her final lines, the speaker joins an anonymous community of others imagining new values, avowing, \u201cWe would try by any means \/ To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, \/ To let go the means, to wake.\u201d The poet\u2019s task is to link conflicts both interpersonal and international without equating them. Speed <\/em>is obsessed with the challenge of situating \u201cthe parts of life in which we dive deep\u201d among what another poem calls \u201cthe constellations of all things,\u201d a horizon not transcendent but political.<\/p>\n

The politicization of intimate experience has been one of the most valuable and widely acknowledged legacies of the U.S. women\u2019s movement of the sixties and seventies. (Consider the vast consequences of the personal is political.<\/em>) Rukeyser\u2019s role in that mobilization is underappreciated but easily verified. Poems from The Speed of Darkness <\/em>lent titles to two popular anthologies of women\u2019s poetry\u2014Florence Howe and Ellen Bass\u2019s No More Masks! <\/em>(1973) and Louise Bernikow\u2019s The World Split Open <\/em>(1974)\u2014as well as Ruth Rosen\u2019s more recent history The World Split Open: How the Modern Women\u2019s Movement Changed America <\/em>(2000). Alice Walker found a mentor in Rukeyser, Sharon Olds had a formative experience in her New York workshops, and Anne Sexton<\/a> famously called her \u201cMuriel, mother of everyone.\u201d Adrienne Rich, who became acquainted with Rukeyser at activist readings in the sixties and seventies, writes in her introduction to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader,<\/em> \u201cGradually I found her to be the poet I most needed in the struggle to make my poems and live my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clear evidence of her contributions to the literature of second-wave feminism can be found in her writing itself. Rukeyser\u2019s voice is different in significant ways from that era\u2019s younger poets\u2014as were those poets\u2019 voices different, of course, from one another\u2014but there are strong ideological affinities among them. Anticipating much feminist art of the decade to follow, The Speed of Darkness<\/em> is confidently erotic, a boldness evident throughout Rukeyser\u2019s career; she wrote and spoke frankly about sexuality and single motherhood before the emergence of independent feminist presses, journals, and readings to shelter writing on such topics. Although \u201cexperience\u201d was a polemically valued category for Rukeyser, Speed <\/em>rarely offers sustained accounts of specific experiences delivered from a stable perspective. Unlike, say, Sexton\u2019s early asylum poems, Speed<\/em>\u2019s first-person lyrics tend toward the anecdotal rather than the confessional, often lingering in small moments of conscious reflection or encounters unfolding in real time. Unlike the poems of June Jordan, Rukeyser\u2019s rarely issue from a credible conversational voice, though she was interested in the enlivening potential of idiomatic speech. And unlike Olga Broumas, Audre Lorde, and other feminist revisionists, Speed <\/em>is deeply ambivalent about myth: the volume\u2019s opening poem announces, \u201cNo more masks! No more mythologies!\u201d Her nimble pivoting between symbolic and concrete registers reflects an effort to divorce figurative language from patriarchal euphemism. Rukeyser was drawn to the power of metaphor but suspicious of its potential to eclipse the embodied reality of women\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

In praising Rukeyser as a feminist forebear, one risks obscuring the reciprocity that underwrote so much of her poetry and politics. The last poem published during her lifetime, 1979\u2019s \u201cAn Unborn Poet,\u201d is dedicated to Alice Walker; it describes how Rukeyser cherished her relationships with younger writers and the possibilities they represented for her own restless self-fashioning. \u201cIt\u2019s called \u2018An Unborn Poet,\u2019 and that\u2019s not Alice Walker, that\u2019s me,\u201d she joked before the poem\u2019s only public reading. In the poem proper, she gently affirms, \u201cAlice, we\u2019re handed down. \/ Alice, there is a road of long descent. \/ Cold and shivering and something of ascent.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There are always multiple forces at work in the upkeep or neglect of a writer\u2019s legacy. Selected editions of Rukeyser\u2019s poems exist, and a new Collected Poems <\/em>was released by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005, but (as far as I can tell) none of her original collections are currently in print as standalone volumes. Just as troubling is the fact that Rukeyser seems insufficiently attended to by the feminist institutional practices\u2014syllabi, memorial conferences, critical and creative response\u2014that have been so vital to the preservation or restoration of other women writers. Rukeyser\u2019s work ought to be preserved precisely because she\u2019s such an unwieldy candidate for feminist canonization. Bridging the old Left and the New, international and domestic politics, foremother and front-runner, her career poses profound challenges to the conventional schools and period divisions through which we narrate twentieth-century literary and political history.<\/p>\n

Despite much scholarship and memoir contesting its sufficiency, a familiar but skewed narrative endures of U.S. feminism in the sixties and seventies. In the most reductive versions of this history, middle-class white women launched the second wave by foregrounding and politicizing their own experiences; women of color are still often imagined to have wandered onstage a decade or two later to force race, class, and imperialism onto feminism\u2019s agenda. The critiques couched in this story are necessary and well-founded\u2014many early women\u2019s groups were overwhelmingly white, myopic in their analyses, and either indifferent or hostile to the concerns of nonwhite, working-class, queer, and trans women\u2014but their effects are self-reinforcing. Because this portrait of the sixties cannot accommodate either women of color engaged in gender politics or white women whose feminism was inextricably bound up in other struggles and scenes, second-wave feminism <\/em>continues to refer primarily to the single-issue politics of white women\u2019s groups.<\/p>\n

The Speed of Darkness<\/em> reintroduces us to a broader horizon of feminist thinking. Its poems reveal the second wave\u2019s politicization of sex and family to have been entangled, from the beginning, in the overwhelming and variable world beyond the home. Rukeyser\u2019s expansive rewriting of intimate experience might also yield new resources for navigating the compulsory publicity of our own private lives\u2014resources she refers to as \u201cthe gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time.\u201d The recently resurfaced \u201cPoem\u201d pushes us to reconcile \u201courselves with each other, \/ Ourselves with ourselves\u201d and casts writing as one such effort. Throughout Speed<\/em>, Rukeyser returns again and again to being among as an orientation to the world\u2019s heterogeneity. In one of my favorite poems, \u201cThe Overthrow of One O\u2019Clock at Night,\u201d being among starts to cohere into something like an ethics:<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 That\u2019s this moment,
\nwhen I lean on my elbows out the windowsill
\nand feel the city among its time-zones, among its seas,
\namong its late night news, the pouring in
\nof everything meeting, wars, dreams, winter night.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The speaker projects a deep rootedness even as she modulates between scales and perspectives: \u201cthe pouring in\u201d first brings young girls kept awake by love, followed by \u201cthe little children \/ half world over tonight\u201d being bombed by \u201cus\u201d and calling on \u201cus\u201d for help. The fullness of this vision is achieved not by retreating from but rather tuning in to immediate experience, a lucidity she describes elsewhere as being \u201cin the world \/ to change the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

We often lament our porosity to the world\u2019s data as a uniquely contemporary curse. Rukeyser imagines it instead as a capacity we might cultivate, no easier for having been attempted before by others like her, from whom we are lucky to learn, and by many more who will not be preserved or restored. So often in her poems, Rukeyser is both student and teacher. \u201cThere is no out there,<\/em>\u201d she instructs in one of Speed<\/em>\u2019s many self-revisions. \u201cAll is open. \/ Open water. Open I.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sam Huber is a graduate student in English and women\u2019s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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