Andrena Zawinski, Associate Editor

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
--Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser was born and died in New York City where she attended Vassar and Columbia. She taught at Vassar and Columbia as well as at the California Labor School and Sarah Lawrence. She was not locked into any particular form, but instead experimented with language from the lyrical to the narrative. Her commitment to humanitarian concerns reflects itself in her poetry considered by many as visionary. 

May Swenson, in praise of what Rukeyser dared to write, said, “ Her vision is never small, seldom introverted. Her consciousness of others around her, of being but one member...of humanity surging out of the past, filling the present, groping passionately toward the future, is a generating force in her work.” She remains a controversial poet, one who wrote about broad and diverse subjects including aviation, biology, psychology, religion, anthropology, war, the environment and those that issues that continue to tug at fundamental moral fibers of the times like women's rights, the female body, motherhood, lesbianism, anti-Semitism. William Carlos Williams said of her, “ Rukeyser sounds like Carrie Nation with a political hatchet on a Cook’s tour.” 

Rukeyser saw everyday living as part and parcel to her poetry. Rukeyser was a mentor of Alice Walker, and among the many women who claimed Rukeyser’s influence upon their work was Anne Sexton, who wrote to her saying, “I just want to tell you again, beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone, how I cherish your words...Your poems move like dreams and sink into my unconscious to reappear at night. “ 

Muriel Rukeyser was a prestigious Yale Younger Poet, President of P. E. N. American Center, won the Copernicus, Shelley Memorial, and Guggenheim Awards; yet many felt she never received in her lifetime the recognition she deserved. Kenneth Rexroth believed no American Poet as much as Rukeyser was worthy of a Nobel Prize. 

Rukeyser has had over fifteen volumes of poetry published and wrote plays, children's literature, translations, biographies and essays as well. For more 
information see “The Life of Poetry,” by Muriel Rukeyser with a new introduction 
by Jane Cooper from Paris Press, "The Muriel Rukeyser Reader" from W. W. 
Norton, “Out of Silence” from TriQuarterly Books.

METAPHOR TO ACTION

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform, 
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, 
whether it is the crash of lips on lips 
after absence and wanting: we must close 
the circuits of ideas, now generate, 
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose. 
Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky, 
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame, 
here is the man night-walking who derives 
tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting; 
here we require the proof in solidarity, 
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating. 
And behind us in time are the men who second us 
as we continue. And near us is our love: 
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close 
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity. 
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding, 
charging with heat its softness in a symbol 
to weld and prepare for action our minds' intensity.

MURIEL RUKEYSER:

The fear of poetry is the
fear: mystery and fury of a midnight street
of windows whose low voluptuous voice
issues, and after that there is not peace.

The round waiting moment in the 
theater: curtain rises, dies into the ceiling
and here is played the scene with the mother
bandaging a revealed son's head. The bandage is torn off.
Curtain goes down. And here is the moment of proof.

That climax when the brain acknowledges the world,
all values extended into the blood awake.
Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did,
building his bird to extend through soaring air,
as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity
through time extended. And the climax strikes.

Love touches so, that months after the look of
blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart
is translated into the pure cry of birds
following air-cries, or poems, the new scene.
Moment of proof. That strikes long after act.

They fear it. They turn away, hand up, palm out
fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem.
The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's shot.
The prolonged love after the look is dead,
the yellow joy after the song of the sun.

ST. ROACH  
from The Gates, McGraw-Hill, 1976

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, 
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth, 
they showed me by every action to despise your kind; 
for that I saw my people making war on you, 
I could not tell you apart, one from another, 
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you, 
for that all the people I knew met you by 
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling 
   water on you, they flushed you down, 
for that I could not tell one from another 
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender. 
   Not like me. 
For that I did not know your poems 
And that I do not know any of your sayings 
And that I cannot speak or read your language 
And that I do not sing your songs 
And that I do not teach our children 
          to eat your food 
          or know your poems 
          or sing your songs 
But that we say you are filthing our food 
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time. 
You were lighter than the others in color, that was 
     neither good nor bad. 
I was really looking for the first time. 
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time. 
You were startled, you ran, you fled away 
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. 
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you. 

POETRY by Rukeyser:
A Turning Wind, 1939 
The Soul and Body of John Brown, 1940 
Wake Island, 1942 
Beast in View, 1944 
The Children's Orchard, 1947 
The Green Wave, 1948 
Orpheus, 1949
Elegies, 1949 
Body of Waking, 1958 
Waterlily Fire: Poems 1932-1962, 1962 
The Outer Banks, 1967 
The Speed of Darkness, 1968 
29 Poems, 1970 
Breaking Open, 1973 
The Gates, 1976 
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, 1978 
Out of Silence: Selected Poems, 1992