Exile of Music
Naginski: Charles Naginski, also mentioned in “The Minotaur” (BV), was a classical composer with whom Rukeyser was friendly.
The Watchers
Carson and Reeves: The writer Carson McCullers and her husband, James Reeves McCullers, with whom Rukeyser was friends.
Born in December
Nancy Marshall: The daughter of George and Elizabeth Marshall, lifelong friends of Rukeyser's with whom she went to England in 1936.
Voices of Waking
Frances G. Wickes: A Jungian analyst with whom Rukeyser corresponded. See the opening annotation to BW.
[Untitled] (“In her splendor islanded)”
[Untitled] (“Like ivy the creeper with a thousand hands”)
These poems appear untitled both in BW and in Rukeyser's bilingual translation of Selected Poems of Octavio Paz (1963); in both books, these poems are titled by their first lines in the table of contents.
from Sun Stone
In BW, the following note appeared at the end of the poem: “‘Sun Stone’ is a poem whose 585 lines, of eleven syllables, stand for the 585 days of the cycle of Venus to that planet's conjunction with the sun, as the unit was used in the Aztec calendar.”
Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter
A contribution to Rukeyser's sequence of “Lives” poems (see the annotation to the “Lives” section of TW). Timothy Dexter (1743–1806) was a rags-to-riches character, an eccentric, prominent citizen of Newburyport, Massachusetts. He was supposedly given the title of “Lord” and adopted it as a proper name—not a title—as he mocked everything ruthlessly, including English snobbery. His booklet about his philosophy of the world, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, was devoid of punctuation and, when criticized for this, he added a page at the end of his second edition consisting only of punctuation, suggesting that he added enough that his readers could “peper and solt [the text] as they please” (see the end of section 5 of this poem). As Louise Kertesz writes, “in Dexter's belief that the world is one creature, Rukeyser met her own profound conviction” (264).
Fields Where We Slept
This poem first appeared in OL. Rukeyser added an endnote when she reprinted it in BO: “‘Fields Where We Slept’ has its scene in the South, where a manmade lake of the TVA system now lies over some of the land of the Scottsboro Trial actions, the revealing clash of 1933 underwater now. ‘Remember they say…’”
Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935–1962. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Rukeyser dedicated the book as follows: “My thanks to Marie de L. Welch and to M. L. Rosenthal—both poets, critics, friends—who helped me select the poems in this book.”
Rukeyser's original acknowledgments read:
For permission to publish the poems in the last part of this book, I wish to acknowledge the kindness of the following magazines: Poetry, The Vassar Review, American Judaism. These publishers have granted permission to print poems which first appeared in books: New Directions, Harper and Brothers, Simon and Schuster, Inc. This selection was made from the following books: Theory of Flight, U.S. 1., A Turning Wind, Beast in View, The Green Wave, Elegies, Selected Poems, One Life, Body of Waking. This volume is published by arrangement with New Directions.
The Speaking Tree
Richard Lannoy writes in The Speaking Tree: The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (1971):
When Alexander the Great reached ‘the furthest forests of India,’ the inhabitants led him, in the dead of night, to an oracular tree which could answer questions in the language of any man who addressed it. The trunk was made of snakes, animal heads sprouted from the boughs, and it bore fruit like beautiful women, who sang the praises of the Sun and Moon. According to Pseudo-Callisthenes, the tree warned Alexander of the futility of invading India with intent to obtain dominion over it.
Known as the Waqwaq Tree in Islamic tradition, it was often portrayed on Harappan seals four millennia ago as sprouting heads of a bovine unicorn, encircling a female divinity, or even growing from her body.
Robert Payne: A prolific literary scholar, translator, and chair of the translation committee of P.E.N. when Rukeyser was its president. Rukeyser came to know Payne (1911–1983) after he came to the United States in 1946 and became founding editor of Montevallo Review, to which Rukeyser was a contributor. He authored 110 books and his writings included novels, political studies, poetry, literary criticism, translations, operas, philosophy, travel writing, filmscripts, plays, journalism, and critically acclaimed biographies, among which is one about Alexander the Great.
Waterlily Fire
Rukeyser included the following endnote for “Waterlily Fire”:
The time of this poem is the period in New York City from April, 1958, when I witnessed the destruction of Monet's Waterlilies by fire at the Museum of Modern Art, to the present moment.
The two spans of time assumed are the history of Manhattan Island and my lifetime on the island. I was born in an apartment house that had as another of its tenants the notorious gangster Gyp the Blood. Nearby was Grant's Tomb and the grave of the Amiable Child. This child died very young when this part of New York was open country. The place with its memory of amiability has been protected among all the rest. My father, in the building business, made us part of the building, tearing down, and rebuilding of the city, with all that that implies. Part II is based on that time, when building still meant the throwing of red-hot rivets, and only partly the pouring of concrete of the later episodes.
Part IV deals with an actual television interview with Suzuki, the Zen teacher, in which he answered a question about a most important moment in the teachings of Buddha.
The long body of Part V is an idea from India of one's lifetime body as a ribbon of images, all our changes seen in process.
The “island of people” was the group who stayed out in the open in City Hall Park in April of 1961, while the rest of the city took shelter at the warning sound of the sirens. The protest against this nuclear-war practice drill was, in essence, a protest against war itself and an attempt to ask for some other way to deal with the emotions that make people make war.
Before the Museum of Modern Art was built, I worked for a while in the house that then occupied that place. On the day of the fire, I arrived to see it as a place in the air. I was coming to keep an appointment with my friend the Curator of the Museum's Film Library, Richard Griffith, to whom this poem is dedicated.
For a contemporary and appreciative review of the poem, see Adkins, “The Esthetics of Science: Muriel Rukeyser's ‘Waterlily Fire.’”
The Speed of Darkness. New York: Random House, 1968.
Rukeyser's original acknowledgments read:
The author wishes to thank the editors and publishers of the following magazines, in which some of these poems first appeared: Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Observer (London), Atlantic Monthly, Ikon, Liberation, Ladies' Home Journal, Saturday Review, American Judaism, Poetry (Chicago), New Directions, Annual, The New Yorker, Macmillan, Unicorn Press, Sarah Lawrence Journal, Poets for Peace, War Resisters Calendar, Chelsea, Ramparts, Evergreen Review. The poem “Endless” appeared originally in The New Yorker. The poems “The Outer Banks” and “Delta Poems” appeared originally in Poetry.
“Delta Poems” was first read at Angry Arts Week; “Käthe Kollwitz” was first read at Syracuse University; “The Speed of Darkness” was first read at M.I.T.
The author wishes to thank the National Council on the Arts for a grant during the time of which many of these poems were written.
The Poem as Mask
Orpheus
The poem's opening—“When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness…,”—refers to Rukeyser's long poem Orpheus, written and published in chapbook form in 1949 (included in this volume as a separate section), and then included in the 1951 SP. As Lorrie Goldensohn argues, this poem became a feminist manifesto and one of its lines, “No more masks!” became the title of an enduring anthology of Amer
ican women's poetry compiled by Florence Howe and first published in 1973.
the rescued child: Rukeyser's son was born by caesarean section September 25, 1947, after medical personnel determined he was presenting in the breech position. More than one friend had urged Rukeyser to abort the baby or place him for adoption, both unacceptable choices to her. Rukeyser had a long and difficult labor and was asked, more than once, if only one of the two (mother and child) could be saved, which would it be. She answered “the baby.”
Junk-Heap at Murano
Joby West: The daughter of Marie de L. Welch West. Joby saw “the glass” on a visit to Venice.
Clues
Indian Baptiste saying: A possible clue to this reference can be found in the third stanza of the manuscript notes (SD, ms file, LCI):
There is a people of Indians on a river
on the north Pacific that do this:
Baptiste Ironstone told me: With the passing
Of the old people, all knowledge of painting
Will disappear. Red signifies “good.” It also expresses
Life, existence, blood, heat, fire, day. Some said
It also meant the earth. And self, friendship, success.
Black is opposite to red: evil, death, cold, darkness, night.
Also “person the opposite of self, enemy antagonism, bad luck.”
Yellow is also earth, and what comes from it, and…dawn.
Green is seldom used; for rainbow. Blue is sky. White is spirit
And the spirit world, ghost, skeleton, dead people, sickness, bones.
Double Dialogue:
Homage to Robert Frost
Frost's son, Carol, committed suicide in October 1940.
The Six Canons
after Binyon: Lawrence Binyon (1869–1943), British poet and Asian art authority who, among many other writings, translated the late fifth-century Taoist painter Hsieh-Ho's “Six Canons of Chinese Painting.” Rukeyser's “Six Canons,” as expressed in the poem, do not restate the six canons but can be read as a metaphysical expression of the principles of life and art she extrapolated from them.
Cries from Chiapas
Rukeyser traveled in Mexico in 1939 and likely visited Chiapas, where she would have become familiar with the conflict and anticlerical purges there.
Poem
For a discussion of this poem addressing its place within twentieth-century American poetry and, in particular, the nuclear arms buildup, see True's essay “The Authentic Voice” and his book An Energy Field More Intense Than War.
The Seeming
Helen Lynd: A friend and colleague from Rukeyser's teaching days at Sarah Lawrence. Lynd was a sociologist best known for the series Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929), which she and Robert Lynd coauthored.
Song from Puck Fair
Dating back to 200 BCE, Puck Fair is considered Ireland's oldest festival. In addition to this poem, Rukeyser wrote a novel based on Puck Fair, The Orgy.
Segre Song
Otto Boch, the German athlete whom Rukeyser met in 1936, joined the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War and died in 1938, in a protracted struggle between the Republicans and Fascist forces on the banks of the Segre River. See the annotation to “The Book of the Dead” (US1).
Bunk Johnson Blowing
William Gary “Bunk” Johnson (1879–1949), legendary New Orleans trumpet player, re-“discovered” by musicologist Alan Lomax while conducting folklore research for the WPA in the mid-1930s. Johnson had given up his playing when he lost his teeth, and when Lomax and other now-established jazz musicians encouraged him to come to New York, he said he couldn't play. They raised the money to buy him a set of dentures and brought him north, where he became quite popular, playing with many of the other legendary jazz musicians of his time including Leadbelly and Louis Armstrong.
Cannibal Bratuscha
In 1900, Franz Bratuscha was sentenced to death for murdering and cannibalizing his twelve-year old daughter; his wife, convicted as an accessory, was sentenced to a three-year prison term. The judgments and sentences were based on the Bratuschas' own false confessions, and the convictions were overturned in 1903 after their daughter turned up alive.
The Blue Flower
Frances G. Wickes: a leading Jungian analyst in the United States with whom Rukeyser exchanged analyses. See the opening annotation to BW.
Word of Mouth
The poem first appeared with this note: “The country is the Catalan border of France and Spain. The two times are July, 1936, the beginning of the war, and the time of my return to the border in 1963.”
1 The Return
Sardana music: very popular style of Catalonian folk music and dance.
2 Word of Mouth
Amor, pena, desig, somni, dolor: An endnote to this section of the poem read: “The line is from a Catalan poem in Cantilena by Joseph Sebastien Pons. Love, agony, desire, dream, suffering.”
The Backside of the Academy
The “Academy” is the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City.
ART REMAINS THE ONE WAY…: from Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868), L.842.
WE ARE YOUNG AND WE ARE FRIENDS OF TIME: from Edward Arlington Robinson's poem “Captain Craig” (1902).
CONSCIOUS UTTERANCE OF THOUGHT BY SPEECH…: from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Society and Solitude” (1870).
WITHOUT VISION THE PEO: “Without vision the people perish,” from Proverbs 29:18.
IVE BY BREAD ALONE: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” from Matthew 4:4.
Mountain : One from Bryant
The poem carried this endnote: “This is a poem of William Cullen Bryant's that is run backward (“What?” said Denise Levertov. “You mean ‘Foul Water’ instead of ‘Waterfowl’?” “Exactly,” I said.) The poem is “Monument Mountain,” out of which I took key words and phrases and ran the film backward.”
Rukeyser was fascinated by the relationship between film and poetry and began writing about it in the 1930s. Discussing film in LP, she wrote: “The selection and ordering are a work of preparation and equilibrium of the breaking of the balance and the further growth. The single image, which arrives with its own speed, takes its place in a sequence which reinforces that image” (143). Rukeyser studied with the famous film editor Helen van Dongen in the 1930s and went on to work herself as a film editor.
The Outer Banks
The poem carried this note:
This country, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is a strong country of imagination: Raleigh's first settlements, in which Thomas Hariot the scientist served a year in the New World, were here; the Wright Brothers flew from here; Hart Crane's “Hatteras” is set among these sand-bars, these waters. Several journeys here, the last one for the sake of the traces of Thomas Hariot (toward a biography I am writing) led me to this poem. The Tiger, in the last part of the poem, is one of the ships sent out by Raleigh. The quotations are from Selma, Alabama, in 1965. The truncated wing is a monument to the Wright Brothers. The spiral lighthouse is Hatteras light.
Rukeyser first published this poem in Poetry (Sept. 1965) and then as a chapbook by the Unicorn Press, 1967. She added the footnote when she included the poem in SD. The biography of Thomas Hariot referred to in the note was published in 1971.
5
“Book of Changes”: A reference to the ancient Chinese Book of Changes or the I Ching, assumed to be by the legendary Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi (2953–2838 BCE) and originating from a prehistoric divination technique. An I Ching is “cast” or performed by making a hexagram with six solid or broken lines.
4 Lives
This section of the book was first published with this note: “These two ‘Lives’ are part of a sequence. Akiba is the Jewish shepherd-scholar of the first and second century, identified with the Song of Songs and with the insurrection against Hadrian's Rome, led in A.D. 132 by Bar Cochba (Son of the Star). After this lightning war, Jerusalem captured, the Romans driven out of the south, R
ome increased its military machine; by 135, the last defenses fell, Bar Cochba was killed, Akiba was tortured to death at the command of his friend, the Roman Rufus, and a harrow was drawn over the ground where Jerusalem had stood, leaving only a corner of wall. The story in my mother's family is that we are descended from Akiba—unverifiable, but a great gift to a child.”
Rukeyser included a second paragraph to her note to “Akiba,” indicating that this poem and “Käthe Kollwitz” belong to her “Lives” series and, “To come are Franz Boas and Bessie Smith,” indicating that she still envisioned writing additional poems. See also the annotations to the “Lives” section of TW.
Akiba
The Way Out
In the first section of the poem, Rukeyser imposes a detail from the life of Yochanan ben Zakkai, the distinguished rabbi and disciple of the scholar Hillel, onto Akiba. According to tradition, it was not Akiba, but ben Zakkai, a pacifist, who staged his own death during Vespasian's siege of Jerusalem in 68 CE and was carried out of Jerusalem in a coffin rather than surrender. See also the annotations to the “Lives” section of TW.
The Bonds
Rachel: Akiba's wife. According to the Talmudic story, in marrying Akiba, Rachel went from a life of luxury to poverty and, intuiting God's will and grasping Akiba's potential for greatness, she encouraged him to go off and study, which left her alone first for twelve years and then for another twelve years. His achievement and strength of leadership are subtly attributed to her vision and moral power.
For an extended analysis of this poem, see Kaufman, “‘But not the study’: Writing as a Jew.”
Käthe Kollwitz
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 60
