Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  Käthe Kollwitz: (1867–1945) German printmaker and sculptor whose art was notable for its passionate social conscience as well as its antiwar conviction. Her pacifism was personal as well as philosophical, as her youngest son was killed in World War I and her grandson in World War II.

  For a discussion of Rukeyser's representation of Kollwitz's life and the correspondences she found between her life and Kollwitz's, see Porritt, “‘Unforgetting Eyes’: Rukeyser Portraying Kollwitz's Truth.” Also see Kearns's biography, Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist, and her essay, “Martha Kearns on Muriel Rukeyser and Käthe Kollwitz.”

  “Nie wieder Krieg”: “Never again war.”

  The Speed of Darkness

  7

  In a letter dated September 1, 1976, with a list of addressees including American and international figures such as Betty Ford, Bella Abzug, Martha Graham, Jane Hart, Gloria Steinem, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, “Bucky” Fuller, Robert Jay Lifton, Kurt Vonnegut, Golda Meir, and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others, Rukeyser explained her desire to form an activist group of Americans called “ARNO” to “move against the word and concept of bastardy.” She wrote: “It is beginning to be clear that we can end the concept of illegitimacy as applied to children. This punishment of children can go the way of other punishments and torments that have been dropped in our own time. The word ‘bastard’ can stay as a pejorative, if people want it, but, like ‘villain,’ a class-word from the same stock, it can let go of its group meaning.// There are no bastards. There are only children; and parents, responsible or irresponsible…” Please sign below, affirming: “‘THERE ARE NO BASTARDS. THERE ARE CHILDREN. ARNO.’” Robert Jay Lifton's returned, signed letter is in the ARNO file (LCII).

  Breaking Open. New York: Random House, 1973.

  Rukeyser's original acknowledgments read:

  My thanks to the following publications and to their editors. Poems in this book first appeared: “Looking at Each Other” in New York Quarterly; “Despisals” in Antaeus; “This Morning” in Mademoiselle; “Ballad of Orange and Grape” in New American Review; “The Writer” in The World of Translation (P.E.N.); “Wherever,” “Fields Where We Slept” in 29 Poems by Muriel Rukeyser (Rapp & Whiting/André Deutsch, London); “All the Little Animals;” “After Melville” in Poetry Review (London); “To Be a Jew” in the Reform Jewish prayerbook, Service of the Heart (London), and Beast in View (Doubleday) and Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (New Directions); “Fire” and “City of Paradise” in Mundus Artium; “The Running of the Grunion” in Ararat; “Iris” (part 1) in The New Yorker, the entire poem in 29 Poems; “In the Underworld” in Transatlantic Review; “Bringing” in Green Flag (City Lights Books); “Next” in Stony Brook Review; “Flying to Hanoi” in American Report; “Waiting for Icarus” in Vogue; “It is There” in American Review.

  The group of poems, “Searching/Not Searching” in New York Quarterly.

  From the poem “Breaking Open,” parts 19 & 20 in Poetry Magazine; parts 8, 11, 12, 13 in The Nation; first part of 1, 2, 10, 17 in Antaeus.

  Waking This Morning

  a violent woman in the violent day: In a public reading in 1969, recorded for the “Spoken Arts Treasury: 100 Modern Poets” series, Rukeyser commented humorously, “I think of myself as a violent woman who tries like the members of AA; I try not to be violent one more day.”

  What Do We See?

  In a public reading in New York in 1983, Rukeyser commented: “[This poem] has a cadenza in it, that is, a place for you, a place for the reader or witness or hearer, to move from the last question in any way you yourself move, to the next place in the poem” (“New Letters on the Air”). The idea of the reader being part of the poem was central to Rukeyser's poetics. As early as 1949, in LP, Rukeyser wrote that she would like to use another word for “audience,” “reader,” or “listener”: “I suggest the old word ‘witness,’ which includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence. The overtone of responsibility in this word is not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self. // These three terms of relationship—poet, poem, and witness—are none of them static. We are changing, living beings, experiencing the inner change of poetry. // The relationships are the meanings, and we have very few of the words for them” (175).

  Desdichada

  Desdichada: A Spanish word that translates as “poor, wretched one,” or “unfortunate, unlucky one.”

  ewig: A German word that translates as “eternal” or “eternally,” “everlasting,” “perpetual,” or “imperishably.”

  Voices

  The endnote to this poem read: “Aug. 26, 1968—by invitation for the Olympics. For Otto Boch, who came to Barcelona July 1936 to run in the Antifascist Olympics.” See the annotation to “The Book of the Dead” (US1).

  Fire

  from City of Paradise

  Both of these poems are translations from the work of Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984), who was born in Seville and spent most of his childhood in Malaga. A contemporary of Jimenez and Lorca, he was publishing, in Spanish, as early as 1932. The first full-book translations of Aleixandre's work into English were done by Lewis Hyde and Robert Bly in 1977, the year Aleixandre also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  Searching / Not Searching

  1

  In this first section of the poem, Rukeyser alludes to subjects she writes about in other poems and prose: the blackened miners suggest the Gauley Bridge mining disaster, the subject of Rukeyser's poem “The Book of the Dead” (US1); that Elizabethan man refers to Thomas Hariot, the scientist and explorer about whom Rukeyser wrote the biography The Traces of Thomas Hariot; and that man forgotten for belief suggests Otto Boch, who appears in many of Rukeyser's poems in relation to the Spanish Civil War. See the annotation to “The Book of the Dead” (US1).

  3 For Dolci

  Danilo Dolci, known as “the Sicilian Gandhi” was twice a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. An architect, engineer, and writer, Dolci dedicated his life to serving and speaking out on behalf of the poor, the illiterate, the oppressed, and the hopeless. An inventive leader of nonviolent action, he also wrote poetry, published interviews with workers, and authored a number of books, including To Feed the Hungry. He was renowned for his work teaching children and, in the 1960s, became somewhat of a cult figure in northern Europe and the United States.

  4 Concrete

  They are pouring the city…/…I am pouring my poems: For a discussion of the relationship between Rukeyser's poetics and her father's work in the building industry, see Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics” (253–54).

  6 Reading the Kieu

  As Rukeyser noted in her original endnote, the Kieu is the national epic of Vietnam.

  8 H. F. D.

  H. F. D. was Hallie Flanagan Davis, director of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project, whom Rukeyser first knew in her capacity as a faculty member at Vassar College. They maintained a lifelong friendship.

  9 The Artist as Social Critic

  the voice of my son speaking half-world away / coming clear on the radio into my room / out of blazing Belfast: William L. Rukeyser, the poet's son, worked as a reporter and photographer in Belfast from 1971–1972, a period marked by what he has called the “large scale intensification of problems” in Ireland, which included bombings and arson. Muriel Rukeyser would work late into the night with the radio on and would hear him broadcasting from Belfast.

  13

  after Camus, 1946: Camus was in New York in 1946, the year The Stranger was published, as part of a three-month lecture tour of North America.

  Boys of These Men Full Speed

  Jane Cooper: Poet who taught with Rukeyser at Sarah Lawrence College. Cooper was a longtime friend of Rukeyser's and wrote the foreword, entitled “Meeting-Place
s,” for the reissued edition of LP (1996).

  Next

  Charles Morice: (1861–1919) French critic and symbolist poet. It is likely that, because Morice's poems were included, at Paul Gauguin's request, in a notebook of sketches and writings that Gauguin published after his return from Tahiti (Noa Noa, 1895), Rukeyser would have come across Morice's work when she was completing her translations of the rari poems, published in 1948 (GW). At the bottom of a typescript of “Next,” Rukeyser includes a typed note to a Mr. Quasha at the Stony Brook Review: “XIX-cent. French, of course, to be found written on the verse of one of Gauguin's Tahitian watercolors; and, in our time in popular form as the Star Baby of 2001.” She continues: “Please believe the punctuation. I have a rubber stamp for that, but it's in storage with my things,” and indicates that the poem is forthcoming in BO. Rukeyser did, in fact, have such a rubber stamp made and used it to emphasize to editors the preciseness of her punctuation and spacing decisions in her typescripts.

  Two Years

  Frances Bucholtz (formerly Sussman), Rukeyser's sister, died of prolonged cancer in New York in 1971. She was seven years younger than Rukeyser. The disease was particularly “bitter” because her physicians failed to catch it early when it would likely have been treatable.

  Ballad of Orange and Grape

  Rukeyser prefaced a public reading of this poem with the following discussion:

  [This poem] has to do with a very hot summer in East Harlem. I was working with young black writers and high school kids, very brilliant black high school kids who were beginning to write. And there was a lot of street fighting that summer in the night. And those kids, there was one who talked to me the most, said all last night he hung onto his bed trying to keep himself from going out into the street. He did keep himself. And I did an exercise with them, which I think of under the name of “A piece of paper.”…[I] show them a sheet. Say, “Here it is with its properties and its possibilities,” and crumple it and throw it down. Then I say, “Here it is now, with its properties and possibilities.” And then I say something like “Write” or “Do something with it.” I think I said “Do something with it,” because that boy who hung onto his bed struck a match and lit the paper and half of it went up. And I said “Yes, we know that. We really, we know that.” I was trying to do something in words. Could he do it in words? And he took another piece of paper, and he wrote little and middle sized and big: Help HELP HELP.

  And we would leave, the white people who worked, you know, with attache cases, portfolios, would leave about 5:30 everyday and go downtown. And I was waiting for the building to be built where I now live and thinking I should be living here where I work. And I would stop across the street on the next corner, I suppose partly to delay leaving…. [There] was a hot dog stand opened to the heat in the corner, with just two tanks. One said orange and one said grape. And [the man behind the counter] was pouring. And he was pouring a dark purple drink in the tank marked orange…(“Just Before the Gates”).

  Don Baty, the Draft Resister

  The endnote from BO reads, “Don Baty, a draft resister, took sanctuary in the Washington Square church during the war in Vietnam. Many of us took bread and wine with him and said, ‘I am Don Baty.’ When the police came for him and asked, ‘Who is Don Baty?’ everyone said, ‘I am Don Baty.’”

  Te Hanh : Long-Ago Garden

  The note to this poem in BO read: “The Vietnamese poet Te Hanh (1921–) was born in the South, was in the Resistance and in jail. He is now in Hanoi. His 4 books of poems are Adolescence, South Heart, To North Vietnam, Wave Song. He is one of the foremost poets of Vietnam.”

  This poem appears to be a translation. Rukeyser apparently met Te Hanh, president of the Foreign Commission of the Vietnamese Writers' Union, on her 1972 trip to Vietnam with Denise Levertov and Jane Hart. In a letter to potential publishers dated March 13, 1973, Rukeyser explains: “Late in 1972 I went to Vietnam with a letter from P.E.N. (of which Rukeyser was president, 1975–1976) authorizing me to invite Vietnamese writers to set up with American writers a translation exchange program.” In a letter to Dr. Spock, dated April 2, 1973, Rukeyser thanks him for hand-delivering a letter to Te Hanh and another poet, Nguyen dinh Thi, along with an authorization note for them to sign to give permission for their work to be published in English (LCII).

  Ripe tenth-month fig, and fifth-month dragon-eye: This line originally appeared with the following note: “Dragon's eye, longan, related to the lichee nut, is the fruit of the tree Euphoria longana.”

  Secrets of American Civilization

  Staughton Lynd: Labor activist, lawyer, historian, and author of numerous books. The son of Helen and Robert Lynd (see annotation to “The Seeming,” SD) and a Yale professor, Lynd was active in the anti–Indochina war effort and made one of the first visits to Hanoi by an American during the war, a controversial decision that resulted in damaging professional consequences.

  A Louis Sonnet

  Louis Untermeyer: (1885–1977) American poet and anthologist. Well known as an editor of the Masses, Untermeyer later became an anthologist and selected many of Rukeyser's poems for publication. His favorable reviews were particularly important early in her career. She thanked Untermeyer in the original acknowledgments to BV.

  After Melville

  Bett and Walter Bezanson: Friends of Rukeyser's who met her in New Haven in the early 1940s when she was researching the biography of Willard Gibbs. Walter was both a scholar and editor of Melville and taught at Rutgers.

  The Writer

  Isaac Bashevis Singer: (1904–1991) The 1978 Nobel Laureate in Literature whose writing marked an era of Yiddish and American literature. Polish born, Singer came to the United States in 1935. Rukeyser was an acquaintance of Singer's in the mid-1960s.

  Gradus Ad Parnassum

  Gradus Ad Parnassum: Latin for “steps to Parnassus.” Refers here to a common exercise book for aspiring pianists.

  Flying to Hanoi

  In 1972, Rukeyser traveled to Hanoi with the poet Denise Levertov and Jane Hart on an unofficial peace mission. See Daniels, “Searching/Not Searching: Writing the Biography of Muriel Rukeyser” and Levertov, “On Muriel Rukeyser.”

  It Is There

  In a letter to the editor accompanying her typescript submission for BO, Rukeyser wrote: “The newest poems are ‘It Is There’—which is Hanoi New York and might be marked that…”

  Sacred Lake

  orante: According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, Orante, or Orans, refers to subjects depicted in the art of the Russian catacombs, a female figure with extended arms who prays and is a symbol of the deceased's soul in heaven. See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11269a.htm.

  3 Northern Poems

  Rukeyser's endnote: “The Eskimo poems were translated by Paul Radin and Muriel Rukeyser from texts given by Rasmussen and others. They have been adapted from material in: The Netsilik Eskimos—Social Life and Spiritual Culture, by Knud Rasmussen; Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, Copenhagen; Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos—Iglulik and Caribou Eskimo Texts, by Knud Rasmussen, same publisher; The Ammassalik Eskimo II: Nr. 3, W. Thalbitzer; Language and Folklore, C. A. Reitzel, Boghandel, Kobenhaven. The glossary used was Five Hundred Eskimo Words, by Kaj Birket-Smith. The last drafts were written in 1973, after the death of Paul Radin, that incomparable man.” Rasmussen was a Danish explorer whose books were based on his journeys to the arctic Alaskan coast in the early 1920s. Paul Radin was a well-known anthropologist and former student of Franz Boas, whom Rukeyser interviewed for her research on Boas.

  Breaking Open

  Westbeth: Since 1967, when the building it occupies was converted from Bell Labs, Westbeth has been an artists' colony/residence in Greenwich Village. Rukeyser, one of the first tenants, moved into Westbeth in 1970 and maintained this residence through the end of her life. In a reading in New York City, Rukeyser talked about Westbeth: “I live in a very curious place in New York. It used to be the lab building of
the phone company and has been made over. It's now, for instance, an enormous building, a big city block large, and holds 1100 people, and each member—I can't say the head of each family because I don't think that way—but one person in each family is an artist. It's the first artists' building in this country. And there are writers and painters and musicians, film people and dancers and other people who consider themselves artists, and I commend it to you to look at, to make other buildings like it. It has a certain danger. That is, when you go down to your mail, many people want you to back them for Guggenheims (laughter)” (“New Letters on the Air”).

  The Gates. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

  The title The Gates refers to the entrance of the South Korean prison in which the poet Kim Chi Ha was held and which Rukeyser visited in the summer of 1975. Rukeyser's original dedication read: “For Jacob & Kang / & the future.” Jacob is Rukeyser's first grandchild, who had just been born, and Kang is Kim Chi Ha's baby son, whom Rukeyser met in Korea.

  Rukeyser's original acknowledgements read:

  Some of the poems in this book have appeared in the following publications: American Poetry Review, American Writing, American Scholar, Antaeus, Black Box, Lilith, Ms., Neruda Reader, Ontario Review, Writers and Teachers Magazine. To these publications and to their editors, my thanks.

  Dream-Drumming

  raga: a South Asian Indian musical scale.

  Double Ode

  Bill & Alison: In a New York City reading, Rukeyser explained the dedication to this poem: “My son and his wife, at a time when they were still in exile and waiting for their first child. In exile in Canada, from which they have been able to come home without going through the president's amnesty. Through a crack in the drafting it became possible” (“New Letters on the Air”).

  4

  But these two figures are not the statues east and west / at my long window…: “The two figures, the two stone figures, are the corners of the long set of windows where I live…the female and male blackstone figures are Mexican obsidian figures, and they're on the floor” (“New Letters on the Air”).