Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  How We Did It

  We knew we would climb the Senate steps: Rukeyser commented at a poetry reading, “This is based on a document. This is the night in Washington before we went to the Senate. This was to present the petition to ask the Senate to stop the war in Vietnam” (“New Letters on the Air”). Rukeyser engaged in an antiwar act of civil disobedience in June 1972. She was detained overnight at the Women's Detention Center, and later recorded details of the event:

  We were five women in a one-person cell in Washington, on a hot day a month ago, and the trial for the action for which 111 men and women were arrested will take place on Thursday (July 27th) in Superior Court, Washington. It was our act of civil disobedience: we are a group who went to Washington to present a citizens' petition to the Senate to stop whatever was before them and because of urgent necessity to end the war in Vietnam. Knowing from long experience that there would be no quick response, we made our gesture.

  We lay down on the floor outside the Senate. We were arrested, and we allowed ourselves to be arrested peaceably, as we had done the action. This group was part of Redress, a movement of the Concerned Clergy and Layman which had acted a month before in the House. But this act in the Senate is considered a misdemeanor, and we are to be tried with the possibility of a maximum sentence of $500 fine and 6 months in jail. The defense of some of us will be the Nuremberg obligation.

  The leaders of the group were Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Falk, Grace Paley, and Dr Spock. (LC)

  See also “Parallel Invention” (G).

  The doctor: Dr. Spock.

  Hypnogogic Figure

  This is a translation of a poem by Gunnar Ekelöf. The endnote to this poem in G read: “English by Leif Sjoberg and Muriel Rukeyser.”

  For Kay Boyle

  Kay Boyle: (c. 1902–1992) A novelist, short-story writer, poet, and translator who lived in Europe (primarily Paris) from 1923–1941, when she returned to the United States. She taught at San Francisco University from 1963 onward and was a political activist, anti-Vietnam War figure, and friend of Rukeyser's. Her novel, Avalanche (1944), became required reading for the U.S. Army.

  Resurrection of the Right Side

  Rukeyser prefaced a reading of this poem with the following, “In this kind of illness [stroke], and this kind of recovery, there's a kind of half-life. Half of the body and half of the imagination is quite alive and well, and the other half is somehow dragged along behind the other side. I spoil this story for you by giving you this context and in the hospital, there was a man who said there was a dead man in the bed all night. ‘It was beside me, cold and inert.’ And they said, ‘No, it didn't happen.’ And he said, ‘It did happen. I felt him there all night long.’ And they said, ‘Not only did it not happen. It couldn't happen in this place.’ And he said, ‘It did happen and I'm going to sue the hospital.’ And they found out what it was, his repudiated, injured, ailing side. And he had repudiated half of himself. And that is the trap in this. And the recovery comes very slowly, but it does come. And they say to you it doesn't come as recovery. ‘You were doing what we called denial.’ And you say, ‘I'm not. You're talking about the arm and the leg, I'm talking about the whole person, myself’” (“New Letters on the Air”).

  The Sun-Artist

  Bob Miller: In the documentary film featuring Rukeyser, They Are Their Own Gifts, the poet discusses Bob Miller as an artist who made sun screens in the San Francisco Exploratorium. She stated: “[The sun screen] is an art in which the viewer, the witness, can be part of the making of the work. I care about it very much, because as the witnesses, the audiences to what I read are part of the making. They don't change the poem, however. This is a matter of changing what is on the screen by intercepting out colors. You can choose out the red and make it quite a different work. And it's the next kind of art, in a way, in which you are part of the art…. I could play the music experiments there, and I would go back and stand and wave my arms or dance slowly before the screen.” Rukeyser herself served as artist-in-residence for the Exploratorium and details her proposals for an eleven-part exhibit of language processes in a memo to the director dated June 1976 (LCII).

  Fable

  Herbert Kohl: A writer and educator, Kohl was a friend of Rukeyser from the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, they cofounded Teachers and Writers Collaborative, a nonprofit organization of writers and educators who bring living writers into classrooms to contribute to young writers and the teaching of writing.

  Neruda, the Wine

  This poem is an elegy to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whom Rukeyser met several times. He once told her that his campaign for the Chilean Senate would involve banging a drum. She sent him a drum.

  He died in a moment of general dying: Refers to the assassination of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was killed during an army coup in 1973, also the year of Neruda's death.

  Work, for the Day Is Coming

  Rukeyser prefaced a reading of this poem: “This name is of course a variation on the hymn [“Work, for the Night Is Coming”], but I don't feel that way about the night. I do a great deal of my life at night, and I do a great deal of my work at night…” (“New Letters on the Air”).

  Parallel Invention

  In G, Rukeyser included a note following this poem: “After reading an essay by Robert McC. Adams in Civilization—found in the Women's Detention Center, Washington D.C.” (See also “How We Did It.”) Accompanying this note was bibliographic information for the footnote to Civilization: “Edited by Williams et al. 6th edition. Published by Scott Foresman, 1969.”

  Slow Death of the Dragon

  Rukeyser dates this poem “Summer 1936–Winter 1975”: 1936 marks the year she traveled to Spain and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and 1975 marks Franco's death.

  Mendings

  Alfred Marshak: A geneticist and political radical, and a friend of Rukeyser's from when she lived and taught at the California Labor School in the mid-1940s.

  The Gates

  The following notes come from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection and parallel, in slightly different form, the prose introduction to “The Gates” that Rukeyser did publish. Both refer to Rukeyser's 1975 trip to Korea.

  Clues (being what the librettoes call the Argument)

  The woman who is speaking is sent to Asia, where a stinging poet is in prison, in solitary. Through the power of his writing and his life under a galling oppression.

  The woman makes the attempt she is sent for: to appeal to the ministers in power for the poet's release. She does this, and the journey turns into a search for the poet, the “house of the poet.”

  She sees his small son, a strong infant just beginning to run—separated from his father, who is in extreme immediate danger of execution or life imprisonment.

  The baby transforms for her into her own son years ago, cut off from his own father for reasons of the imprisoning culture of that time and what it did to men and women.

  She goes further in the present-day search—through the poet's poems, through the well-wishers (who cannot now be named), through the courts of government “it's like Kafka,” one of her guides says, and finally to the House of the Poet.

  It is the huge prison and the prison yard…. She remembers. She stands vigil. At the end of the day, which is also the Day of Atonement after the trial of the poet has not been held—the gates swing open, surprisingly, for a crowded bus. The thin Chinese-red posts of another gate are visible. The busload of prisoners goes in.

  This is the apparatus of the group of poems, The Gates. It is my hope that this note can be removed in later printings. I have been lucky: This has been possible several times before, as the material of my earlier poems became more known to readers—poems dealing with the cave-paintings of Ajanta, the life of the scientist Willard Gibbs, the life of the composer Charles Ives. People used to say, “Ives? You mean Bill Ives? Currier and Ives? (The Gates, folder 3)

  For further commentary on this poem, see Michelle Ware's
essay, “Opening the Gates: Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness.”

  6 The Church of Galilee

  In 1974, Rukeyser traveled to Israel and visited the area of the Galilee, including the Church of the Annunciation.

  7 The Dream of Galilee

  Akiba at rest over Kinneret: On this trip, Rukeyser also visited Akiba's grave. “Kinneret” is the Hebrew term for the Galilee.

  Juvenilia

  These poems were written in Rukeyser's early and late adolescence, during her years at the Ethical Culture and Fieldston schools and at Vassar. For more information on these poems, please refer to the introduction to this volume. For comments on the significance of these poems in Rukeyser's personal history as well as some speculation on her decision not to include them in later volumes, see Daniels, “A Note on the Place Poems” (27–28).

  A New Poem

  An Unborn Poet

  This is the only poem we know of that Rukeyser wrote and published between 1978, when her CP came out, and her death in 1980. Rukeyser read this poem publicly at a celebration in her honor at Sarah Lawrence College in 1979, and it was published in American Poetry Review, November/December 1979, 8:6. Rukeyser prefaced a reading of this poem by saying: “I have a new poem. I finished it last night. I don't know whether it's a first draft…. It's a poem after a long gap of illness and recovery and getting over that big book that holds back a big door [CP] and it's very hard to get past it and write a poem after. And it's a poem for Alice Walker, for whom I've been trying to write for years. It's called ‘An Unborn Poet’ and that's not Alice Walker, that's me (laughter)” (“New Letters on the Air”).

  Alice Walker transferred from Spelman College to Sarah Lawrence College in 1964 and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in January 1966. On Rukeyser's influence, Walker stated: “What I learned from Muriel is that poetry, done well, is always about the truth; that it is subversive; that you can't shut it up and that it stays” (White 109). Walker's relationship with Rukeyser was complicated; interested readers may wish to consult Evelyn White's biography, Alice Walker: A Life (2004).

  her hurt eye: Here and elsewhere in the poem, when Rukeyser refers to a young female student from the south with an injury to her eye, it is Alice Walker, one of Rukeyser's students at Sarah Lawrence College. See Walker's essay that discusses her injury: “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” (361–370).

  Zora: Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) African American novelist and folklorist. Alice Walker is largely credited for recovering and promoting Hurston's many contributions as a writer and intellect. See Walker's essays “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View” and “Looking for Zora” (83–92, 93–116).

  Berenice: Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) A major twentieth-century photographer, known for her New York photographs and portraits of major intellects and artists of her time. Abbott was a longtime friend of Rukeyser and fellow Greenwich Village resident. She took photographs of Rukeyser on more than one occasion, including the ultra closeup of Rukeyser's eye that decorated Rukeyser's biography of Thomas Hariot. Rukeyser wrote the foreword to Abbott's 1970 book of photos.

  Grace, Denise: the writers Grace Paley and Denise Levertov, friends of Rukeyser's.

  TEXTUAL NOTES

  Conventions and Considerations in the Text

  1. When sections of long poems are indicated by number, Arabic numbers are used throughout. Rukeyser's first editions varied in their usage of Roman or Arabic numerals for this purpose.

  2. Setting Rukeyser's poems is challenging in part because of the way she uses spacing. Her editor for 29 Poems wrote her about this, and we quote from her letter here because it articulates the challenge quite well:

  On the question of intentional spaces between words we have found that confusion often arises about how much space the poet would like to have left on the printed page, and in order to avoid unnecessary correction at proof I would be most grateful if we could settle this point now. The problem arises in that typewritten character spaces are usually much wider than the printed character, which of course vary anyway depending on what typeface one uses. Would we, therefore, be correct if we instructed the printer to gauge the spaces by aligning them to whichever character they fall below in the typewritten MS? I enclose an example of how “Bringing their life” would be treated to illustrate what I mean. In following this method, we are, of course, assuming that the spacing is intentionally uneven within each poem, and has been typewritten exactly as it should appear in print and hope we are correct in this.

  To this, Rukeyser replies in the margin, “yes, thank you very much”; we have thus used this approach as our guide, as did the editor for 29 Poems. Sometimes different editions of poems have a different look, as in the Elegies series, which appears in part in A Turning Wind, Beast in View, Green Wave, and as a whole in Elegies, Selected Poems (excerpts), Waterlily Fire, and Collected Poems. In such cases, we studied all the editions of each poem and approximated as closely as possible what seemed to be Rukeyser's intent for the poems' setting. In some cases, we made compromises between different versions.

  3. Enjambment: Rukeyser is known for her long lines. Although we use her first editions as copy texts, wherever possible we have reduced the enjambment that was compulsory in those editions due to margin length. When that is impossible, we have wrapped the line around to the next line and indented it. Where it has been difficult to tell whether or not a given line was intentionally or necessarily enjambed, we have determined this by studying and comparing the line breaks of the poem in question in all editions of the poem.

  4. Separate, unnumbered sections of long poems are indicated by an ornamented line space. Rukeyser often used asterisks to separate sections of a poem and, as with the spacing in her poems, was highly attuned to the look of the poem on the page. The editor of Selected Poems (1951) wrote to ask her whether the asterisks should be centered according to page width or according to the length of longest line on the page. The editor commented: “I like them best when they are visually centered on each page. You cannot exactly go by the longest line, particularly where there is only one long line on a page. You have to go by the ‘feel’ of the page, so to speak.” Underneath this, Rukeyser wrote “Yes.” (SP TS 2465, p. 4). Our design here marks an effort to achieve consistency in the visual appearance of the poems.

  5. Rukeyser often wanted more vertical spaces between stanzas, and between titles and first lines of poems, than her publishers would provide. For instance, in “Madboy's Song,” she requested four vertical spaces between the penultimate and last lines (SP TS 2464, p. 44). In “The Speed of Darkness,” she wanted triple spaces between titles and first lines, and between stanzas (LCII). In this poem, and throughout her books, she wanted poems printed on their own pages whenever possible.

  6. After we had completed our research for this project, the Library of Congress reorganized the Rukeyser holdings to categorize and catalogue a significant portion of archival papers that had previously been designated as “unprocessed.” The Rukeyser collection is now arranged into two sections, Part I and Part II. We have been advised by the Manuscript Division Literary Specialist at the Library of Congress not to use previous file and box designation numbers in our citations as they may now be obsolete due to the recent work on the Rukeyser holdings. We have been assured that the newly drafted register to the Rukeyser holdings will assist any future researchers in locating the materials they seek.

  7. In some cases, Rukeyser has varied spellings within the same poem or section. In these cases, we have standardized spellings and made them contemporary. Thus “Postoffice” in “Gauley Bridge” and “post-office” in “Praise of the Committee” has become “post office”; “blonde” in “The Cruise” has become “blond”; and “travellers” in “Letter to the Front” has become “travelers”.

  Tracking the Text

  Below we have acknowledged and detailed changes made to the copy texts, variances in different published editions of R
ukeyser's poems, and mistakes in the 1978 Collected Poems.

  In identifying the location of each item, we have noted the poem's title and, if applicable, subtitle or number of subsection. Poems divided into unnumbered sections by ornaments are counted by section (the section under the title is 1; a new section begins after each ornament); then stanza number (within the section in a poem with ornaments or else counting from the start of the poem); then line number (within the stanza). When counting lines we have included all lines of text, including runovers of enjambed lines. The locators, then, look like this:

  Poem Title

  Section Title or Section number (where applicable)

  section#: stanza#: line# (for poems with ornaments)

  or

  stanza#: line# (for poems with no ornaments)

  Theory of Flight (1935)

  Wedding Presents

  1

  3:3: By typographical error, CP changes “breath-intake” to “breath-inake”.

  Three Sides of a Coin

  3

  2:7: CP adds a stanza break after the line “this is a different story.”

  The Lynchings of Jesus

  2 The Committee-Room

  1:5: TF reads “with it” and CP inserts a period.

  1:6: TF reads, “into a series of nights” and CP presents a variant printing, “into a series of flights”. In TF and CP, the same line continues “rocking sea-like” but in SP, Rukeyser changed this to “a sea rocking”. She marked this change in her page proofs for SP (PP 2467).

  3 The Trial

  1:7:5: CP erroneously adds a period at the end of the phrase “In the Square.”

  2:1:1: TF reads “Earth, include sky ;” and CP prints this line with a colon: “Earth, include sky :”

  The Tunnel

  1

  5:3: TF and CP read “mines graveyards.” This edition adds a missing apostrophe to “mines' graveyards.”