In 1943 Muriel Rukeyser, a thirty-year old poet, was attacked in an editorial in Partisan Review under the heading 'Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl'. Without knowing the context, which I'll explain soon, the title suggested that Rukeyser must have been a lightweight, a pin-up girl who presumably had attained some fame by employing her feminine wiles. In fact, the reference was to her work in the Graphics Workshop of the US Office of War Information. But the patronising, sexist tone of the heading was borne out in the article: Muriel Rukeyser had displeased the male ultra-left establishment that ran Partisan and had been adjudged by them to be due a kicking. Being literate literary types they couldn't resist that below-the-belt title.
This was not to be the only time Rukeyser, a pioneering poet, feminist and political activist, was subjected to cheap sexist attacks. Rukeyser' sensibility is one we can now more easily recognize, as women take their place in every area of life, but she was a true pioneer, fifty years ahead of her time. At 20 she learned to fly and this was the subject of her first book of poems, Theory of Flight (1935), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, traditional first rung for an American poet. She pioneered the docu-poem with The Book of the Dead (1938), in which she excoriated the Union Carbide company for the Gauley Bridge Disaster, in which hundreds of mostly black workers died from the effects of tunnelling into almost pure silica, an invitation, as the management knew, to silicosis. Gauley Bridge is in the state of West Virginia, where the recent mine tragedy occurred. She was a lesbian who brought up a son single-handedly. He said of her, “she was largely successful in inventing her own life.”
Rukeyser was curious about everything – she was, as the poet and critic Alicia Suskin Ostriker said: “In love with mixings, blendings, relationships” – and wanted to see how it all added up. In the world as she saw it too many things added up to greed and narrow prejudices. She was a lifelong activist – from Gauley Bridge and Spain in the '30s, through the War, Vietnam, to her efforts just before she died on behalf of the dissident Korean poet Kim Chi Ha, imprisoned for being sympathetic to reconciliation between North and South Korea.
Science was a lifelong fascination and for daring to cross two boundaries – art/science; man/woman – she was patronised in a review as a mere “she-poet” who had no business writing a biography of a serious scientist. The book in question was the life of Willard Gibbs, a great but austere American scientist. His field, thermodynamics, is fundamental but not the most attractive and accessible area of science to an outsider. No frivolous pin-up he.
The crude, sexist attack of the Partisan Review editors would not be possible today: autre temps, autre moeurs, we might be tempted to say. To understand how Rukeyser was maligned as a “Poster Girl” we have to enter the strange universe of leftist thought in the 1930s and 40s. As Paula Rabinowitz pointed out, in Labor & Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, the Left had difficulty in accepting the good faith of women in the class struggle. The symbology was easy to understand: the virile proletariat were going to triumph over the effete bourgeoisie. If the bourgeoisie were effete, bourgeois women were obviously doubly effete. Rukeyser was a bourgeois woman: for many on the Left “the bourgeois woman represented the epitome of false consciousness.”
The Rukeyser Imbroglio, as Partisan themselves called it, was a shocking episode in which the complacent assumption of male cultural superiority was exposed in all its tawdriness and viciousness. Rukeyser was abused simply for being a woman who dared to do too many things (for the Partisan editors proof of her opportunism). The year before the Poster Girl attack, Rukeyser's booklet Wake Island (a war poem) had received the snub of a one-line review by Weldon Kees: “There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy.”
Since the Imbroglio, her reputation has waxed and waned. When feminism arrived in the 1960s Rukeyser was recognised by poets such as Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton as their torch-bearer. “No more masks!” from her poem 'The Poem as Mask' became a rallying cry, and Rukeyser is the presiding sprit of Ellen Howe's anthology No More Masks (1997); Louise Bernikow's anthology The World Split Open also takes its title from one of Rukeyser's poems, 'Käthe Kollwitz', and Rukeyser herself wrote the preface. Rukeyser shared many a platform with writers such as Rich, Denise Levertov and Grace Paley, and Levertov and Rukeyser went to North Vietnam together in 1972. After her death in 1980 Rukeyser's books slipped out of print but in the 'nineties a new generation of scholars began to return her work to publication and critical assessment. A Reader appeared, her The Life of Poems was reprinted, and a new selected poems issued; a biography has long been promised from Jan Heller Levi, editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader.
In the USA Rukeyser is revered by feminist poets who rightly regard her as “Our Mother Muriel” but she is patchily represented in anthologies. Devoted readers know where to find her best poems but, like a similarly omnivorous poet who was in love with impurity and blending, Louis MacNeice, she wrote too much. The need for a good Selected Poems has been recognised by many supporters and there have been several attempts, the latest being Adrienne Rich's Selected Poems (Library of America, 2004), not published in the UK but available on Amazon. Rich is Rukeyser's most powerful advocate and, although everyone will prefer their own selection, Rich's is a good place to start.
With the best poets you enter a new landscape when you read them. In this changed world a mode of apprehension rubs off on you. I first experienced this with Rukeyser in 'Poem':
I lived in the century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices ....
The poem was written during the Vietnam crisis of 1968 but the phantasmagoria of corrupted media it evokes is clearly even more relevant today. The genius of the poem is to evade the dulling habituation by which we become inured to this corruption by showing us the process afresh in hypercharged language. And the remedy is equally vivid: a call to arms that is believable and inspiring:
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
Rukeyser caught the 'thirties music of Auden certainly but used it to such fresh purpose she can be forgiven those few poems in which docketed attributes of a world are smartly marshalled with half the definite articles missing:
Log's entry: “Engines faltering, charts useless, meat maggoty,
passengers grown flabby with lack of confidence,
great trust in me while I believed in my orders.
In her passionate work of poetry advocacy The Life of Poems she made a case for the seamlessness of poetry and jazz and folksong and she could capture the urban blues perfectly in a poem like 'Ballad of Orange and Grape':
Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack –
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who'd like to break your back.
Rukeyser's vivid tableaux of mid-century America often recall another artist, the painter Edward Hopper. The way she tells the story in 'Orgy' for example, is pure Hopper:
There were three of them that night.
They wanted it to happen in the first woman's room.
In her later work, Rukeyser's expansiveness and proud feminism drew comparisons with Whitman. Poetry is rhythm above all else and Rukeyser's rhythms are compelling and the diction easy and natural. Her voice is one of great dignity. From 'Sand Quarry with Moving Figures' in which she rejects her father's greedy wish “to own the countryside” to 'Long Enough', a poem in which she vows to “walk out of the pudorweb / And into a lifetime', her bulletins retain their currency.
Rukeyser's touchstone was, in the critic Louse Kertesz's words: “the brave, full lif
e which denies or simplifies no part of the human journey and which, beaten down or blocked, transforms itself into new modes.” This translates into a sense of dramatic urgency in her poems which is infectious. Rukeyser is a poet who makes you want to go that extra mile: to sign up for that petition, go on that march, learn that new language, call that friend you've been neglecting. In 'Night Music' comfortable people meeting a demo in the city at night are challenged to “build a newer music rich enough to feed starvation on.”
It has been said by many of her advocates that Rukeyser was such a multi-facetted writer that only to read her poetry is to miss a great deal. Besides poetry, she wrote several curiously hybrid books. One Life (1957), ostensibly a biography of the politician Wendell Willkie, is a collection of prose poems and poems that weave the story – Rukeyser called it “a book: a story and a song.” Orgy (1967) her only 'novel' is in fact a fictionalised account of her visit to the Puck Fair at Killorglin in Ireland. Fictionalisation was a necessary device because some of the cast of characters were IRA members.
One Life is an extraordinary work. Some of the poems are reprinted in the Collected Poems and stand happily alone. 'Campaign' evokes a panorama of 1940s America: the stockyards, steelyards and freightyards of a country in which the Texas oilfields produced “60% of the oil of the world. / Let the streetlamps burn all night.” And the candidate? “Street corner to corner he will talk all day, / Feasting on talk at midnight to the last / Listening man.”
Rukeyser seems to have invented single-handedly that spectre of the fearful right wing; the multiply challenged professional minority subject: she was by nature or choice a single parent, a Jew, a leftist, a lesbian and a poet. To have lived out this life without, for most of it, being surrounded by the like-minded or any kind of institutional support or societal understanding was very brave. For gifted young women today, from all cultures – and the future, if there is one, surely belongs to them – Rukeyser is an amazingly prescient figure. Read her and be challenged “To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake.”
The Plot
Maureen Freely
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 22