Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation," Anne Sexton famously described her as "mother of us all", while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."

One of her most powerful pieces was the long poem titled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.

Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life.

Early life
Muriel Rukeyser was born on December 15, 1913, to Lawrence and Myra Lyons Rukeyser. She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in The Bronx, then Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. From 1930 to 1932, she attended Columbia University.

Her literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry Theory of Flight, based on flying lessons she took, was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Activism and writing
"Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 21, she covered the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals. She wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications, including Decision and Life & Letters Today, for which she was supposed to cover the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. Instead of reporting on the games, she witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War an experiences that she would describe as a "moment of proof," forming the basis of her rediscovered autobiographical novel, Savage Coast, and the long poem Mediterranean. Rukeyser famously traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia with the filmmaker and photographer Nancy Naumburg, to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her modernist masterpiece the documentary poem The Book of the Dead (poem). During and after World War II she gave a series of lectures, entitled The Usable Truth, about art and politics in times of crisis, eventually published as The Life of Poetry. From the end of the war through the period of McCarthyism, she was the target of sexist literary and political attacks which affected her career trajectory and publishing opportunities, and the FBI compiled a thick file on her as a suspected Communist. For much of her life, she taught university classes and led writing workshops, but she never became a career academic.

In 1996, Paris Press reissued The Life of Poetry, which was published in 1949 but had fallen out of print. In a publisher's note, Jan Freeman called it a book that "ranks among the most essential works of twentieth century literature." In it Rukeyser makes the case that poetry is essential to democracy, essential to human life and understanding.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when Rukeyser presided over PEN America, her feminism and opposition to the Vietnam War drew a new generation to her poetry. The title poem of her final book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death row in South Korea. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In addition to her poetry, she wrote a fictionalized memoir, The Orgy, plays and screenplays, and translated work by Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöf. She also wrote biographies of Josiah Willard Gibbs, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas Hariot. Andrea Dworkin worked as her secretary in the early 1970s. Also in the 1970s she served on the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, a New York City based theatre group that wrote and produced plays on feminist issues.

Rukeyser died in New York on February 12, 1980, from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing factor. She was 66.

In other media
In the television show Supernatural, Metatron the angel quotes an excerpt of Rukeyser's poem "Speed of Darkness": "The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Jeanette Winterson's novel Gut Symmetries (1997) quotes Rukeyser's poem "King's Mountain".

Rukeyser's translation of a poem by Octavio Paz was adapted by Eric Whitacre for his choral composition "Water Night." John Adams set one of her texts in his opera Doctor Atomic, and Libby Larsen set the poem "Looking at Each Other" in her choral work Love Songs.

Writer Marian Evans and composer Chris White are collaborating on a play about Rukeyser, Throat of These Hours, titled after a line in Rukeyser's Speed of Darkness.

The JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, a publication from Eastern Michigan University, dedicated a special issue to Rukeyser in Fall 2013.

Rukeyser's 5-poem sequence "Käthe Kollwitz" (The Speed of Darkness, 1968, Random House) was set by Tom Myron in his composition "Käthe Kollwitz for Soprano and String Quartet," "written in response to a commission from violist Julia Adams for a work celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Portland String Quartet in 1998."

Rukeyser's poem "Gunday's Child" was set to music by the experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

Personal life
Rukeyser was bisexual. In 1936 she had traveled to Spain to cover the People's Olympiad for the literary journal Life and Letters. The Spanish Civil War broke out and during her five-day stay, she fell in love with Otto Boch, a German communist athlete who volunteered to fight the fascists, and who was later killed. That experience was evoked in "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century." Also, her literary agent Monica McCall was her partner for decades.

Awards

 * Yale Younger Poets Award (1935) with Theory of Flight
 * Harriet Monroe Poetry Award (the first)
 * Levinson Prize
 * Copernicus Prize
 * Guggenheim Fellowship

Works

 * Rukeyser's original collections of poetry
 * Theory of Flight. Foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. New Haven: Yale Uni. Press, 1935. Won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1935.
 * Mediterranean. Writers and Artists Committee, Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1938.
 * U.S. 1: Poems. Covici, Friede, 1938.
 * A Turning Wind: Poems. Viking, 1939.
 * The Soul and Body of John Brown. Privately printed, 1940. With etchings by Rudolph von Ripper.
 * Wake Island. Doubleday, 1942.
 * Beast in View. Doubleday, 1944.
 * The Green Wave: Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. Includes translations of Octavio Paz poems and rari.
 * Orpheus. Centaur Press, 1949. With the drawing "Orpheus" by Picasso.
 * Elegies. New Directions, 1949.
 * Selected Poems. New Directions, 1951.
 * Body of Waking: Poems. NY: Harper, 1958. Includes translated poems of Octavio Paz.
 * Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935-1962. NY: Macmillan, 1962.
 * The Outer Banks. Santa Barbara CA: Unicorn, 1967. 2nd rev. ed., 1980.
 * The Speed of Darkness: Poems. NY: Random House, 1968.
 * 29 Poems. Rapp & Whiting, 1972.
 * Breaking Open: New Poems. Random House, 1973.
 * The Gates: Poems. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1976.


 * Fiction by Rukeyser
 * Savage Coast : A Novel. Feminist Press, 2013.


 * Plays by Rukeyser
 * The Middle of the Air. Produced in Iowa City, IA, 1945.
 * The Colors of the Day: A Celebration of the Vassar Centennial. Produced in Poughkeepsie, NY, at Vassar College, June 10, 1961.
 * Houdini. Produced in Lenox, MA, at Lenox Arts Center, July 3, 1973. Published as Houdini: A Musical, Paris Press, 2002.


 * Film written by Rukeyser
 * All the Way Home. Produced in New York City, NY, 1957.


 * Children's books
 * Come Back, Paul. Harper, 1955.
 * I Go Out. Harper, 1961. Illustrated by Leonard Kessler.
 * Bubbles. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
 * Mazes. Simon & Schuster, 1970. Photography by Milton Charles.
 * More Night. Harper & Row, 1981. Illustrated by Symeon Shimin.


 * Memoirs by Rukeyser


 * The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation. London: Andre Deutsch, 1965; NY: Pocket Books, 1966; Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1997.


 * Works of criticism by Rukeyser
 * The Life of Poetry. NY: Current Books, 1949; Morrow, 1974; Paris Press, 1996.


 * Biographies by Rukeyser
 * Willard Gibbs: American Genius, 1942. Reprinted by the Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge CT. Biography of Josiah Willard Gibbs, physicist.
 * One Life. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Biography of Wendell Willkie.
 * The Traces of Thomas Hariot. NY: Random House, 1971. Biography of Thomas Hariot.


 * Translations by Rukeyser
 * Selected Poems of Octavio Paz. Indiana University Press, 1963. Rev. ed. published as Early Poems 1935-1955, New Directions, 1973.
 * Sun Stone. Octavio Paz. New Directions, 1963.
 * Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf. With Leif Sjöberg. Twayne, 1967.
 * Three Poems. Gunnar Ekelöf. T. Williams, 1967.
 * Uncle Eddie's Moustache. Bertolt Brecht. Pantheon Books, 1974.
 * A Molna Elegy: Metamorphoses. Gunnar Ekelöf. With Leif Sjöberg. 2 volumes. Unicorn Press, 1984.


 * Edited collections of Rukeyser's works
 * The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. McGraw, 1978.
 * Out of Silence: Selected Poems. Edited by Kate Daniels. Triquarterly Books, 1992.
 * A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. Norton, 1994.
 * The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
 * The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. Eds. Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Cornell University Press, 2023.