The Stellar Life and Then, Rebirth of Muriel Rukeyser---And More!

How one poet brought another back to life---maybe we can, too...

Dear Reader, I bet you didn’t recognize Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) in this photo. Neither did I. Every other image I’ve seen of this political and powerful poet (and prose writer) shows her at the late edge of middle age.

Who knew she was also beautiful and sexy — well, she was a poet after all.

As a graduate student, one does a great deal of reading. That’s an understatement, of course. However, there is only one book that I remember the visceral feeling of reading. At night, alone in my attic apartment at the dark end of Sunnyside Drive, in Eugene, Oregon, I sat at the kitchen table reading this book bought secondhand —- long out of print at the time. And in that moment (remembered 30 years later) is the bodily sense that just maybe I could become a poet.

It was Adrienne Rich who first reintroduced the poet Muriel Rukeyser to me, and to many readers in What is Found There in the early 1990’s. My paperback edition is dated 1993. My copy is marked in three different colors of ink.

The poet today must be twice-born. She must have begun as a poet, she must have understood the suffering of the world as political, and have gone through politics, and on the other side of politics she must be reborn as a poet (Rich 21).

While Rich is likely talking about herself in this package, this could refer to Rukeyser as well. In 1996, the poet Jan Freeman’s, fabulous Paris Press, reissued The Life of Poetry—which Rich had referenced over a dozen times in What Is Found There. I love this story of a poetry friendship across generations. Rukeyser and Rich met in New York—Rich, maybe in her twenties, Rukeyser, perhaps in her forties.

“In many ways, ” writes Adrienne Rich in her Introduction (A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Revised), “Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time – and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: the connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country’s psychic geography.”

Rukeyser was jailed in Washington D.C. for protesting the Viet Nam war. In addition to many volumes of poetry, she published a biography of the physicist Williard Gibbs (which I’ve just started), several children’s books, translations, 3 plays, a novel, and in 1957 produced a film, All the Way Home. In her personal life, she married and a few weeks later, divorced. Two years after that, she gave birth to a son out of wedlock, and kept him. Then for nearly 30 years her literary agent, Monica McCall, was also her life partner.

Her son, Bill Rukeyser, is interviewed here.

“And one story that she always told was going to the U.S. Consulate and asking for assistance, because, you know, that’s what the foreigners were doing.  The British people on the train went to the English Consulate, and they said, ‘Yeah.  There will be a Royal Navy ship to take you out.’  And she told the story of going to the U.S. Consulate, and the Consul there said, ‘Well, I can give you a Letter of Safe Conduct.’  And she said, you know, ‘Well, what does that do?’  And she wasn’t the only American asking for help.  It didn’t do anything.  ‘We’ll give you a piece of paper.’ 

And luckily, she had met some Belgians on the train, and they said, ‘Our government is chartering a ship.’  It was the “Ciudad de Ibiza”.  She never forgot the name of the ship.  The Belgians had chartered this Spanish ship.  They loaded all the Belgians who wanted to go.  There was still room.  She got on the “Ciudad de Ibiza”, and it went up the coast to the first French port north of the border.  The six or seven days that she was there, at the beginning of the war, incredibly important, a life-changing experience for her.”

I think a lot these days about a life well lived. Is it possible to make a positive difference in the world and have a fulfilling personal life and write, too?

It seems Muriel Rukeyser may be the poet we need the most in this moment.

caption...

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

The world would split open.