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There's a wolfish quality to a poet's character. You might bring one
into your home ("It looked like a dog!"), but ultimately a
wolf won't act like a dog, can't understand that she's in your home and
(as wolf specialists tell us) doesn't distinguish between inside and
out. Wolves challenge the safety of our world. So it's probably easier
to keep one out of your house than to try to imagine what that missing
thing looks like-either the wolf or the poet's inner landscape.
Like most of Muriel Rukeyser's work, The Life of Poetry has
been out of print for twenty years, so its reappearance is a genuine
cultural event. Mainly it's a collection of talks Rukeyser gave in the
forties, in America at a time of war. Written in an expansive
prose-poetic style, it's a scarily beautiful book, almost disorienting
in its clarity.
John Ashbery has suggested that there was more room for
experimentation back thenthat one could imagine a poet like Delmore
Schwartz. Later one could not; things were different. Lowell ruled. What
was missing after World War II was an attitude of adventure in writing,
toward experimentation. Something got lost. It's rare that we have
access to words directly from another era, to talk about literature and
life. If we're lucky we have the poems, but we don't usually have the
speech, the context from which the poems sprang. So The Life of
Poetry is something even rarer than 1949, the year it was published.
We're in the wolf's den: a book of talk.
The Life of Poetry--this entirely inappropriate document, this
leftist manifesto, this Modernist tract touting poetry as a
"theater of total human response"--came out during the
McCarthy era (yes, she was investigated). Rukeyser was not of her time,
not in the correct way. The book is in part a response to the New
Critics of the forties and fifties, who rejected her socialist leanings,
her need to write poems "about" crying babies and un
reconstituted nature, and even the occasional remark from God. Yet
because of Rukeyser' s wily, independent aesthetics, the lefties didn't
accept her either. So she created a book that spoke for her. It's a
record of exultation and complaint comparable to The Answer/La
Respuesta of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (or Valerie Solanas's SCUM
Manifesto, Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation or Gertrude Stein's
Lectures in America). It's one of those historical documents (the
last two titles are still out of print) of a woman taking space and
refusing to sit down.
Muriel Rukeyser unspools one of the most passionate arguments I've
ever read for the notion that art creates meeting places, that poetry
creates democracy. We watch it happen in her urgent prose:
We can make autobiographies of a parade of symbols. The drum, the
sidewalk, the river, the tower, the father, the car, the aunt, the
chauffeur, the sister, the mother, the book, the piano, the harbor,
the slum, the sand hill, the lake, the cement mixer, the sacred
dome, the school door, the museum stair, the field of coarse grass,
the golf green, the Bridge, the poem written in the dark, the
unsolved murder, the corner whore, stain on the lab ceiling, the
granite mountain under whose cliff the adolescent all night lay,
waiting to climb in the morning light.
Such light and dark optimism. "Meeting place" is her
mantra, and it means linking the public to a cumulative privacy of
people, to living. It's a staunch reminder at a moment when global
culture is evincing such a horror of the small. And poetry's so tiny
it's universal: A famous painter might be invited by The New York
Times to give us a tour of the Met, to show us what he knows, but
for poets there's no such building, or even bookstore. It's simply the
world. The Life of Poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of
Rukeyser's interests, the niches she found herself in. She liked this
century, and her liking was not wholly abstract. Her frequent allusions
to film, for instance, are grounded in experience, not theory: "The
cutting room is a different landscape. There you sit in a bright
cubicle, with a stack of shallow cans of film at your elbow, a red
china-pencil in your hand, your face bent to the viewer of the Movieola,
where the film is passing, enlarged to the plainness of a snapshot.
Rukeyser was an upwardly mobile New York Jew, a Vassar dropout who
came into the public eye at 21 with her Yale Younger Poets Award-winning
Theories of Flight (inspired by her flying lessons-yes, she also
flew planes). She was a journalist and bisexual, a poet arrested in
Alabama at the Scottsboro trials; she traveled to Hanoi; she was
president of PEN, a single mother, a stroke victim, a science
biographer, a historian and a teacher. Rukeyser was also a consummate a
workshop leader, spouting her practice all over the place for more than
ten years. In her academic career, she always managed to leave before
tenure set in--which sounds downright wolfish to me.
Besides poetry (eighteen volumes, and good; what's available today is
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader from Norton), she also wrote biographies
and plays, children's books, translations, screenplays and a novel (The
Orgy)--it's an oeuvre wider than most, organic and self-propelled.
It would be exhausting if it weren't so pleasurable. If you pick up her
work, you will read it.
Kenneth Rexroth called Rukeyser the greatest poet of her exact
generation. Which made me wonder exactly which generation that was. In
the "Hand of the Poet" show that ran recently at the New York
Public Library, we saw her correspondences with Robert Duncan and
Charles Olson. She seemed to be sitting pretty in that school, but oddly
she wasn't passed down. She's barely represented in either the academic
or the experimental poetic canon, Women have protected her (no small
task). Though out of print, her poems nonetheless continue to be taught
at Sarah Lawrence and Vassar, where she herself taught. Her students
have had a hand in republishing her work; one used a line from a
Rukeyser poem to name a new book, The Wild Good. All tangible
evidence of how female literary networks operate. And the fact that her
influence continues without inclusion in anthologies or persistent are
canonization in the world of men is, well, awesome. There were a few
naysayers, of course. Former Vassar classmate Elizabeth Bishop groaned
wearily that Rukeyser's "life is one heroic saga of fighting for
the underdog: going to jail, writing about silicosis, picketing alone in
Korea, also thinking very deeply about POETRY & motherhood."
The Life of Poetry is a book about fear, about what a culture
has lost through its failure to use its intimate powers. Poetry is the
emotional locus of that intimacy, but Rukeyser means sex, too:
How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about
birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it
seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the
illumination that--to an adolescent-- was the cause for life around
me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill
themselves?
This is an immensely quotable book everywhere you open it, chock-full
of radiant abstractions that make glorious sense as the reader begins to
inhabit Rukeyser's flow of intense musical rhetoric. She is the
excessive ancestor of Adrienne Rich, She takes a deep breath. The book
is a podium. She begins grandly:
In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are
lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image
that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know
our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on
the long preparation of the self to be used.
It's pure American Pragmatism. The penultimate chapter, "Out of
childhood," resembles a procession of film clips, and it feels like
an intellectual biography with pictures. It's a long female life
already. "You put your head back very far. There it was! The plane.
With its double wings and a frail body. You could feel it in the back of
your neck." Then a slightly older child is gasping in awe at a
friend's mother loosening her hair in a car one night. The Freedom of
it. So many of her "recognitions" are of the startlingly
mundane, that reveal the capacity to experience, so that literature
becomes the act of being alive for those who read it.
It's great to come to such an American book, a World War II book--the
intimacy of understanding firsthand that Franklin Roosevelt
fearlessness. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" is
pretty good poetry, Rukeyser agrees; the greater poetry is invisibly in
millions of listeners' homes they're allowing the President in. So we
arrive; the moment of history is a meeting place. It's like the shared
sense of danger in a darkening theater: "We sit here, very
different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our
equality, to make us part of the play...the play part of us." This
passion she speaks of is worthy of our fear. It's history.
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