Monday, December 31, 2012

Muriel Rukeyser and the 'music of truth'

"There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost." 
Muriel Rukeyser

'The universe is made up of stories, not atoms"
Muriel Rukeyser

For those of us who work  for social and economic justice the American Jewish poet and social activist Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is a source of inspiration and an exemplar of a life lived in the radical tradition.
 
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet and social justice activist, best known for her political poetry. Her poetry acted as mode of social protest.

She used poetry to describe her own emotional and  intellectual experience as a woman within the context of wider social and political events. Her poetry was shaped by the violence and injustice she saw around her, as well as the larger social and economic forces that washed over her.

As a journalist she witnessed and wrote about some of the most significant events in world and USA history. Aged 19 she reported on the 1931 Scottsboro trial of 9 negro boys accused of rape in Alabama.

In 1936 at 22 years of age Rukeyser went to Spain to report on the anti-fascist Olympiad, an alternative to the 1936 Berlin Olympics which had been exploited by Hitler and the Nazis as a propoganda opportunity. She was in Spain when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Rukeyser was radicalized and transformed by her experience in Spain. Later she would describe Spain in 1936 as  the place where “I began to say what I believed,” and as “the end of confusion.” She wrote about the Spanish Civil War until her death.

In 1938 she published the Book of the Dead, poems inspired by her travels through West Virginia to report on the terrible suffering of miners. During the 60's and 70's she protested fiercely aginst US involvment in the Vietnam War

For much of her life, she taught at university and led public workshops, but she never became a career academic.

Rukeyser was part of the radical left but eschewed leftist dogmas. She was a target for the right, particularly her feminism and opposition to social and economic injustice.

But Rukeyser was more than just a poet and public intellectual. Her life and work were informed by her lived experience as a woman and lover, single parent, journalist, feminist intellectual and political activist.

Rukeyser's poetry broke political, personal and private silences. She wrote about women's experiences in a way that broke silences- about sexuality and motherhood, breastfeeding, lesbianism, menstruation, desire, love- in the context of wider class, racial and economic injustice.

Her poetry and political commitment were a major influence on distinguished American poets, including Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich.
 
Poet Adrienne Rich wrote that Rukeyser's poetry: 

"......... confronts the turbulent currents of 20th-century history, as it explores with depth and honesty the realms of politics, sexuality, mythic imagination, technological change, and family life. She was a social activist of unwavering commitment, a tireless experimenter who opened fresh forms and fresh subject matter in modern American poetry, and a writer who was constantly testing her own limits in a life's work of extraordinary scope".

 
Poem 
By Muriel Rukeyser
 
I lived in the first 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
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
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.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Orpheus

   When I wrote of the women in their dances and
wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music


 

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