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Breaking Open
poetry about women
- GenresPoetry
135 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
1 person is currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
Muriel Rukeyser
84 books155 followersMuriel Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled 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.
One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled 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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 21, 2013
Some talk about an extra dimension in writing: time, morality, selflessness, compassion, the pith, the essence, the spirit. Here, "to break open" means something like encountering those things. It hardly can be put into words. It is extrasemantic: "Naked among the silent of my own time/and Zig Zag Zag that last letter/of a secret or forgotten alphabet/shaped like our own last letter but it means/Something in our experience you do not know/When will it open open opening" ("Breaking Open").
There might be a negative mystery afoot: "Something walks here/a little breath in hell/without its ghost./A breath after nothing. Gone." ("The Underworld") At the same time, the author makes clear that the state of being aspired to is of this world. It is acts of motion, of doing. The speaker translates Eskimo poetry. She achieves moments of clarity face-to-face with a fake-juice fountain in '70s Harlem ("Ballad of Orange and Grape"). She engages in the frustrating Mobius-comic-strip of going to the page/getting away from the page: "I thought I was going to the poets, but I am/going to the children." ("Flying to Hanoi")
This is maturity gained through personal historical consciousness, refracted and spectrumed into simple acts of relating to other people in the most basic of ways: "In facing our entire personal life, we look at each other."
There might be a negative mystery afoot: "Something walks here/a little breath in hell/without its ghost./A breath after nothing. Gone." ("The Underworld") At the same time, the author makes clear that the state of being aspired to is of this world. It is acts of motion, of doing. The speaker translates Eskimo poetry. She achieves moments of clarity face-to-face with a fake-juice fountain in '70s Harlem ("Ballad of Orange and Grape"). She engages in the frustrating Mobius-comic-strip of going to the page/getting away from the page: "I thought I was going to the poets, but I am/going to the children." ("Flying to Hanoi")
This is maturity gained through personal historical consciousness, refracted and spectrumed into simple acts of relating to other people in the most basic of ways: "In facing our entire personal life, we look at each other."
May 10, 2008
4.5 out of 5. "I love Breaking Open because it shows the wide range of Muriel Rukeyser's splendid gifts: humor, bawdiness, lyrical sweep, political commitment, compassion, great moral force. She is a brilliant craftswoman who can go from sonnets to prose-poems to rondels and back to rhythmic free verse-and have all of them bear her own unique cadence, her utterly individual sound."
Erica Jong wrote that about this book, and it's pretty perfect.
Erica Jong wrote that about this book, and it's pretty perfect.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews