Out of Silence: Selected Poems

by Muriel Rukeyser, Kate Daniels (Editor)

Muriel Rukeyser published her first book; the powerfully experimental iTheory of Flight/;at age twenty-two, and went on to an adventurous and prolific career as poet, translator, and political activist. Her expansive energies sought a poetry in which politics, geography, sexuality, mythology, and autobiography could find fused and fluid expression. From her early, brilliantly cinematic ldquo; Poem Out of Childhoodrdquo; through excerpts from her long wartime ldquo;Letter to the Frontrdquo; to her late ldquo; Resurrection of the Right Side, rdquo; written after her stroke, this selection represents the many sides and selves of a major poet.

Genres: Poetry

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Muriel 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.

Reviews

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rukeyser was a fiercely political and feminist poet, and her words continue to resonate. This collection gathers some of her most forceful poems, including "The Book of the Dead," "Käthe Kollwitz," and "The Poem as Mask." "The Book of the Dead" is compelling in the way it tells the story of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, which cost the lives of hundreds of West Virginia workers, by using court testimony and victim statements. Throughout her life, Rukeyser was a political activist and used poetry as a political tool to shine light on the forgotten and the marginalized.

The first poem I ever read by Rukeyser was the stunning "Effort At Speech Between Two People." It is a rhythmic, heartbreaking poem that laments the disconnection and loneliness so many of us feel. When I read it, I felt an instant connection, it was one of my earliest revelations about the power of poetry to make me feel less alone, to diminish some of the distance and separation I felt in the world. Here was a poem that spoke to me of feelings that I knew intimately, feelings that have haunted me my entire life. While it's true that we are, too often, disconnected from one another, Rukeyser's poem impressed upon me the importance of always making an effort to communicate. It's the effort that matters most, even if connection is never achieved.

Personally, I find myself most drawn to the later poems, from the collection "Breaking Open," published in 1973. It includes "Waiting for Icarus," which continues the feminist project of giving voice to women of the past. In the poem, Rukeyser imagines what a lover of Icarus might have thought as she watched him fly away, knowing that she did not have the same freedom to escape. There's also "Poem White Page White Page Poem," which describes the liberating experience of writing, how the words pour "out of a body in waves" and "something like light stands up and is alive."

Muriel Rukeyser did not live her life in silence. She chose to write poetry on subjects both personal and political, historical and quotidian. Above all, she is a ferocious voice is the poetry canon, and I hope more people continue to discover and read her unforgettable work.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This manages nicely the 500+ pp. McGraw Hill edition of Rukeyser's poems Rukeyser herself assembled just two years before she died in 1980. There has since been a subsequent Collected Poems (from Pittsburgh), as well as a new short version of her work brought out by Library of America. A biography is needed. I had assumed the editor of this present volume, Kate Daniels, was to write it, but now I'm not sure.

I read Rukeyser for her moral authority and intellectual curiosity, plain and simple. Before anyone, perhaps, she had absorbed William Carlos Williams' historiographical take on the documentary history movement, and in U.S. 1 (1938), with its central poem, "The Book of the Dead," showed herself fluent in it a full year and a half ahead of Agee and Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1940). Later she proved wildly adept at appropriating literary modes like the ballad (a great poem from the late Sixties is called "Ballad of Orange and Grape") to her journalism, but in the late Thirties we have her at her best in her "coverage" of Rinehart-Dennis Company's negligence in providing safety measures to the (mostly negro) workers digging out the New River tunnel flowing underneath the mountain called Hawk's Nest, in southern West Virginia. The New River was damned at Gawley's Bridge, and in the "dries" there, engineers found the mountain rock consisted of anywhere from 90% to 98% silica, a pure mineral that could be alloyed by Union Carbide's metallurgic plants just down river in Alloy (formerly Boncar -- a coinage from Carbon), West Virginia. The silicosis that resulted from this 1927-1933 mining operation ended in some score of deaths by the time the twenty-three year old Rukeyser arrived on the scene in 1936, though because the miner population of Gawley Bridge (the company town) was migrant negroes from the South, the resultant-death toll among returning workers may have been in the hundreds -- at any rate, Union Carbide paid off a few of them, and Giles Mead sold his share in the company shortly before he died in 1937.

Here is Rukeyser's great al fresca poem, "Alloy," from "The Book of the Dead": When Rukeyser describes this landscape as "most audacious," we should remind ourselves that in the hills north of Knoxville, TN, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers (funded by Union Carbide) sit on that landscape, as well as the continent's most impressive cave system:

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster's
stance with his gun smoking and out is not so
vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.

Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills
narrow to this, clouds over every town
finally indicate the stored destruction.

Crystalline hill: a blinded field of white
murdering snow, seamed by convergent tracks;
the traveling cranes reach for the silica.

And down the track, the overhead conveyor
slides on its cable to the feet of chimneys.
Smoke rises, not white enough, not so barbaric.

Here the severe flame speaks from the brick throat,
electric furnaces produce this precious, this clean,
annealing the crystals, fusing at last alloys.

Hottest for siicon, blast furnaces raise flames,
spill fire, spill steel, quench the new shape to freeze
tempering it to perfected metal.

Forced through this crucible, a million men.
Above this pasture, the highway passes those
who curse the air, breathing their fear again.

The roaring flowers of the chimney stacks
less poison, at their lips in fire, than this
dust that is blown from off this field of glass;

blows and will blow, rising over the mills,
crystallized and beyond the fierce corrosion
disintegrated angel on these hills.

[Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

"i write from a woman's body." Her life and the passions that shaped it are a revelation - but read the poetry first. This is a physically beautiful book - an act of loving introduction to a voice we nearly lost.

_________________


From Library Journal
Five decades before political correctness became a topic of genteel debate among academics, Rukeyser was raising her poetic voice "to answer the silence of the weak." Her muse demanded that she pay as much attention to the shared, literal world as the world of literature, so, like Whitman, she personalized the public events of her time: the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the struggles of class and gender ("I hear the singing of the lives of women, / The clear mystery, the offering and pride"). This collection showcases a lifelong effort to deal squarely with large social forces as they rippled through one woman's acute sensibility. Twelve years after her death, the poet's desire to get past "all evasion's wishes" seems no less timely.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

[Charity]

I thought I'd try to give a book of poetry a try, but I lack the attention span for an entire book of poems, and I couldn't read it before it was due back at the library. I'll have to buy a copy and take my time instead of trying to power through. (Powering through poetry is sacrilege anyway, or at least pointless.)

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this more than I did. Rukeyser's poetry is important, and she was way ahead of her time.
My major problem with this book is the layout. The poems are all jammed on top of each other, one after the other, with no room to breathe. The poems are dense and very intense, they demand to be read slowly and with a serious level of concentration, and then they demand to be read again. The rushed, crammed layout of the poems does not lend itself well to this kind of reading, or this kind of poet.

[Parneshia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this so much!

[Mills College Library]

811 R934o 1992