poet and political activist (1913–1980)
Muriel Rukeyser (15 December 1913 – 12 February 1980) was an American poet and political activist, most famous for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.
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only my fingers in your hair, only, my eyes
splitting the skull to tickle your brain with love
in a slow caress blurring the mind,
kissing your mouth awake
opening the body’s mouth and stopping the words. — Muriel Rukeyser, from “Three Sides of a Coin,” Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. (University of Pittsburgh Press May 10th 2014)
The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves — those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.
I speak, then, of a poetry which tends where form tends, where meanings tend. This will be a poetry which is concerned with the crises of our spirit, with the music and the images of these meanings. It will also be a poetry of meeting-places, where the false barriers go down. For they are false. (Chapter One, p 20)
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all of need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up our fullness; we turn, and act. We begin to be aware of correspondences, of the acknowledgement in us of necessity, and of the lands. And poetry, among all this — where is there a place for poetry? If poetry as it comes to us through action were all we had, it would be very much. For the dense and crucial moments, spoken under the stress of realization, full-bodied and compelling in their imagery, arrive with music, with our many kinds of theatre, and in the great prose. If we had these only, we would be open to the same influences, however diluted and applied. For these ways in which poetry reaches past the barriers set up by our culture, reaching toward those who refuse it in essential presence, are various, many-meaning, and certainly — in this period — more acceptable. They stand in the same relation to poetry as applied science to pure science.
Anger I would like to talk about, too. All my life I have protested in anger against what was happening, in rebellion, about wanting to make a new society and change the world, but I know underneath that I am a person who makes things much more than a person who protests. And I finally came to the point of saying, "I will protest all my life but every time I protest, I will make a poem, or I will plant, or I will feed children, or I will try to help a building, I will make something."
In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.
If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has — the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge — infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.