Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

How shall we venture home? How shall we tell each other of the poet? How can we meet the judgment on the poet, or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run? All those beginning to run?

Their faces said : This is your home; and I .
I never come home, I never go away.
And they all answered : Stay.

The water they would bring had dust in it, our drinking water,
the camps and their groves were colored with the dust,
we cleaned our clothes in the groves, but we always had the dust.
Looked like somebody sprinkled flour all over the parks and groves,
it stayed and the rain couldn't wash it away and it twinkled
that white dust really looked pretty down around our ankles.

As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night,
with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white.
The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.

There are the questions of love and religion that have to enter, along with the social bonds between us, into everything we do.

Plague summer in London : and an increase of over 1000 deaths a week. Ralegh tried to kill himself the day after he was imprisoned, but the table knife with which he stabbed himself in the right breast left only a painful wound. During the fortnight in which he was healing, he could hear the bells ringing for plague victims. The bells never stopped tolling. In the streets, people with running sores could be seen, in hatred trying to infect others by strewing contaminated gloves, handkerchiefs, ruffs. Families took their bedding and went out into the country. The court of justice was removed to Winchester. One out of every six in the City was sick or dying of the plague. Infected ale-houses were not shut up. Londoners went out to the outlying towns, and died under the hedges; in Hampstead, they would fall in the yards and out-buildings, and there were barns around London where many would run to die. The jails were infected. There was an outbreak of 30 prisoners in Southwark; they were caught and put under stricter custody.
At the end of July, Ralegh was well and asking for Hariot.

The scene of hope's ahead; look, April,
and next month with a softer wind,
maybe they'll rest upon their land,
and then maybe the happy song, and love,
a tall boy who was never in a tunnel.

We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.

It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide,
runs through electric wires;
it comes, warning the night,
running among these rigid hills,
a single force to waken our eyes.

The people in the fine apartment houses insisted that Hooverville be destroyed because it spoiled their view. It was clear to a growing child that the terrible, murderous differences between the ways people lived were being upheld all over the city, that if you moved one block in any direction you would find an entirely different order of life.

Art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means. If we fear it in art, we fear it in nature, and our fear brings it on ourselves in the most unanswerable ways. (p 26)

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

I was told by friends, when it was a matter of deciding to go ahead and have a child, that I would have to choose between the child and poetry, and I said no. I was not going to make that choice; I would choose both.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms!

We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. They are everyday, these sources, as the sources of peace are everyday, infinite and commonplace as a look, as each new sun.

The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice — even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved — that the questions raised are very pertinent. . . . The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem. These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes — for the moment — an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form. A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.