Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

I've always thought of two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence.

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

How old were you when you knew that there were living poets? Do you remember? In this culture a great many people don't know that there are living poets, or didn't know when I was growing up.

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 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.

it was suggested to me in my adolescence, it would be a good idea if I married a doctor, and when he was out on housecalls I could write my poems. Now of course we have no housecalls and we have women poets-the culture has changed to that extent.

One opens, yes, and one's life keeps opening, and poets have always known that one's education has no edges, has no end, is not separated out and cannot be separated out in any way, and is full of strength because one refuses to have it separated out.

O for God's sake they are connected underneath.

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?

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.

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.

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?

Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced. To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.

As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive. We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionary: Dare we win? All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us, the wounds, the young and the unborn-we will define that peace, we will live to fight its birth, to build these meanings, to sing these songs. Until the peace makes its people, its forests, and its living cities; in that burning central life, and wherever we live, there is the place for poetry. And then we will create another peace. ** p. 214