Of all the poets I have featured in these Sunday night posts, there is one whom I think everyone should read. That poet is Muriel Rukeyser. She is not the best poet I’ve featured here: She wrote a lot, especially when she was a single mother trying to raise her son after World War 2, and it’s of uneven quality; even in her best works she tended toward prolixity and overwriting. (In that she was like Walt Whitman, one of her major influences.) But she was among the most ambitious of poets in the forms and subjects she took on.
Rukeyser was a heartfelt American patriot, in her own idiosyncratic way, and a lifelong activist for social justice causes, someone who loved her country deeply but was clear-eyed about the injustices inflicted on others in the making of it. She was also intensely interested in science and the technological marvels of the 20th century, but again was well aware of the human cost that often accompanied them.
Below are the beginning of and additional excerpts from one of Rukeyser’s best-known works, “The Book of the Dead.” It’s a long documentary poem that tells the story of the Hawk’s Nest hydroelectric dam in West Virginia, the tunnel through which water flowed to feed its turbines, and — its primary focus — the hundreds of laborers, mostly poor Black men, who died in the digging of that tunnel, their lungs choked by inhaling the almost pure silica through which the tunnel ran.
The Road
These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,
reading the papers with morning inquiry.
Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light
chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights
indicate future of road, your wish pursuing
past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,
well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.
Past your tall central city’s influence,
outside its body : traffic, penumbral crowds,
are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason.
These roads will take you into your own country.
Select the mountains, follow rivers back,
travel the passes.
. . .
The Disease
This is a lung disease. Silicate dust makes it.
The dust causing the growth of
This is the X-ray picture taken last April.
I would point out to you : these are the ribs;
this is the region of the breastbone;
this is the heart (a white wide shadow filled with blood).
In here of course is the swallowing tube, esophagus.
The windpipe. Spaces between the lungs.
Between the ribs?
Between the ribs. These are the collar bones.
Now, this lung’s mottled, beginning, in these areas.
You’d say a snowstorm had struck the fellow’s lungs.
About alike, that side and this side, top and bottom.
The first stage in this period in this case.
. . .
George Robinson: Blues
. . .
When the blast went off the boss would call out, Come, let’s go back,
when that heavy loaded blast went white, Come, let’s go back,
telling us, hurry, hurry, into the falling rocks and muck.
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.
Looks 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.
. . .
The Dam
All power is saved, having no end. Rises
in the green season, in the sudden season
the white the budded
and the lost.
Water celebrates, yielding continually
sheeted and fast in its overfall
slips down the rock, evades the pillars
building its colonnades, repairs
in stream and standing wave
retains its seaward green
broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet
spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white.
White brilliant function of the land’s disease.
Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under
concrete arches and the channeled hills,
turns in the gorge toward its release;
kinetic and controlled, the sluice
urging the hollow, the thunder,
the major climax
energy
total and open watercourse
praising the spillway, fiery glaze,
crackle of light, cleanest velocity
flooding, the moulded force.
. . .
The Book of the Dead
These roads will take you into your own country.
Seasons and maps coming where this road comes
into a landscape mirrored in these men.
Past all your influences, your home river,
constellation of cities, mottoes of childhood,
parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes.
What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
cough in the theaters of the war.
What two things shall never be seen?
They : what we did. Enemy : what we mean.
This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.
What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.
The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.
. . .
Rukeyser’s critical reputation and the popularity of her work has waxed and waned over the years. In the 1930s she was hailed as a promising young poet on the strength of Theory of Flight, her first poetry collection (inspired in part by her experience as a student pilot), and its follow-up U.S. 1, which included “The Book of the Dead.” She fell out of favor in the late 1940s and 1950s as the Cold War began, only to be rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s during second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement. Slipping back into obscurity after her death in 1980, she’s seeing a revival once more, with many of her works being reprinted, and some published for the first time. (We still await a full-length biography, though as noted below we should see one published relatively soon.)
Although she is often reduced to the intersection of her personal characteristics — Jewish / bisexual / woman / single mother / feminist / leftist — Rukeyser resists easy classification. A poet, she was extremely curious about the science and technologies that had transformed the US within her lifetime, so she wrote an (unauthorized) biography of Willard Gibbs, the 19th century American mathematical physicist who pioneered the field of physical chemistry and (following James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann) formalized the theory of statistical mechanics. (In a characteristic move, Rukeyser begins the book with a chapter describing the rebellion of captured Africans on the slave ship La Amistad: Willard Gibbs’ father Josiah was a linguist and abolitionist who established communication with the men and championed their cause.)
A leftist (though never a Party member), Rukeyser found inspiration in others who did not share her politics, writing an impressionistic biography (in combined prose and poetry) of Wendell Wilkie, a Midwestern lawyer, utility executive, and fierce opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. (A lifelong Democrat, Willkie switched parties to become the unsuccessful 1940 Republican presidential candidate, was then tasked by FDR to make a wartime around-the-world tour of American allies and hoped-for allies, and returned to preach the gospel of decolonization and anti-imperialism, freedom and human rights within an international political order, and the power of free trade and economic globalization to lift the people of the world out of poverty.)
And yet more: a semi-autobiographical novel (unpublished during her lifetime) based on her experiences as a reporter with the anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, a fictionalized memoir of her time at an Irish pagan festival, set against the background of the IRA’s “border campaign,” another biography, this time of the Elizabethan mathematician, astronomer, and explorer Thomas Hariot, a musical about the magician Harry Houdini, poetry translations, children’s books, and (perhaps most relevant for our time), The Life of Poetry, a book of essays exploring the role that poetry might play in creating a more just and democratic society.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation:
- A biography of and selected poems by Muriel Rukeyser.
- “Muriel Rukeyser 101.” A brief introduction to Rukeyser’s life and work.
- Internet Archive:
- Out of Silence: Selected Poems, by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Kate Daniels. This is a good single-volume introduction to Rukeyser’s poetry.
- Selected Poems, by Muriel Rukeyser. This edition dates from 1951, and thus omits Rukeyser’s late poems.
- The Life of Poetry, by Muriel Rukeyser.
- Willard Gibbs, by Muriel Rukeyser. You will not learn a great deal about physical chemistry and statistical mechanics from this book, but it is excellent at giving a sense of what it was like to be an American physicist in the late 19th century, when the US was a scientific backwater compared to Germany, France, and the UK, and when US engineering practice was just beginning to be influenced by theoretical advances.
- Bookshop.org:
- A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Jan Heller Levi, with an introduction by Adrienne Rich. This is a single-volume introduction to Rukeyser’s prose and poetry, and is a good place to start for those new to Rukeyser’s work.
- Out of Silence: Selected Poems, by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Kate Daniels.
- Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems (American Poets Project #9), by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Adrienne Rich. Another “selected poems” collection, this one was published by the Library of America.
- The Essential Muriel Rukeyser: Poems, by Muriel Rukeyser, edited and with an introduction by Natasha Trethewey. Yet another “selected poems” collection, this one is available as an audiobook, read by Tanya Eby.
- The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet Kaufman and Anne Herzog.
- The Book of the Dead, by Muriel Rukeyser, with an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore. This recent edition combines Rukeyser’s poem with an extensive discussion of the background to the work (originally envisioned as a combination of poetry and documentary photography).
- The Life of Poetry, by Muriel Rukeyser, with a foreword by Jane Cooper.
- The Muriel Rukeyser Era, by Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Another collection of Rukeyser’s prose, much of it previously unpublished.
- Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. A discussion of Rukeyser’s unpublished and incomplete works that also serves as a foretaste of Kennedy-Epstein’s forthcoming biography Mother Of Us All: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser.
- Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler Than Its Parts, by Muriel Rukeyser, with a foreword by Maria Popova. This is a forthcoming new edition of Rukeyser’s out-of-print biography of Gibbs.
- Other:
- Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive is an excellent online resource for more information about Rukeyser. The recent first issue of their Rukeyser Biannual newsletter contains, among other things, a bibliography of academic publications discussing Rukeyser.
- One Life, by Muriel Rukeyser. This 1957 biography of Wendell Wilkie is unfortunately not only out of print, but also not available anywhere online. The title echoes that of Willkie’s 1943 One World, the book he wrote after returning from his world tour.