Contents:
If we're lucky we have the poems, but we don't usually have the speech, the context from which the poems sprang.
So The Life of Poetry is something even rarer than , the year it was published. We're in the wolf's den: The Life of Poetry --this entirely inappropriate document, this leftist manifesto, this Modernist tract touting poetry as a "theater of total human response"--came out during the McCarthy era yes, she was investigated. Rukeyser was not of her time, not in the correct way. The book is in part a response to the New Critics of the forties and fifties, who rejected her socialist leanings, her need to write poems "about" crying babies and un reconstituted nature, and even the occasional remark from God.
Yet because of Rukeyser' s wily, independent aesthetics, the lefties didn't accept her either. So she created a book that spoke for her. It's one of those historical documents the last two titles are still out of print of a woman taking space and refusing to sit down. Muriel Rukeyser unspools one of the most passionate arguments I've ever read for the notion that art creates meeting places, that poetry creates democracy. We watch it happen in her urgent prose:. We can make autobiographies of a parade of symbols.
The drum, the sidewalk, the river, the tower, the father, the car, the aunt, the chauffeur, the sister, the mother, the book, the piano, the harbor, the slum, the sand hill, the lake, the cement mixer, the sacred dome, the school door, the museum stair, the field of coarse grass, the golf green, the Bridge, the poem written in the dark, the unsolved murder, the corner whore, stain on the lab ceiling, the granite mountain under whose cliff the adolescent all night lay, waiting to climb in the morning light.
Such light and dark optimism. It's a staunch reminder at a moment when global culture is evincing such a horror of the small. And poetry's so tiny it's universal: A famous painter might be invited by The New York Times to give us a tour of the Met, to show us what he knows, but for poets there's no such building, or even bookstore. It's simply the world. The Life of Poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of Rukeyser's interests, the niches she found herself in.
She liked this century, and her liking was not wholly abstract.
Her frequent allusions to film, for instance, are grounded in experience, not theory: There you sit in a bright cubicle, with a stack of shallow cans of film at your elbow, a red china-pencil in your hand, your face bent to the viewer of the Movieola, where the film is passing, enlarged to the plainness of a snapshot. Rukeyser was an upwardly mobile New York Jew, a Vassar dropout who came into the public eye at 21 with her Yale Younger Poets Award-winning Theories of Flight inspired by her flying lessons-yes, she also flew planes.
She was a journalist and bisexual, a poet arrested in Alabama at the Scottsboro trials; she traveled to Hanoi; she was president of PEN, a single mother, a stroke victim, a science biographer, a historian and a teacher. Rukeyser was also a consummate a workshop leader, spouting her practice all over the place for more than ten years. In her academic career, she always managed to leave before tenure set in--which sounds downright wolfish to me.
Besides poetry eighteen volumes, and good; what's available today is A Muriel Rukeyser Reader from Norton , she also wrote biographies and plays, children's books, translations, screenplays and a novel The Orgy --it's an oeuvre wider than most, organic and self-propelled. It would be exhausting if it weren't so pleasurable. If you pick up her work, you will read it.
Kenneth Rexroth called Rukeyser the greatest poet of her exact generation. Which made me wonder exactly which generation that was. She seemed to be sitting pretty in that school, but oddly she wasn't passed down. She's barely represented in either the academic or the experimental poetic canon, Women have protected her no small task. Though out of print, her poems nonetheless continue to be taught at Sarah Lawrence and Vassar, where she herself taught.
Her students have had a hand in republishing her work; one used a line from a Rukeyser poem to name a new book, The Wild Good. All tangible evidence of how female literary networks operate. And the fact that her influence continues without inclusion in anthologies or persistent are canonization in the world of men is, well, awesome. There were a few naysayers, of course. Former Vassar classmate Elizabeth Bishop groaned wearily that Rukeyser's "life is one heroic saga of fighting for the underdog: The Life of Poetry is a book about fear, about what a culture has lost through its failure to use its intimate powers.
Poetry is the emotional locus of that intimacy, but Rukeyser means sex, too:. 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?
This is an immensely quotable book everywhere you open it, chock-full of radiant abstractions that make glorious sense as the reader begins to inhabit Rukeyser's flow of intense musical rhetoric. She is the excessive ancestor of Adrienne Rich, She takes a deep breath. The book is a podium. In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power.
And this luck is more than it seems to be: It's pure American Pragmatism. The penultimate chapter, "Out of childhood," resembles a procession of film clips, and it feels like an intellectual biography with pictures. It's a long female life already. With its double wings and a frail body. You could feel it in the back of your neck. The Freedom of it. So many of her "recognitions" are of the startlingly mundane, that reveal the capacity to experience, so that literature becomes the act of being alive for those who read it. It's great to come to such an American book, a World War II book--the intimacy of understanding firsthand that Franklin Roosevelt fearlessness.
So we arrive; the moment of history is a meeting place. It's like the shared sense of danger in a darkening theater: Quinn from The Provincetown Banner November 7, Assume it's true that there are only two kinds of people in the world, those who really and truly believe in poetry, and those who simply don't get it.
Muriel Rukeyser's "The Life of Poetry", just reissued by Paris Press almost 50 years after its first publication, is a must-read for both groups. A restored classic that, like most of her over 15 volumes of poetry and other prose works including two Plays and a biography of scientist William Gibbs had fallen out of print, Rukeyser's "Life of Poetry" is a heartfelt, majestic testimonial, entirely without the shortcomings of its genre. Rukeyser avoids the self-serving agendas that have underlain even the most thoughtful defenses of poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe's famous theory explains, among other things, why his poem "The Raven" is a perfect poem, and T. Eliot's writings commend erudition and conscious complexity, the signature features of Eliot's own style. But Rukeyser's argument is a more wholly democratic defense of poetry.
Rukeyser also avoids the tendency of many Poets to write about their field with a poetic ambiguity, which is not to say that Rukeyser's book is not "poetic. Rukeyser's unrelenting and comprehensive support of that proposition, through a survey that takes in science, psychology, film, theater, music, and military history, is what makes the book so revolutionary, so shocking, so disruptive.
Mainly it's a collection of talks Rukeyser gave in the forties, in America at a time of war. Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! We invoke a rigorous positive, that will enable us to imagine our choices, and to make them. She thinks about science. She thinks about meter, rhythm, and breathing. But it appears that among the great conflicts of this culture, the conflict in our attitude toward poetry stands clearly lit.
You cannot read this book and return to a complacent existence. Rukeyser's definition of poetry, though eloquent, is not new. Poetry is, she writes, "an approach to the truth of feeling. Rukeyser proves to be a brilliant observer not just of poetry but of American culture, which she both indicts and hopes to save. Siding with nature against culture Rukeyser believes that people have a need, a hunger, for poetry --"wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been meaning all along"--but also thinks that the fear of poetry is a complicated and civilized repression of that fear and an active force in American life.
The best most Americans get, she argues, are the "commercial" or "amusement arts," as she labels American film, theater and music. They feed but don't nourish that hunger, largely because they target an artificial conglomerate known as the "audience" rather than individuals. An example, in Rukeyser's own words: For all the directness of Rukeyser's basic argument, however, the book is still a challenge to read, partly because she refers to a wide range of artistic and intellectual figures. This is not just a book about poetry; it's Rukeyser's grand explanation of everything, like Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" or Darwin's "Origin of Species" presented with an epic, authoritative some might even say biblical tone.
Rukeyser's work will offer today's reader an alternate, almost forgotten framework for evaluating the history and tradition of American poetry. Since William Carlos Williams labeled T. Eliot's "The Waste Land" the greatest tragedy in American letters on the ground that it gave the poem back to the academy , there's hardly been a treatise on American poetry that doesn't posit Eliot synonymous with erudition and academia and Williams a poet of the everyday, whose verses were short and accessible as the end-points of a spectrum, and evaluate all other poets in reference to them.
Rukeyser's parameter poets, however, are Walt Whitman whom she calls the poet of possibility and Herman Melville her poet of outrage a most refreshing and enlightening changing of the guard. We live, it seems, in a time bereft of vision. Wars break out like fiery pus-filled blisters nobody knows how to heal. Politicians are assumed to be infinitely corrupt, and the media love it when this turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idealisms of the past--the battles for integration and civil rights, the peace movement, feminism, the hope of eradicating poverty the notion remember?
To read the paper or watch the box is to be filled with sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs, as Keats might say. Post modernism, explains one witty commentator, is modernism without the hope. Fifty years ago, the poet Muriel Rukeyser knew all this, and rejected despair. One of her poems begins, "I lived in the first century of world wars. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Strive to be happy. Davies This short poem could not be more pertinent to the world of today if it tried. Make space in your life for this simplest act of leisure. You may ask yourself what the point of life is if all you do is repeat what others have done before you. This poem serves to remind us that the world never tires of creation and that you are a creator. It talks of great acts and great deeds, but also of love and romance and laughter and loyalty — things that every man or woman is capable of.
Fleming Stepping away from the famous and classic works, we find this gem of a poem by an amateur writer just goes to show that anyone can create pieces of great meaning. Much like those more well-known poems above, it talks us through how we ought to try to live our lives. To learn while still a child What this life is meant to be. To overcome the tragedies, To survive the hardest times.
To face those moments filled with pain, And still manage to be kind. With those who wander in the dark, To love with all my might. To still stand up with courage, Though standing on my own. To still get up and face each day, Even when I feel alone. To try to understand the ones That no one cares to know. And make them feel some value When the world has let them go. To be an anchor, strong and true, That person loyal to the end.
To be a constant source of hope To my family and my friends.
To live a life of decency, To share my heart and soul. To make the most of every day By giving all I have to give.
To take what God has given me And make it so much more. To live a life that matters, To be someone of great worth. To love and be loved in return And make my mark on Earth. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than to-day. Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. Be a hero in the strife!
Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,— act in the living Present! Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait. I Like your all poems but Please can you make me only one poem this best day of my life. God is the one and only creator Who makes the all, so All creatures has been ruined by time. A Psalm Of Life.