This week on December 15th is the birthday of the late Muriel Rukeyser, who Adrienne Rich described as one of the 20th-century's greatest integrators of personal and social themes in poetry (from the Introduction to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, Jan Heller Levi, ed., Norton, 1994). If she is not as well known to readers as that commendation ought to suggest, it may be partly because her work was not only controversial, inviting scathing hostility and huge appreciation during her lifetime, but also (as Rich points out) extremely difficult to categorize. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Meg Schoerke at San Francisco State University for my introduction to Rukeyser when I took her 20th-century American poets course in 1998. I owe another debt of gratitude to the universe for the excellent coincidence of later having Muriel's grandson Jacob Rukeyser as a law school classmate. I have to forego my impulse to speak with formality to and of my elders (and to Jacob's, in this case) and give in to the deeper urge to just call her Muriel. I don't think this indulgence is unjustified. In the introduction to her Reader, editor Jan Heller Levi says everyone (with the exception of Levi herself) - friends, strangers, former students - called her Muriel. It is impossible to read Muriel's work and not be pulled into a kind of intimacy with her and her subjects. She insists. For example:
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
Orpheus
When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask, on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy, it was a mask; when I wrote of the god, fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song, it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself. There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child beside me among the doctors, and a word of rescue from the great eyes. No more masks! No more mythologies! Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand, the fragments join in me with their own music.
So you get the idea, hopefully, of what I mean by 'insisting.'
