Muriel Rukeyser held a visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language. She earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty, and racism. Her eloquent poetry of witness-of the Scottsboro Nine, the Spanish Civil War, the poisoning of the Gauley Bridge laborers-split the darkness covering a shameful world.
In addition to the complete texts of her twelve previously published books, this volume also features new poems discovered by the editors; Rukeyser's translations, including the first English translations of Octavio Paz's work; early work by Rukeyser not previously published in book form; and the controversial book-length poem Wake Island. An introduction by the editors traces Rukeyser's life and literary reputation and complements discerning annotations and textual notes to the poems.
"An event to loudly celebrate—a new collected poems of Muriel Rukeyser, who opened much of the forbidden territory where poets can now move with ease. Here, for a new generation, the full range of the capacious poet who gave twentieth-century women’s poetry its mottos and its most audacious exemplar, and poetry of witness and moral passion its most ardent and urgent American voice."
—Eleanor Wilner
<p. vi, no folio, p. vii, cont'd > Contents Editor's Notes 000 Acknowledgments 000 Introduction 000 Theory of Flight (1935) 1 Poem Out of Childhood Poem out of Childhood 000 Song for Dead Children 000 In a Dark House 000 Effort at Speech between Two People 000 Notes for a Poem 000 Place-Rituals 000 Tradition of This Acre 000 Ritual of Blessing 000 Wooden Spring 000 Sonnet 000 Letter, Unposted 000 Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures 000 Wedding Presents 000 Three Sides of a Coin 000 Breathing Landscape 000 Four in a Family 000 This House, This Country 000 2 Theory of Flight Preamble 000 The Gyroscope 000 The Lynchings of Jesus 000 1 Passage to Godhead 000 2 The Committee-Room 000 3 The Trial 000 The Tunnel 000 The Structure of the Plane 000 1 The Structure of the Plane 000 2 The Strike 000 3 The Lover 000 Night Flight : New York 000 Theory of Flight 000 3 The Blood Is Justified For Memory 000 Life and Works 000 Holy Dying 000 Ritual for Death 000 City of Monuments 000 Study in a Late Subway 000 Child and Mother 000 Eccentric Motion 000 Sundays, They Sleep Late 000 Thousands of Days 000 The Surrounded 000 Burlesque 000 Movie 000 Metaphor to Action 000 Citation for Horace Gregory 000 Cats and a Cock 000 The Blood Is Justified 000 U.S. 1 (1938) 1 The Book of the Dead The Road 000 West Virginia 000 Statement: Phillippa Allen 000 Gauley Bridge 000 The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones 000 Praise of the Committee 000 Mearl Blankenship 000 Absalom 000 The Disease 000 George Robinson: Blues 000 Juanita Tinsley 000 The Doctors 000 The Cornfield 000 Arthur Peyton 000 Alloy 000 Power 000 The Dam 000 The Disease: After-Effects 000 The Bill 000 The Book of the Dead 000 2 Night-Music A Flashing Cliff 000 Girl at the Play 000 Burning Bush 000 Eel 000 Homage to Literature 000 The Handclap 000 Trophies 000 Panacea 000 In Hades, Orpheus 000 The Drowning Young Man 000 Boy with His Hair Cut Short 000 Course 000 More of a Corpse than a Woman 000 Three Black Women 000 Formosa 000 Night-Music 000 Time Exposures 000 The Child Asleep 000 Adventures, Midnight 000 Night-Music 000 Driveway 000 Lover as Fox 000 Gift-Poem 000 Woman and Emblems 000 Woman and Bird 000 The Birthday 000 Woman and Music 000 Outpost 000 3 Two Voyages The Cruise 000 Mediterranean 000 A Turning Wind (1939) 1 Moment of Proof Reading Time : 1 Minute 26 Seconds 000 Song, the Brain-Coral 000 Target Practice 000 Otherworld 000 Landing at Liverpool 000 The Island 000 Otherworld 000 Nuns in the Wind 000 For Fun 000 Correspondences 000 Democritus Laughed 000 Tree of Days 000 1/26/39 000 Correspondences 000 Noguchi 000 Seventh Avenue 000 The Shortest Way Home 000 Palos Verdes Cliffs 000 Paper Anniversary 000 From the Duck-Pond to the Carousel 000 Asylum Song 000 The Victims, a Play for the Home 000 M-Day's Child 000 Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini 000 Judith 000 2 Lives "The risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named" 000 Gibbs 000 Ryder 000 Chapman 000 Ann Burlak 000 Ives 000 Wake Island (1942) 1 "PROOF OF AMERICA! A fire on the sea" 000 2 "These are the brave of our time" 3 "This battle is not finished" Beast in View (1944) 000 One Soldier 000 1 Beast in View Ajanta 000 1 The Journey 000 2 The Cave 000 3 Les Tendresses Bestiales 000 4 Black Blood 000 5 The Broken World 000 Mortal Girl 000 Child in the Great Wood 000 The Meeting 000 The Key 000 Darkness Music 000 Song 000 Shooting Gallery 000 Suicide Blues 000 Wreath of Women 000 Madboy's Song 000 Drunken Girl 000 Love and Its Doors and Windows 000 The Minotaur 000 Gift-Poem 000 Holy Family 000 Who in One Lifetime 000 from "To the Unborn Child" 000 Leg in a Plaster Cast 000 Bubble of Air 000 Sea Mercy 000 Long Past Moncada 000 Chapultepec Park--1 000 Chapultepec Park--2 000 A Game of Ball 000 Gold Leaf 000 All Souls 000 Evening Plaza, San Miguel 000 Beast in View 000 2 Letter to the Front 000 1 "Women and poets see the truth arrive" 000 2 "Even during war, moments of delicate peace" 000 3 "They called us to a change of heart" 000 4 Sestina 000 5 "Much later, I lie in a white seaport night" 000 6 "Home thoughts from home; we read you every day" 000 7 "To be a Jew in the twentieth century" 000 8 "Evening, bringing me out of the government building" 000 9 "Among all the waste there are the intense stories" 000 10 "Surely it is time for the true grace of women" 000 3 The Soul and Body of John Brown 000 The Green Wave (1948) "Let poems and bodies love and be given to air" 000 Water Night 000 Eyes of Night-Time 000 This Place in the Ways 000 Song, from "Mr. Amazeen on the River" 000 Cloud, Airs, Carried Me Away 000 Salamander 000 His Head Is Full of Faces 000 Mrs. Walpurga 000 A Certain Music 000 The Motive of All of It 000 Green Limits 000 The Children's Orchard 000 Christmas Eve 000 Crayon House 000 A Charm for Cantinflas 000 Traditional Tune 000 Foghorn in Horror 000 Summer, the Sacramento 000 Speech of the Mother, from The Middle of the Air 000 Then I Saw What the Calling Was 000 Translations: Six Poems by Octavio Paz The Bird 000 Poet's Epitaph 000 Spark 000 Two Bodies 000 The Street 000 Lovers 000 Rari from the Marquesas Rari for Tahia and Piu 000 Rari for O'Otua 000 A True Confession 000 Careful of the Day 000 Rari for Hepuheku 000 Rari 000 Rari to Encourage Youth 000 Rari, to Be Bothered by Mosquitoes 000 Not Before I Fall Asleep 000 Easter Eve 1945 Easter Eve 1945 000 Private Life of the Sphinx 000 Nine Poems for the unborn child 000 Orpheus (1949) 1 "The mountaintop stands in silence a minute after the murder" 000 2 "Scattered. The fool of things. For here is Orpheus" 000 3 "Standing in silence on the mountaintop, the trees incline" 000 Song 000 Elegies (1949) 000 First Elegy. Rotten Lake 000 Second Elegy. Age of Magicians 000 Third Elegy. The Fear of Form 000 Fourth Elegy. The Refugees 000 Fifth Elegy. A Turning Wind 000 Sixth Elegy. River Elegy 000 Seventh Elegy. Dream-Singing Elegy 000 Eighth Elegy. Children's Elegy 000 Ninth Elegy. The Antagonists 000 Tenth Elegy. Elegy in Joy 000 Body of Waking (1958) 1 Haying before Storm 000 Phaneron 000 The Young Girl of the Mississippi Valley 000 A Birth 000 King's Mountain 000 Mother Garden's Round 000 Rite 000 Ringling 000 After Their Quarrel 000 Tree 000 Night Feeding 000 The Return 000 Unborn Song 000 The Two Illuminations 000 F. O. M. 000 Exile of Music 000 On the Death of Her Mother 000 "Make and be eaten, the poet says" 000 Hero Speech 000 The Watchers 000 A Ballad Theme 000 Asleep and Awake 000 Of Money. And the Past. 000 "Long enough. Long enough" 000 The Loan 000 Pouring Milk Away 000 Children, the Sandbar, that Summer 000 Born in December 000 The Sixth Night: Waking 000 Nevertheless the Moon 000 Speed, We Say 000 The Birth of Venus 000 The Place at Alert Bay 000 Voices of Waking 000 Divining Water 000 2 Translations: Octavio Paz "The hand of day opens" 000 "At daybreak go looking for your newborn name" 000 Fable 000 Day 000 Proverbs 000 "In her splendor islanded" 000 "Like ivy the creeper with a thousand hands" 000 Life of the Poet 000 The Prisoner 000 from Sun Stone 000 3 Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter 000 1 "They face us in sea-noon sun, just as he saw them waiting" 000 2 How to Impress Massachusetts 000 3 Three Nights I Dreamed 000 4 Kings and Contemporaries 000 5 The Pickle, the Temple 000 6 The Kind of Woman 000 7 Guessing Time 000 4 Are You Born?--I 000 "Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters" 000 "The tree of rivers seen and forgotten" 000 "The power of war leads to a plan of lives" 000 "A tree of rivers flowing through our lives" 000 "The sea has opened, the limit of his dream" 000 Powerplant 000 "In the last hour of night, a zebra racing dawn" 000 Fields Where We Slept 000 Portrait of a Man, with a Background of Holdings 000 "A red bridge fastening this city to the forest" 000 "Power never dominion" 000 "The sky is as black as it was when you lay down" 000 "On your journey you will come to a time of waking" 000 "This is the net of begetting and belief" 000 Body of Waking 000 "Sounds of night in the country of the opposites" 000 Willkie in The Gulliver 000 "Then full awake you will recognize the voice" 000 "In your time, there have been those who spoke clearly" 000 "No one ever walking this our only earth, various, very clouded" 000 Are You Born?--2 Waterlily Fire (1962) The Speaking Tree 000 To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost 000 For a Mexican Painter 000 A Song of Another Tribe 000 Song 000 Waterlily Fire 000 1 The Burning 000 2 The Island 000 3 Journey Changes 000 4 Fragile 000 5 The Long Body 000 The Speed of Darkness (1968) 1 Clues The Poem as Mask 000 Orpheus 000 What Do I Give You? 000 The Transgress 000 The Conjugation of the Paramecium 000 Junk-Heap at Murano 000 Clues 000 In Our Time 000 Double Dialogue : Homage to Robert Frost 000 The Six Canons 000 Forerunners 000 Orgy 000 The Overthrow of One O'Clock at Night 000 Among Roses 000 What I See 000 Believing in Those Inexorable Laws 000 Song : Love in Whose Rich Honor 000 Niobe Now 000 Song : The Star in the Nets of Heaven 000 Air 000 Gift 000 Cries from Chiapas 000 The War Comes into My Room 000 Delta Poems 000 Spirals and Fugues 000 Anemone 000 Fighting for Roses 000 For My Son 000 Poem 000 The Power of Suicide 000 The Seeming 000 Song from Puck Fair 000 Not Yet 000 Landscape with Wave Approaching 000 Segre Song 000 Bunk Johnson Blowing 000 Cannibal Bratuscha 000 What Have You Brought Home from the Wars? 000 One Month 000 Silence of Volcanoes 000 What They Said 000 A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida 000 The Blue Flower 000 Woman as Market 000 Forgetting and Remembering Word of Mouth 000 1 The Return 000 2 Word of Mouth 000 Endless 000 2 Games The Backside of the Academy 000 Mountain : One from Bryant 000 The Flying Red Horse 000 3 The Outer Banks 000 4 Lives Akiba 000 The Way Out 000 for the Song of Songs 000 The Bonds 000 Akiba Martyr 000 The Witness 000 Käthe Kollwitz 000 1 "Held between wars" 000 2 "Woman as gates, saying" 000 3 "Held among wars, watching" 000 4 Song : The Calling-Up 000 5 Self-Portrait 000 5 The Speed of Darkness 000 Breaking Open (1973) 1 Searching / Not Searching Waking This Morning 000 Despisals 000 What Do We See? 000 Looking at Each Other 000 Desdichada 000 Voices 000 Fire 000 Waiting for Icarus 000 from City of Paradise 000 The Question 000 In Her Burning 000 Rondel 000 More Clues 000 Myth 000 Searching / Not Searching 000 1 "What kind of woman goes searching and searching?" 000 2 Miriam : The Red Sea 000 3 For Dolci 000 4 Concrete 000 5 Brecht's Galileo 000 6 Reading the Kieu 000 7 The Floor of Ocean 000 8 H. F. D. 000 9 The Artist as Social Critic 000 10 The President and the Laser Bomb 000 11 Not Searching 12 The Question 13 "Searching/not searching. To make closeness" 14 "What did I see? What did I not see?" A Simple Experiment 000 Along History 000 Boys of These Men Full Speed 000 All the Little Animals 000 Next 000 Two Years 000 Iris 000 2 Orange and Grape Ballad of Orange and Grape Rock Flow, River Mix Martin Luther King, Malcolm X Looking Don Baty, the Draft Resister Te Hanh : Long-Ago Garden Welcome from War Facing Sentencing Secrets of American Civilization Wherever Bringing A Louis Sonnet After Melville The Writer Gradus Ad Parnassum From a Play : Publisher's Song In the Night the Sound Woke Us In the Underworld Afterwards Flying to Hanoi It Is There The Running of the Grunion Sacred Lake 3 Northern Poems Songs of the Barren Grounds 1 The Old Days 2 Inland, Away 3 I'm Here Again 4 Not Much Good 5 My Breath I Recognize This Song The Black Ones, the Great Ones Trout Fishing How Lovely It Is The Word-Fisher Stroking Songs A Girl for a Boy--Stroking Song The Baby on the Mountain--Stroking Song The Wiping Moss from the Ruins Stroking Songs, Childhood Songs Being Born Shooting Star 4 Breaking Open Breaking Open Columbus Burning the Dreams Death and the Dancer Rational Man The Hostages The Gates (1976) 1 St. Roach Dream-Drumming Double Ode Painters Rune How We Did It Islands Blue Spruce Artifact Ms. Lot Boys in the Branches Song : Lying in Daylight Hypnogogic Figure The Lost Romans Canal For Kay Boyle Resurrection of the Right Side The Wards The Sun-Artist Poem White Page White Page Poem Fable Neruda, the Wine Before Danger Song : Remembering Movies Work, for the Day Is Coming Recovering Parallel Invention Poem Not to Be Printed, Not to Be Said, Not to Be Thought Back Tooth Destruction of Grief Trinity Churchyard Burnishing, Oakland The Iris-Eaters Slow Death of the Dragon Mendings Then 2 The Gates 1 "Waiting to leave all day I hear the words" 2 "Walking the world to find the poet of these cries" 3 New Friends 4 "The Cabinet minister speaks of liberation" 5 "Among the days" 6 The Church of Galilee 7 The Dream of Galilee 8 Mother as Pitchfork 9 "You grief woman you gave me a scarlet coverlet" 10 "Air fills with fear and the kinds of fear" 11 "Long ago, soon after my son's birth" 12 "For that I cannot name the names" 13 "Crucified child--is he crucified? he is tortured" 14 "So I became very dark very large" 15 "All day the rain" Juvenilia Antigone Cities of the Morning Autumn in the Garden The Ballad of the Missing Lines November Sketches To a Lady Turning Middle-Aged Place-Poems: New York Fourteenth Street The New School for Social Research Sheridan Square Conversation The New Bridge Park Avenue College Special Empire State Tower "Dear place, sweet home" For an Aesthete Pastorale No. 2 A New Poem An Unborn Poet Abbreviations Annotations 000 Textual Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index of Titles 000 Index of First Lines 000
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