Muriel Rukeyser

Do you want to talk to us a little bit about where you encountered the poem, what it's about, and then we're going to have you read it for us.

Yes, that poem is by the very, very great, the very mighty Muriel Rukeyser, a person who was mighty through the word, poetry, memoir, nonfiction, plays.

She wrote all kinds of things, but also mighty in her humanity and in the ways that she wanted always to stand alongside people whose experiences were not necessarily her own experiences.

and to bear witness, especially to injustice.

And Dr. Martin Luther King is putting together in his speeches the connections between racial discrimination and and economic exploitation and the war.

Muhammad Ali is boldly refusing military service and stripped of his heavyweight championship, which was an extraordinary act, a public act of courage.

So Muriel Rukeyser writes this poem that I'm about to read to you.

And I've always known it, but I think that in the last several years.

And so that's what brought the threads of the book together and occasioned it coming out in this form.

And of course, what a startling way to open with a poem from Muriel Rukeyser from 1967.

If you'd said nothing about it, you know, the, the time, I would have read it, as I'm sure many will read, as though it, she just wrote it last week.

It sounds like today.

Absolutely.

I mean, Muriel Rukeyser is my...

There are many guiding lights in this book, but she opens and closes the circle of this book.

She was a Jewish feminist, radical poet, biographer, memoirist, theorist, reader, witness bearer, who in the early 1930s, when she was at Vassar College, 19 years old, she left college to go to Alabama to bear witness and write about the Scottsboro Boys trial.

You know, there was a poet, the name just escapes me right now, it'll come to me, but she wrote a poem in which there's a line that says, the universe is made of stories.

And Muriel Rukeyser, that's her name.

And I think that if you take that seriously, and I do, because that is something that I've explored in my own practice and and have thought about quite a bit, if you take that seriously, that really becomes a basis for creating a greater sense of community with other people, because you have your story and I have my story.

That doesn't necessarily lead to relativism, because I continue to maintain my story.

Storytelling is the core of humanity.

If you think about it, I think it was the author Muriel Rukeyser who said the universe is not made of atoms, it's made of stories.

A story in its simplest form is just a sequence of what happened.

It's a documentation of what happened.

They're versions of truth.

So I know there's another poet, Muriel Rukeyser, who has a line in one of her poems, what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

And I just thought, well, do we want it to split open? That's like, it's like a bomb.

You know, the truth is a dangerous thing.

Whether it's the lyrics of songs or whether it's Emily Dickinson or whether it's writing my own work, it's helped me to do those things.

I want to go back for sure to this idea of the status of women in the 21st century.

And I also have in my head, you brought up Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser, and I'm thinking of her poem, Waiting for Icarus.

I'll put it in the show notes, but it's brilliant.

You agreed to read something because there's so much writing in this book that, as I said in the break leading up to this segment, is things that you consider among the most profound things you've ever read.

And one of them at the start of the book was something written by Muriel Rukeyser in 1967.

It's just called Poem, but in parentheses, I lived in the first century of world wars.

Do you want to dive in or do you want to set it up?

We would try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to let go the means to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

The great Muriel Rukeyser.

That's the first poem you write about in the book.

June Jordan and Audre Lorde are both from Harlem.

James Merrill, Merwin, Howard Nemiroff, Michael Palmer, and Muriel Rukeyser are all born in New York City.

And Delmore Schwartz is in Brooklyn.

And Richard Wilbur is New York City.

The rebel is... someone who rails against the injustices that she faces.

And what interested me about the two rebels I write about, Vera Brittain, whom I've talked about a little bit already, and Muriel Rukeyser, the American poet, is both the rebellions they fight for and the moments where they're conventional.

So if you're a Britain one and they're the only two mothers in the book.

So that struck me as very surprising, right? Because I think the stereotype of the rebel is really a kind of untouchable Joan of Arc, you know, a formidable, um, hatchet-faced woman.

And what interests me about The Rebel is this idea that courage is a decision you have to make many times over, right? And that you're constantly reminding yourself.

And so Muriel Rukeyser was a queer woman.

She had affairs with men and women.

She had a child.

Pause for Peace.

Poem, I Lived in the First Century of World Wars, featuring a poem by Muriel Rukeyser.

I hope you enjoy this midweek pause for peace.

Each Wednesday, I pair an image with a poem, a little something for your heart and your nervous system.

This Muriel Rukeyser poem, long one of my favorites, first published in 1968, shows how things haven't really changed at all.

Poem, I Lived in the First Century of World Wars by Muriel Rukeyser.

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane.