Muriel Rukeyser

I suppose it could be said that we live in the second century of world wars, if we stretch that term to include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "wars on terror" in which the United States has been engaged since 2001. Were she still living, I suspect Muriel Rukeyser would agree. Certainly what she wrote in a poem written during the Vietnam War and simply called "Poem" applies to those wars as deeply and as troublingly as it does to World Wars I and II. 

Of those recent and ongoing wars in the greater Middle East, political scientist Andrew Bacevich writes, "What does the United States hope to achieve....? To pacify the region? To remake it in our image? To drain its stocks of petroleum? Or just keeping the lid on? However you define the war's aims, things have not gone well, which... suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come."

That likelihood surely brings to mind the madness Muriel Rukeyser describes in "Poem," and draws us powerfully into her compelling determination to construct peace, in and among ourselves if not in the world at large:

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

Muriel Rukeyser was a poet of intimacy and political protest, and made no
line of separation between the two. Adrienne Rich wrote of Rukeyser, "[Her] poetry is unequalled in the twentieth-century United States in its range of reference, its generosity of vision, and its energy. She pushes us, readers, writers, and participants in the life of our time, to enlarge our sense of what poetry is about in the world, and of the place of feelings and memory in politics.... Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

William Meredith wrote of Rukeyser in an interview for The Paris Review: "She was the first poet that I knew personally. I knew her when I was still an undergraduate. She was a very amazing human being and any traces of honesty in my life come from having seen how beautifully honest she was in administering her life and her poetry without any separation—you couldn't get a knife between the two things with her. The real influence was her human model of what a poet could be."

Poem

By Muriel Rukeyser

 

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. 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.