Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyserwas an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 December 1913
CountryUnited States of America
penalty
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
american-poet brought poems
Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
beware falls possible rest second talk
I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
atoms universe
The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms
reality shrinking world
dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.
feelings approach poetry-is
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
memories curves ideas
The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.
body language punctuation
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...
hollywood standards contempt
Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.
history buried lost
There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
distance men brave
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.
morning war insane
I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
flight contradiction
Flight is intolerable contradiction.
made our-lives
All the poems of our lives are not yet made.