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
passion play giving
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
vocabulary work-out silence
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
memories self long
In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
thinking dying desire
Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.
creation
Exchange is creation.
poetry possibility outrage
Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know ...
poetry form
the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
world imagine built
A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
speak fragile
I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?
stories world molecules
The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
artist wife four
Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
rocks blood color
The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals, water to sound, fire to form: life flickers uncounted into the supple arms of love.
morning trying world
I will try to be non-violent one more day this morning, waking the world away in the violent day.
flames light movement
I am haunted by interrupted acts, introspective as a leper, enchanted by a repulsive clew, a gross and fugitive movement of the limbs. Is this the love that shook the lights to flame?