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
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.
world imagine built
A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
stories world molecules
The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
morning trying world
I will try to be non-violent one more day this morning, waking the world away in the violent day.
poetry would-be world
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
stories world atoms
The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.
truth world splits
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
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
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 ...