in the ‘‘Annotations’’ and ‘‘Textual Notes.’’ Such
precision not only corrects the flaws of the earlier
Collected Poems;it also takes into consideration
Rukeyser’s own later critical reassessment of her
work.
By including a selection of Rukeyser’s juve-
nilia—seventeen poems she wrote as an adoles-
cent at Vassar and the Ethical Culture and
Fieldston schools—Kaufman and Herzog make
Rukeyser’s earliest work available, revealing the
poet’s fledgling experimentation with form and
development of an aesthetic and a voice that
were remarkably consistent throughout Rukeys-
er’s long career. The editors close the volume
with the last known published poem that
appeared after the 1978 Collected Poemsand
before Rukeyser’s death in 1980. According to
Rukeyser, ‘‘An Unborn Poet,’’ written for Alice
Walker (Rukeyser’s student at Sarah Lawrence
College), refers not to Walker but to Rukeyser
herself. A meditation on teaching, the connec-
tions between the past and the present, between
old poets and new, and the inspiration that
comes from the questioning creativity of youth,
this poem moves between memory and possibil-
ity and signals a rekindling of Rukeyser’s poetic
power: ‘‘Alice, landscaper of grief, love, anger,
bring me to birth, / bring back my poems. No.
Bring me my next poem!’’ It is comforting and
satisfying to know that Rukeyser ended her life
as a poet with the same generous and optimistic
vision with which she began it.
For Rukeyser scholars, Kaufman and Herzog
have opened another door, as they did with their
1999 critical collection,‘‘How Shall We Tell Each
Other of the Poet?’’: The Life and Writing of Muriel
Rukeyser.Their thorough and thought-provoking
editorial annotations and explanations, drawing
on biography with the help of Jan Heller Levi,
literary criticism, interviews, and the fullness of
Rukeyser’s own genre-defying body of work,
makeThe Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeysera
rich mine of resources for future study of a poet of
unquestionable importanceandvaluetotwenti-
eth-century American literature.
Source:Michele S. Ware, Review ofThe Collected Poems
of Muriel Rukeyser,inCollege Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2,
Spring 2006, pp. 199–201.
Ted Solotaroff
In the following essay, written in memory of
Rukeyser, Solotaroff calls ‘‘St. Roach’’ one of
Rukeyser’s best poems.
When I first and best knew Muriel, five or
six years ago, she was a large, somewhat top-
heavy woman in her early 60s with a broad,
crafty Russian face—the kind you might see
behind the counter of a Jewish deli—an infirm
walk and a full heart. She was one of those
people who come across immediately, which I
remember thinking was surprising in a poet as
famous as she was. Fame, at least literary fame,
tends to make people cagey, not to mention the
conflicts that maintain them as poets and make
them, in person, usually wear a sleeve on their
hearts.
Not Muriel. She arrived before you on a
wave of feeling each time you saw her, a bit
disheveled from the ride. At least that’s how I
remember our meetings. What brought us
together was a matter of literary politics. A fac-
tion at P.E.N. needed someone to stand for pres-
ident at the last moment. It doesn’t pay to go
into the reasons, which I’m not nearly as con-
vinced of now as I was then, but anyway we felt
we needed a writer who was not only renowned
but also one whose career would immediately
have a commanding appropriateness for the
post: a veteran literary freedom fighter. Some
of us were also hoping for an activist who
might get American P.E.N. off the dime of a
certain dated genteelness on which we felt it
had been languishing and make it a center of
literary community in New York.
For both jobs Muriel seemed a terrific
choice. She was one of the few literary radicals
from the 1930s who hadn’t lost faith in her social
conscience: that special blend of outrage and
tenderness which was always on tap in her
poetry—‘‘the desperate music/poverty makes.’’
Her radicalism still prompted her active engage-
ment with the causes and movements of the
1960s and early 1970s as it had in Spain and in
the coal-belt factory and mining towns and in the
Deep South thirty years ago. At the same time,
she was already a kind of one-woman center of
energy and community for poetry. She was aIN HER BODY AND IN HER MIND, IN HER LIFE
AND IN HER ART, SHE FOUGHT AGAINST NUMBNESS.’’St. Roach