mainstay of the Translation Center, an organi-
zation that was trying to reclaim this wasteland
sector of American letters. She was also a force
for good in the 92nd Street YMHA poetry pro-
gram, which was in several ways a model for
what we wanted to do with American P.E.N.
Muriel had a special workshop going there;
instead of teaching poetry writing, as her peers
did, she taught poetry reading. When her friend,
Louise Bernikow, once asked her what she did
besides writing, Muriel said she was ‘‘mainly
reading poems with people: undergraduates; 2
year olds; dropouts; the old; the blind, etc.’’ She
was also reading a lot of poems by young poets;
she was a rarity in that way too, a ‘‘name’’ who
took the manuscripts that were thrust at her at
readings and meetings, who tried hard to get the
good ones published. She was so approachable:
that warm, steady look that took you in in the
way you liked to be seen, that smile which gave
you welcome, one which could easily be taken
for the smile of Fortune.
At the time we approached her on the
P.E.N. matter, Muriel was recovering from a
heart attack, the latest of her cardiovascular
problems, and looked it. Listening to her breath-
ing, I wondered whether we were asking too
much of her. Sitting there in her studio loft in
the artists’ housing project known as Westbeth
(where else would she live?), surrounded and
protected by the tools and arrangements and
icons of a working literary life, what did she
need us and our thorny issue and airy plans
for? But she listened to us intently and then, I
think, she held up her hand and said, ‘‘All right, I
know what needs to be done now. I’ll do it if
you’ll help me.’’
And so she did and so we did. The bureauc-
racy of P.E.N. at the time didn’t know what to
make of her and gave her a hard time. She didn’t
go through channels and agendas very well; as
Grace Paley says, ‘‘Muriel was like the ocean
instead of a stream or a puddle.’’ There was a
poet, Kim Chi Ha, in prison in South Korea.
Instead of sending letters and cables to Seoul,
Muriel sent herself. She went to see the author-
ities and when they wouldn’t let her visit Kim
Chi Ha in his cell, she went to the prison anyway
and stood outside in the mud and rain and bore
witness. Back home at the executive board meet-
ings, she also poured herself out. Somewhat
indifferent to the housekeeping problems—to
which her standard response was a wily ‘‘What
is the board’s pleasure?’’—she pressed on to the
heavy issues such as decentralizing P.E.N.
through regional centers and creating programs
for writers in the New York area. Her pet project
was a conference on ‘‘the life of the writer,’’ a
topic that had a kind of numinous meaning for
her but remained somewhat vague to the rest of
us. Without much support, she persisted and
brought it off in Washington, D.C. In her public
actions, as in her poetry, she trusted her vision-
ary gleam, a trust that made her, in the fullest
sense of the word, undiscourageable.
Gallant Muriel. The final few years beggar
description. Her health, which had always been
precarious, was devastated by a serious stroke,
by cataracts, and by her longtime nemesis, dia-
betes, ‘‘the Caligula of diseases,’’ as Richard
Selzer puts it. Still, as always, she did what she
could, writing poetry and bringing out herCol-
lected Poems,going her appointed rounds of
literary panels and juries and conferences and
keeping up her readings. As Grace Schulman
tells it, ‘‘Whenever poetry was being celebrated,
Muriel would somehow get there.’’ At one such
event, a group of poets was assembled on a stage;
Muriel arrived and then, walker and all, virtually
blind, she somehow hoisted herself up on that
stage, for that was where she belonged.
In one of her late poems, ‘‘Facing Sentenc-
ing’’ (she was about to go to jail for protesting
the war on the steps of the Senate), these lines
appear:
But fear is not to be feared
Numbness is To stand before my judge
Not knowing what I mean
Muriel was not a measured poet. Like
Whitman, a powerful early influence, she was
a sayer rather than a maker. Her mind ranged
and ranged, from aviation to zoology, from the
mines of West Virginia to the sacred caves of
India, from the writings of Akiba to the
speeches of Wendell Willkie. In herCollected
Poems,there is a series of portraits of the early
physicist Willard Gibbs, the painter Albert
Ryder, the aristocratic man of letters John Jay
Chapman, the labor organizer Ann Burlack
and the composer Charles Ives. Her verse is
typically open, notational, even documentary;
its rhythm comes from the onrushing movement
in her mind of the experience, from the flow of
her passion for the object. There are transcripts
of trials in her poems, the minutes of Congres-
sional hearings, detailed descriptions of silicosis.St. Roach