28 Poetry for Students
ciety can move forward without set constructs, set
meanings for words, ideas and acts. The hot dog
man shrugs his shoulders. He is not a witness to
the revelation. It is not a big deal to him. His non-
chalance fuels the “I,” as the poem explores bina-
ries, or opposites. The poem asks what the world
would do if “war” bled into “peace” a little bit, or
“love” slipped just a tiny bit into “hate.” The “wit-
ness” in the poem, the “I,” is aggravated and maybe
a bit afraid, as if saying there must be meaning we
can all believe in. Rukeyser plays with the audi-
ence, suggests the “interplay” of words, and revels
in the fact that life offers this conundrum. “Love”
isin “hate.” “Violence” isin “non-violence.” In-
deed, how can there be one without the other? If
the world defines words according to their coun-
terparts, meanings seepover boundaries. Rukeyser
has fun with the reader, seeming to suggest that it
is time to lighten up. As she pokes at the “I,” she
is serious as well.
Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry,that
through poetry, “we are brought face to face with
our world and we plunge deeply into ourselves, to
a place where we sense the full value of the mean-
ings of emotions and ideas in their relations with
each other, and understand, in the glimpse of a mo-
ment, the freshness of things and their possibili-
ties.” In the sometimes ugly words of the penulti-
mate stanza, Rukeyser implies that words are at
play with and in each other. She lets the opposing
ideas breathe into one another and offer, in their
“interplay,” another layer of meaning.
The whole concept of opposites breathing into
each other is a source of great power for the mar-
ginalized. With the outrage of lost voice, there must
also be possibility. Rukeyser seems to offer herself,
as marginalized poet, that gift as well. The critic
Michele Ware, writes in “Opening the Gates:
Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness,” that
“Rukeyser’s work has been relegated until very re-
cently to a kind of critical back water reserved for
women writers long dismissed by a Modernist male
poetic sensibility.” If Rukeyser harbors outrage at
this neglect by a Western male dominated canon,
she has also used it to discover her own possibil-
ity. Ware claims that the general critical consensus
before 1974 was that Rukeyser’s work was too po-
litical, that her first person “posturings,” a word
used frequently by the critic M.L. Rosenthal, were
in love with themselves, and that the poems were
full of exhortation and public promises. The tide
changed after 1974, as Rukeyser’s name was men-
tioned in the ranks of female poets whose writing
succeeded in propelling them into the ranks of“myth makers.” Her optimism, which was once so
sharply criticized, became, as Michele Ware
claimed, “a feminist denial of the Modernist male
poetic system, a denial that attempts to defy limi-
tation.” Her writing is a ballad of orange and grape.
She defies the limitation of containers and allows
meanings to move through and reside within each
other.
In the final stanza of the poem, the opposing
words are gone. In their place is the moment de-
scribed in extreme. The place is East Harlem. There
is “garbage,” “a deep smile,” “rape.” With every
word and idea the reader is meant to feel or sense
the opposite, because the opposite is always in the
moment. There is possibility with outrage and out-
rage with possibility. They keep pouring into each
other, as orange is poured into grape. Rukeyser
brings life to the relations of word and meaning and
defines the poem through its opposites. In The Life
of Poetry,she wrote, “I have attempted to suggest
a dynamics of poetry, showing that a poem is not
its words or its images, any more than a symphony
is its notes or a river its drops of water. Poetry de-
pends on the moving relations within itself. It is an
art that lives in time expressing and evoking the
moving relation between the individual conscious-
ness and the world.” There is truth in “interplay,”
and a chance at reformation and transformation. It
is the experience of “Ballad of Orange and Grape,”
and an experience, Rukeyser seems to say, of a life
lived in poetry.
Source:Erika Taibl, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.David Kelly
David Kelly is an instructor of Creative Writ-
ing and Composition at two colleges in Illinois. In
the following essay, he examines how the apparent
weaknesses in a poem like “Ballad of Orange and
Grape” can actually help enforce the poem’s over-
all message.Relatively late in her long and illustrious life,
in her second-to-last completed collection of po-
etry, Muriel Rukeyser produced a poem, “Ballad of
Orange and Grape,” that was typical of her work.
In this piece, like her best poems, Rukeyser slides
effortlessly back and forth over the line that divides
formal verse from informal thought. She escapes
the categories that people rely on when they label
serious art and seal it off somewhere, so that it
won’t become mixed up with the personal musings
of someone who is just thinking with a pen in hand.
Getting this near to casualness, I believe, accountsBallad of Orange and Grape