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for the unevenness of Rukeyser’s reputation since
her death; she made poetry seem too easy.
A poem like “Ballad of Orange and Grape”
seems to only touch on any sort of artistic design
when it wants to, or when it remembers to, but not
with a strong enough structure to make readers con-
fident that the author is in control. As with all of
Rukeyser’s best work, her detractors can believe
that those who like the poet’s work are simple peo-
ple able to vaguely recognize occasional rhythm
and rhyme and think that nice thoughts are nice.
Her supporters, on the other hand, are surprised to
see how many people fail to understand that under
the guise of simplicity Rukeyser was a wise old
fox.
The best thing that can be said about any artis-
tic work, and this poem in particular, is that it takes
its own circumstances into account and includes the
readers’ feelings about the work into their under-
standing of it. This is a poem about division, about
dichotomies, about those lines that humans men-
tally draw in order to understand, or to control, or
to conquer. Any sense that it doesn’t “belong” with
serious poetry helps to draw attention to its point.
One thing often mentioned about Rukeyser’s
work is the way she used it to bring factions to-
gether. In the preface to her Collected Poems,she
used a basic example of how surprising it might
have seemed to some that her publisher, McGraw-
Hill, would put out her book, when at the time their
reputation rested on publishing scientific texts. This
situation suited her fine, Rukeyser wrote, because
“I care very much about that meeting-place, of sci-
ence and poetry.” The same wording appeared in
Eileen Myles’ review of the 1997 reissue of
Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry.“Muriel Rukeyser,”
Myles wrote, “unspools one of the most passion-
ate arguments I’ve ever seen for the notion that art
creates meeting places, that poetry creates democ-
racy.” She went on to explain, “’Meeting-place’ is
her mantra, and it means linking the public to a cu-
mulative privacy of people, to living.”
The distinction between “cumulative privacy”
and “the public” is that the first depends on seeing
things (or even oneself) as an independent unit, sep-
arate from all others. The same goes for the con-
cept of “meeting place.” A place by itself can stand
complete, as a concept, but when it becomes a
meeting-place it brings together different, distinct
elements that usually stand alone. At the meeting-
place they stand alone in each other’s presence.
The last two stanzas of “Ballad of Orange and
Grape” bring together opposites. Rukeyser starts
out with sets of opposites that are contradictory just
because of semantics. Our language is arranged in
such a way that a word often has an opposite word,
which leads us to think the things represented by
these words actually are opposites. The words here
represent binary systems, the areas where things
can only be either one or the other. There are a
whole lot of divisions of this kind that are real and
truthful: you are either inside of a room or out, un-
less you are one of those rare cases that linger in
the doorway; an event either did or did not take
place, provided that you define it well enough to
rule out the idea that it “sort of happened”; some-
one is either dead or alive. The first examples that
Rukeyser gives—white and black, women and
men, love and hate, enemy and friend, etc.—are bi-
nary pairings. But these are just the first ones. Then
the logic of seeing things in this binary way falls
apart.
The later things are not pairs that we usually
see linked together: garbage and reading, a deep
smile and rape, forgetfulness and a hot street of
murder. Are they opposites? They can be, if you
look at them as opposites. Are they different ways
of saying the same thing? They can be.
It doesn’t matter, one’s the same as the other,
there is no rule requiring that these concepts must
be defined. That is the attitude of the poem’s hot
dog vendor, who ignores the labels on his drink
machines and pours the wrong syrups into each.
Apparently, he is not acting out of illiteracy, be-
cause once the mistake is pointed out he does noth-
ing to fix it. It hardly seems that he is being com-
pletely subversive, either, as he would if he crossed
them up on purpose just to contradict expectations
and make people think. The shrug and the smile
might be signs that this act is done as a joke, but
he has no audience to play to. Most likely, this re-
versal was done out of laziness and carelessness,
because he cannot see how it could make any dif-
ference to call one thing the other. The narrator
does, though. Established as the sort of person whoBallad of Orange and GrapeThis is a poem about
seeing beyond form, and it
has to break its form to
fully make its point.”