How Shall We Tell Each Other Of The Poet: The Life And Writing Of Muriel Rukeyser

How Shall We Tell Each Other Of The Poet: The Life And Writing Of Muriel Rukeyser

Product Description Muriel Rukeyser, the late poet, journalist, translator, biographer, pilot, and social activist, has been described as an American Genius and our 20th-century Whitman. Anne Sexton and Erica Jong both referred to Muriel Rukeyser as the Mother of Everyone. To read her collected work is to track American history through the century and to question with her the particular nature of the American imagination. Rukeyser began publishing in the 1930s, writing about Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, and the Popular Front?s stand against fascism, insisting always on the link between public subjects and the personal life. Until she died in 1980 at the age of 66, she persisted in bringing the events of the world into poetry, and poetry into the world. Her writing stretches the American poetic imagination, indeed the very definitions of American poetry, and guarantees her place in twentieth-century American literature. How Shall We Teach Each Other of the Poet? brings together the voices of those who have been challenged by the complexity and richness of Rukeyser?s poems: former friends, colleagues, editors, and students reflecting on their personal knowledge of the poet; contemporary poets probing the significance of Rukeyser as one who influenced their own poetry, and scholars offering new interpretations of her work. From Library Journal Even if Muriel Rukeyser never attained the status of Whitman or Dickinson, the poets Adrienne Rich compares her to in one of these essays, she was an American original. She was less a marquee poet than a force of nature, an imposing woman who gave herself to a variety of aesthetic positions, political causes, and passionate friendships and antagonisms. (Gerald Stern recalls being taunted by an audience member when he and Rukeyser read together once and starting to defend himself by saying, I dont want to be mean, only to hear Rukeyser whisper, Be mean, be mean.) Herzog and Kaufman, English professors at West Chester University and the University of Utah, respectively, gather writings by 37 Rukeyser fans; a number of these pieces are poems, the most luminous of which is Richard Howards A Sibyl of 1979, in which he describes being given a computer that had baffled Rukeyser, finding in it some draft phrases she had left there, and making them into his own tribute to her. For larger public and academic libraries.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Rukeyser (1913^-80) was shunned by the academy for the freedom of her thinking, her humanitarianism, and her unabashedly Whitmanesque poetic voice. As Denise Levertov, one of the nearly 40 poets and literary scholars whose considerations of and tributes to Rukeyser are collected here, writes, Rukeyser consistently fused lyricism and overt social and political concern. Reginald Gibbons, another insightful admirer, observes that Rukeyser aimed not at grace but at inquiry and witness and re-imagining. A writer, scholar, single parent, pilot, and activist, Rukeyser linked art to politics and science, and glided with ease from poetry to biography to childrens books to translation to literary criticism, a fluidity that endeared her to poets but vexed critics and led to a vanishing of her works like that of an endangered species. But editors Herzog and Kaufman and contributors such as Gerald Stern, Adrienne Rich, and Richard Howard have set out to redress this neglect, and Rukeyser does, indeed, emerge from these pages, vibrant, defiant, gifted, and embracing. Donna Seaman Review Rukeyser does ...emerge from these pages, vibrant, defiant, gifted, and embracing. --Booklist About the Author Anne F. Herzog is on the English Faculty of West Chester University. Janet E. Kaufman is on the English Faculty of the University of Utah.