Muriel Rukeyser's Enduring Relevance

Sam Huber guides Paris Review readers through Muriel Rukeyser's writings, reminding us of each one of her books' enduring significance. One place to start, Huber attests, is with Rukeyser's "Poem" from The Speed of Darkness, which is "in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external: 'I lived in the first century of world wars./Most mornings I would be more or less insane,/The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,/The news would pour out of various devices/Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.'" Huber writes: 

Since 2016, “Poem” has become a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment, an equivocal fate for any artifact but one Rukeyser would not likely have chafed against. Throughout her career, she remained sensitized to a political and cultural landscape that was changing rapidly. When The Speed of Darkness appeared in 1968, that landscape was more crowded than ever and more vividly perceived: the civil rights movement had given way to Black Power, the women’s and gay liberation movements were coalescing, the Cold War raged on, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, despite being the most thoroughly reported and divisive military conflict since the Civil War one hundred years before it. The speaker of “Poem” can’t opt out of this deluge, as the vitality of her art depends on its responsiveness to the world it enters. But neither can art concede to that world’s terms: “Slowly I would get to pen and paper, / Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.” Rukeyser struggles, here and elsewhere, to write toward the poem’s divergent “unseen”: an anticipated future audience of poetry and that other living audience already in thrall to newspapers, TV, and the various devices through which the world tries to reach us.

Read on at the Paris Review. Also of stunning note: an animated version of "Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)," created by Manual Cinema for our latest episode of Poem Videos!