I’ve been re-reading Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry the last few nights. It’s not an easy book by any stretch, its density matched only by her elusive biography of Willard Gibbs. But there are numerous passages of immediate moral if not linguistic clarity, the following of which struck me last night:
[I]f communication has broken down, then it is time to tap the roots of communication. Poetry is written from these depths; in great poetry you feel a source speaking to another source. And it is deep at these levels that the questions lie. They come up again and again during these years, when under all the surface shouting, there is silence about those things we need to hear.
Later, in a somewhat different context, she writes, “The gestures of the individuals are not history; but they are the images of history.”
Rukeyser’s insistent humanism reminds me of Hayden Carruth’s, but not as individualist as his, and though her prose can, as I said, be cumbersome, her position is clear. Against the dominant strains of violence, imperialism, and inequality, she defines poetry as the center of healing, peace, community, and learning, as a measure of progress. Whether or not she’s right in this assertion might be open to debate (I’m pretty sure she is, for what it’s worth) but she remains, in any case, an active and productive source of inspiration as we approach election-times and face a seemingly neverending war.