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Muriel Rukeyser

59 quotes

“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Waterlily Fire", IV: 'Fragile', in Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935-1962 (1962), and in Out of Silence: Selected Poems, ed. Kate Daniels (1994), p. 120
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: attributed in Medicine Stories by Aurora Levins Morales (1998)
“These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is your road, tyingyou to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice. Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river cutting fast and direct into the town.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What do you want — a cliff over a city? A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses? These people live here.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems, and workmen from many coastal sections — factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting, take full life. Full agonies: Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God Reduced to a hostage among hostages. The gift is torment.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee For every human freedom, suffering to be free, Daring to live for the impossible.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used. In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth! How do we use feeling? How do we use truth! However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole. If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response. This response is total, but it is reached through the emotions. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually — that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too — but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response. This response is total, but it is reached through the emotions. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually- that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too-but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling. (Chapter One, p 11)”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I speak, then, of a poetry which tends where form tends, where meanings tend. This will be a poetry which is concerned with the crises of our spirit, with the music and the images of these meanings. It will also be a poetry of meeting-places, where the false barriers go down. For they are false. (Chapter One, p 20)”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is the way we feel and the way we remember. (p 23)”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather, it prepares us for thought. Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: rather, it prepares us for thought. Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us. (p 25)”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art and nature are imitations, not of each other, but of the same third thing both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means. If we fear it in art, we fear it in nature, and our fear brings it on ourselves in the most unanswerable ways. (p 26)”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The use of truth is its communication. (p 27)”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves — those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poetic image is not a static thing. It lives in time, as does the poem. Unless it is the first image of the poem, it has already been prepared for by other images; and it prepares us for further images and rhythms to come. Even if it is the first image of the poem, the establishment of the rhythm prepares us — musically — for the music of the image. And if its first word begins the poem, it has the role of putting into motion all the course of images and music of the entire work, with nothing to refer to, except perhaps a title.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of our poems are such monuments. They offer the truths of outrage and the truths of possibility.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A society in motion, with many overlapping groups, in their dance. And above all, a society in which peace is not lack of war, but a drive toward unity.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the making of a poem is the type of action which releases aggression. Since it is released appropriately, it is creation. For the last time here, I wish to say that we will not be saved by poetry. But poetry is the type of the creation in which we may live and which will save us.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world of this creation, and its poetry, is not yet born. The possibility before us is that now we enter upon another time, again to choose. Its birth is tragic, but the process is ahead: we must be able to turn a time of war into a time of building.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great ideas are always emerging, to be available to all men and women. And one hope of our lives is the communication of these truths.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be against war is not enough, it is hardly a beginning.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. They are everyday, these sources, as the sources of peace are everyday, infinite and commonplace as a look, as each new sun.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced. To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How shall we venture home? How shall we tell each other of the poet? How can we meet the judgment on the poet, or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run? All those beginning to run?”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“O for God's sake they are connected underneath.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One opens, yes, and one's life keeps opening, and poets have always known that one's education has no edges, has no end, is not separated out and cannot be separated out in any way, and is full of strength because one refuses to have it separated out.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it was suggested to me in my adolescence, it would be a good idea if I married a doctor, and when he was out on housecalls I could write my poems. Now of course we have no housecalls and we have women poets-the culture has changed to that extent.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The people in the fine apartment houses insisted that Hooverville be destroyed because it spoiled their view. It was clear to a growing child that the terrible, murderous differences between the ways people lived were being upheld all over the city, that if you moved one block in any direction you would find an entirely different order of life.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was told by friends, when it was a matter of deciding to go ahead and have a child, that I would have to choose between the child and poetry, and I said no. I was not going to make that choice; I would choose both.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How old were you when you knew that there were living poets? Do you remember? In this culture a great many people don't know that there are living poets, or didn't know when I was growing up.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are the questions of love and religion that have to enter, along with the social bonds between us, into everything we do.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always thought of two kinds of poems: the poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given; and the other kind being the document, the poem that rests on material evidence.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“at college there was so much more freedom, and an access to materials and to people who were more than I had thought people could be. It was there that everything opened again, but I left college because my father had gone bankrupt and could not afford to have a daughter at Vassar.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't believe that poetry can save the world. I do believe that the forces in our wish to share something of our experience by turning it into something and giving it to somebody: that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far as my life is concerned, poetry has saved me again and again.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In rewriting, I have tried always to strengthen the sound structure and to make a dense fabric, of sound, of fact, of reality and truth.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The movement of meaning is surely the music of poetry. There isn't any music as we mean music, but there is that movement in the body and the soul, if you like. And one longs for it; it is a deep pleasure and a deep life to us, and there is this union of a physical life and a mental life that comes to us in poetry, and the physical life is bound up with sound in that way. The movement of our breathing is why we take pleasure in hearing poets read, even though most poets are abominable readers, as you know.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it seems to me that the invitation of poetry is to bring your whole life to this moment, this moment is real, this moment is what we have, this moment in which we face each other, and if a poem is any damn good at all, it invites you to bring your whole life to that moment, and we are good poets inasmuch as we bring that invitation to you, and you are good readers inasmuch as you bring your whole life to the reading of the poem.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anger I would like to talk about, too. All my life I have protested in anger against what was happening, in rebellion, about wanting to make a new society and change the world, but I know underneath that I am a person who makes things much more than a person who protests. And I finally came to the point of saying, "I will protest all my life but every time I protest, I will make a poem, or I will plant, or I will feed children, or I will try to help a building, I will make something.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source