Gander, Catherine
(2018)
Rereading Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry: a
Textual Practice special issue.
Textual Practice, 32 (7).
pp. 1097-1102.
ISSN 0950-236X
Abstract
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry is a difficult text to define. Written first as
a series of lectures between 1940 and 1948, and published in 1949, the book is
partly a defence of poetry as a vital means of truthful communication; partly a
clear-eyed commentary on American culture and social realities in the midtwentieth
century; partly a wide-ranging exposition of the relationality of all
forms of human knowledge; partly a memoir of the most open and useful
kind; partly a careful critique of the forms, images, meanings, effects, and
implications of poetry – of the pacts poetry makes with its readers (and
vice versa) – in aesthetic, personal, and ethical terms. I write ‘partly’ with
the acknowledgement that the word does not suffice. The Life of Poetry is
an extraordinary book not least because it is wholly all of these things,
while encompassing and embodying many more – stretching, as it does,
across topics that include politics, music, visual art, physics, philosophy,
history, advertising, film, literature, religion, childhood, narratives of the marginalised
and disenfranchised. As Rukeyser was fond of saying, quoting the
physicist Willard Gibbs (whose biography she wrote), ‘the whole is simpler
than the sum of its parts’. Perhaps above all, The Life of Poetry is an education.
Framed as a response to a fellow refugee, who was sharing Rukeyser’s boat as
it sailed away from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, The Life of Poetry
answers the man’s question as to the importance of poetry to such historical
moments. As the essays in this special issue demonstrate, Rukeyser’s response
affords a variety of perspectives on a myriad of connected issues pertaining to
being in the world, with others. As such, it is a rousing call to put poetry to
use, an activation of our shared ‘capacity to make change in existing
conditions’
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