Summary

Muriel Rukeyser has many faces: poet, biographer, theorist, playwright, novelist, story-writer, filmmaker, translator, ethnographer, and innovator of social, documentary poetics; feminist, queer, Jewish, single mother, and social justice activist. Yet above all, she was a poet. Threaded through her work, politics, and life was the conviction that poetry is an animating force that connects people and disciplines. Recent years have seen a surge of renewed interest in Rukeyser’s work, bringing her back into public consciousness as a crucial voice on the relations between poetry and social life in America and beyond. 

Beyond Ourselves is the first volume of its kind to comprehensively consider the continued urgency and lasting legacy of Rukeyser’s work as a key source and inspiration for poets working today. Volume editors Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim—both scholars and poets—have gathered critical and creative contributions from some of the most innovative, exciting, and socially engaged poets writing today. In lyric and braided essays, scholarly critique, hybrid investigations, documentary collages, and collaborative poetry, these poets dive deeply into Muriel Rukeyser’s work and life to interrogate, explore, and challenge the models she provides for thinking and writing in our own social, political, and poetic moment. These essays address a range of themes, from the transhistorical politics of motherhood and contemporary relational and feminist poetics of war to communal history via documentary film and the possibilities of coalition-building beyond borders. As in Rukeyser’s own work, the forms of these texts animate their inquiries.

Beyond Ourselves is a volume at the intersections of creative and critical thought, reflecting on how Rukeyser’s expansive body of work offers a vision for, as she writes, “a kind of imagination with which to meet the world.”

Contributors: Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Catherine Gander, Stacy Hardy, Stefania Heim, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Jena Osman, Deborah Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Solmaz Sharif, and Nomi Stone.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Introduction

Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim

Chapter 2

Dynamic Equilibrium of Word and World: What Muriel Rukeyser Knows About Poetry

Stefania Heim

Chapter 3

The Breathers

Daniel Borzutzky and Stacy Hardy

Chapter 4

On Milkweed, Fences, and Webs

Susan Briante

Chapter 5

The Open Self: On Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics

Khadijah Queen

Chapter 6

The Song Starts in My Body: On Muriel Rukeyser and the Forms of Poetry

Philip Metres

Chapter 7

The Synthetic Dreams of Muriel Rukeyser’s A Place to Live

Jena Osman

Chapter 8

Resurrection Music

Erika Meitner

Chapter 9

“The Faces Going Home into War”: The Legacy of Muriel Rukeyser’s Anti-Epic Poetics

Deborah Paredez

Chapter 10

A Boy Among the Ways: A Poem-Essay on Mazes, Motherhood, and Witness

Nomi Stone

Chapter 11

“Something Already in Ourselves, But Not Discovered”: Learning from Muriel Rukeyser in Ireland

Catherine Gander

Afterword: How Else to End It

Solmaz Sharif

Authors

Catherine Gander is associate professor of American literature at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her authored books include Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection and Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics; she is coeditor of the volumes Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices and The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts. Gander holds a PhD in English from King’s College London.

Stefania Heim is associate professor of English at Western Washington University. She is the author of award-winning poetry collections A Table That Goes On for Miles and Hour Book. Heim has been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and has translated Geometry of Shadows: Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian Poems and de Chirico’s posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron. She is the cofounder of the journal Circumference: Poetry in Translation. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Reviews

“A wonderfully tessellated congregation of contemporary takes on one of the most significant polymaths of American modernism. This rousing, open-hearted collection demonstrates how Rukeyser’s impressive oeuvre continues to inspire new instances of critical inquiry and creative expression.”

—Michael Leong, Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry, Kenyon College