slack line

Each week Muriel gave us writing as well as reading assignments, and we would go over class poems as well as poems by Whitman, Keats, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams. Once when someone read a poem that had a very weak line, a line without much in it, Muriel called the line "slack," and we could see the line sagging there in the poem, without tension, nothing that an acrobat would trust her life to.

Then she said, “No one wants to read poetry. No one wants to!” (With her good-humored energetic pessimism that felt like optimism). “You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down, impossible for them to stop reading it—word after word you have to keep them from closing the book. They want to close the book. And if it’s slack they’ll be able to—nothing says they have to read to the end. No one’s making them. And they don’t want to! They could be doing something else, like making a cheese sandwich! You have to make them want to go on reading with every word and every line.”

And Muriel said this cheerfully, the truth of it giving her voice energy. There was no whining in her about the place of poetry in America. It was just a reality, what was there for us to work with.

—Sharon Olds, “A Student’s Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2020)

poetry invented

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. And from that need, from the relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living, and from every other expression of man’s nature, poetry would be—I cannot say invented or discovered—poetry would be derived.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974)

all we can be sure of

     The only danger is not going far enough…we are speaking here of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.
     If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
     All we can be sure of is that our art has life in time, it serves human meaning, it blazes on the night of the spirit; all we can be sure of is that at our most subjective we are universal; all we can be sure of is the profound flow of our living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea in eternal relationship, in a dance of power, in a dance of love.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974, pp. 201-202