I.
I wanted to see her body.
I’m aware it sounds strange, even lurid. What I wanted was to see her read her poetry, and her body reading it. Something about Rukeyser’s writing made me feel that she was at home in her flesh, and I wanted to see her loving her body as she read her poems. Because I have felt so exiled in my body, so at war with it, I have hungered for models of being at home and at peace in one’s skin.
Years ago, I met a musicologist who was an expert in analyzing how classical music compositions moved the body—as if the composition were not just a script for music but also for the dance of the body. I wondered about the dance her poems would make.
I searched and searched online, but I couldn’t find a single video clip of her reading. On some audio recordings, we can hear her voice, but it’s her voice alone.
I open The Life of Poetry and find: “For Whitman grew to be able to say, out of his own fears, Be not afraid of my body” (142).
And “he remembered his body as other poets remembered English verse. Out of his own body, and its relation to itself and the sea, he drew his basic rhythm” (142).
II.
In my late teens and twenties, in the 1990s, I pored over the Norton Anthology of Poetry, searching for clues to the body of verse—searching and searching for something that I could be at home in, that could make me feel more at home.
I found so much of the English tradition of poetry to be cold and unhappy, equally full of cloudy immateriality and sharp edges.
A language contains and reflects a culture. I could not know, exactly, that by growing up and living in English, I would inherit something of the alienation and burden of the British empire and the project of Western thought.
Some kind of warmth was missing. It was present here and there, to be sure. There is much to love in English and American poetry, of course. But it’s also true that something of the unhappiness is there as well. Western Wind, we are alone, La Belle Dame has no mercy, nevermore never-more, hollow men, stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw, the best minds of my generation?
I remember wondering if there was something wrong with me. Isn’t this “the best of what’s said and thought”?
I don’t want to diminish the achievement of great poets, to collapse hundreds of years of striving into some judgment of imperial culture and the unhappiness that causes a people to try to steal other lands. After all, Chaucer. After all, Shake-speare. herself. After all, Milton. After all, Herbert and Donne and Hopkins, etc.
Why was I having such a hard time finding sanctuary in it? Where in the Norton Anthology of Poetry was Neruda, or Gibran, or Prado, or Mandelstam, or Rumi, or or or? Perhaps the new Nortons are now inhabited by black and brown poets in ways that don’t feel tokenized. But then, the misery of lonely, alienated, white men seemed ubiquitous. But wasn’t I also a lonely, alienated man as well?
As much as I love Plath’s music, for example, I found her work full of knives—turned inward as much as outward.
What if it were Rukeyser whom we remembered—not a martyr, but a survivor?
“I’d rather be Muriel / than be dead and be Ariel” (CP 554).
III.
Yes, we need to return to
