“A
work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to
give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such
thing as bad art.” – Muriel Rukeyser
Born on this date in 1913, Rukeyser was an
American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality,
feminism, social justice, and Judaism.
Critic and fellow writer Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest
poet of her "exact generation."
One of her most powerful pieces was a group of
poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of
the Hawk's Nest incident in West Virginia, an industrial disaster in which
hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
That followed closely on the heels of her coverage of the Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama (as a
journalist), and her work for the International Labor Defense,
which handled
the defendants' appeals. Her writings
on the case were among those used in the creation of the award-winning Broadway
show by the same name.
Throughout
her life (she died in 1980) she traveled to all the world’s hot spots,
including the Spanish Civil War in the ‘30s, the war fronts during World War II
and Korea, and to Vietnam, primarily using her powerful poetic style to speak
out on behalf of what she considered to be injustice or mistreatment. A play about her life with a working title
of Throat of These Hours is being
developed from her poem Speed of
Darkness.
The
key to powerful and expressive writing, she said, was experience. “Breathe-in experience. Breathe-out poetry.”
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