Muriel Rukeyser, the poet of American injustice who returned to express anger over Donald Trump

The poet Muriel Rukeyser (New York, 1913-1980) returned in the 21st century. She was like an unexpected gust that she broke against the monotony of the summer heat, in the midst of the hell of the donald trump government: “I lived in the first century of world wars. /Most mornings I was more or less crazy, / The newspapers arrived with their untidy articles, /The news streamed from various devices/ Interrupted by attempts to sell products we don't see. / I called my friends on other devices; / They were more or less angry for the same reasons.”

By WattsApp, by Twitter, Instagram; even by mail, many adults remembered and many young people discovered these verses by the poet of the mid-twentieth century. This is rightly pointed out by Sam Huber of the New York magazine The Paris Review. Rukeyser, Rukeyser had suddenly become current by picking up the anger and impotence of a part of the American population in the face of fake news, sexism, racism and xenophobia of the tycoon president.

It was The poem, as it is titled, included in his emblematic collection of poems The speed of darkness. It appeared in the same way as in 1968, there Rukeyser returned to the center of the poetic and intellectual scene thanks to this book, after years of oblivion. Between the tensions of the fight for civil rights, Black Power, the feminist movements for the liberation of women and homosexuals and the opposition to the Vietnam War, this essential work emerged in the second moment of recognition of a writer who was never one of half inks. "My themes and the use I make of them depends on who I am, on my life as a poet, a woman, an American, a Jew," she wrote in her book of essays The life of Poetry in 1949. At the same time, she was recognized by the second wave of feminist writers like Alice Walker, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton,

Winner of the Yale Prize for Young Poets at the age of 21 with her first book Theory of Flight in 1935, Rukeyser was from the beginning a writer of Poetry and action, an artist restless both in experimenting with her poetic production and in her energetic ideological positions. Then, she abandoned her studies to dedicate herself to Poetry and literary journalism in different publications until in 1933 she was sent to Alabama by the socialist magazine of the National League of students to cover the famous trial of the "Scottsboro Boys", nine African-American teenagers. wrongly accused of rape. She or she collaborates with the New Masses magazine, which was attended by authors such as John Dos Passos or Dorothy Parker engaged in social struggles after the great economic crisis of the 1930s.

But it is with his second work The Book of the Dead (1938) where he becomes known for the first time outside of literary circles. Together with the photographer and documentary producer Nancy Naumburg, they investigate the case of the death of more than a thousand workers from silicosis at a Union Carbide mine in West Virginia: "My boy worked there for about eighteen months, / one afternoon he came home breathing chopped up. / He told me, 'Mom, I can't breathe.' / Shirley was sick for about three months. / I carried him in my arms from the bed to the table, / from his bed to the terrace. The book cites testimonies and statistics, cuts out documents and invents what we now call documentary Poetry without leaving aside the versification, sound and rhythm so similar to the North American poetic tradition.

Muriel Rukeyser published more than a dozen books of Poetry and her work was collected in 1978 to then practically disappear from the canon of American Poetry readings and academic circles. In Argentina, the poet and translator Alberto Girri partially rescued her in a 1969 anthology, although it was from the mid-80s that we inherited her admiration for her thanks to the work of the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi. We inherited it from her foundational anthology of American poets Answer me, dance my dance (Último Reino, 1984- Salta el Pez reissue, 2019), where she translates it, and what she told us more than once: her fascination on hearing it for the first time inside a café on Broadway avenue on his initial journey through America, from south to north. There, in the middle of New York, was Muriel Rukeyser, with his expressive and charged voice, his imposing figure, penetrating look, his exact and cutting breathing in reading; reciting her poems in front of a entranced audience.

In number 46 of the recently published Hablar de Poesía magazine, there is a preview of La velocidad de las tinieblas that will be published for the first time completely in Spanish by Salta el Pez publishing house in 2023, translated by those of us who wrote these lines. The book is variously traversed by Walt Whittman's Biblical verse and cadence, by Emily Dickinson's introspective punctuation, by Ezra Pound's material use of word and space and Carlos Williams's Williams. It also condenses without veils the issue of children and transmission, the war conflicts of the 20th century and the Cold War, feminism, gender and sexuality. They are the political and poetic plot of this exceptional work still in force.

From him we have chosen to accompany this note The poem as a mask, Between roses and For my son. In them, Muriel Rukeyser puts into tension, among other things, with sharpness and conviction for the time, the vital desires of feminism, the love of a woman for another woman, the legacy of a single mother for her son. She does it in her unique way of writing and politicizing the intimate experience with emotion, technique and certainty. An original mark of this central and inescapable poet of 20th century American poetry.

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their wild dances, it was a mask,

on his mountain, hunting gods, singing, in orgies,

it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,

fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, love united with song,

I was myself, split in half, unable to speak, exiled from myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory

of my life torn open in my sleep, the rescued girl

by my side among the doctors, and a word

rescue from the big eyes.

Enough of masks! Enough mythologies!

Now for the first time the god raises his hand,

the fragments come together in me with their own music.

Lying here in the grass am I dead am I sleeping

amazed between silences you never touch me

Here deep down, the little white moon

cries like a token and I hear?

The sun turned copper or I dissolve

untouched untouched a touchless land

deny my death my fallen hand

silence runs through the river bed

A high wind walks on my skin

breeze, memory

hold on my body (as the world fades away)

entering

too late in the night of the world to see the roses open

Remember, love, lying among roses.

Don't we sleep among roses?

You come from poets, kings, debtors, preachers, almost debtors, builders of cities, salesmen,

the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed dry food grocers, beautiful

women of songs

great horsemen, tyrannical fathers on the shore of an ocean, western mothers looking west through their windows,

the families escaping across the sea in haste and at night —

the round towers of the violet celtic sunset,

the deceased, the shiny, flying, men expelled from town, man bribed by

his cousins ​​so that he stays out of town, teachers, the liturgical singer from Friday to

the night, the morbid newspapers,

strong women elegantly maintaining relationships, the Jewish girl who goes to school

parish church, children racing their boats on the ice at Lakes,

the still woman in front of the diamond in the velvet window, says "Wonder of the

nature".

Like all men,

you come from singers, from ghettos, from famines, wars and refusals of wars, men who

they built villages

who grew to be our solar cities, students, revolutionaries, pouring out of

buildings, market newspapers,

a poor tailor in a darkened room,

a man from the desert, the hero of the mines, the astronomer, a woman with a pale face who

teaches piano hour after hour and his crippled wrist,

like all men,

you haven't seen your father's face

but you have known it forever in a song, the coast of heaven, in a dream, wherever

that man be found playing his role as father, father among our light, among

our darkness,

and in your being made complete, complete with you and complete with others,

the stars your ancestors.

(Translation: YS and SW)

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You come from poets, kings, debtors, preachers, almost debtors, builders of cities, salesmen,the great rabbis, the kings of Ireland, failed dry food grocers, beautifulwomen of songsgreat horsemen, tyrannical fathers on the shore of an ocean, western mothers looking west through their windows,the families escaping across the sea in haste and at night —the round towers of the violet celtic sunset,the deceased, the shiny, flying, men expelled from town, man bribed byhis cousins ​​so that he stays out of town, teachers, the liturgical singer from Friday tothe night, the morbid newspapers,strong women elegantly maintaining relationships, the Jewish girl who goes to schoolparish church, children racing their boats on the ice at Lakes,the still woman in front of the diamond in the velvet window, says "Wonder of thenature".