The
Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City has turned their
poetic gaze inward this year, choosing to honor with placement in the
cathedral's US national poet's corner a 20th century poet whose
contributions toward making the place a landmark location for American
poetry were profound. The 2021 selection, chosen by current poet in residence Marie
Howe from nominations provided to her by 12 electors at the cathedral,
is Muriel Rukeyser.
Rukeyser follows the induction of Audre Lord to the honored in he alcove of the cathedral that, since 1984, has become a touchstone to major American literary figures dating back to Anne Bradstreet and, year by year, tapping the shoulders of the true luminaries of American poetry and fiction over the course of 150 years.
As a lifelong New Yorker, she formed a relationship with the Cathedral towards the end of her life, becoming the namesake of the Muriel Rukeyser Poetry Wall. Today, the Poetry Wall continues to receive submissions of poetry from incarcerated people around the United States.
"I have known about Rukeyser's poetry, and her relation to the Cathedral, going back to when I came to Columbia in 1982," stated Howe. "In fact, I often quote from her before I do a reading of my own, particularly this quote which we have chosen for the stone we are placing in the poetry alcove: What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The universe would split open. I keep that quote close to my heart."
Howe is serving a five term as poet in residence at the Cathedral, and follows Marilyn Nelson, and before her Charles Martin and Molly Peacock, all of whom held five year terms with possibility of renewal, in that position.
A woman who biographers note grew up in what has been described as an 'assimilationist' Jewish household Rukeyser learned early a singular mixture of reticence and pride of family identity. "She grew to have an awareness of 'the silence about self in assimilationist families," notes the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Her mother, for example, insisted they were descended from Rabbi Akiba, the ancient scholar who was behind including the erotic Song of Songs in holy scripture. This penchant grew to an acute sense of the common unifying influence of a range of visionary figures in our shred history, " such as the physicist Willard Gibbs, the painter Albert Ryder, the composer Charles Ives, the labor organizer Ann Burlak, Rabbi Akiba, and Herman Melville."
Her literary associations were wide ranging and profound. Rukeyser met Robinson and Una Jeffers in 1944, when she spent the summer at the Carmel cottage of Ella Winter. This occurred a few years after Jeffers served on a panel of three judges who selected Poetry magazine’s first Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, and picked Rukeyser for the honor.
As a woman, Rukeyser was a courageous precursor to the feminist movement of the 1960s. She was independent enough to marry and divorce painter Glynn Collins (the marriage lasted only six weeks) and to give birth to William out of wedlock. Except for persons close to her, Rukeyser never revealed that William's father was Donnan Jeffers -- Robinson's son -- was Bill’s father, although she did write, poignantly, in her poem “The Gates”: “...I cannot name the names,/my child’s own father, the flashing, the horseman,/the son of the poet....”
The Gates was written in 1961 while Rukeyser was in South Korea protesting the imprisonment of poet Kim Chi-Ha. It is one of numerous examples of her fearless engagement in poetry of witness. Another major example of this is her poem cycle “The Book of the Dead” which recounts the story of what many consider one of the worst industrial catastrophes in U.S. history, the Hawk’s Nest tunnel disaster in West Virginia. Two other poems of Rukeyser's which show this profound sense of the relationship between a poet and the politics of her times are "I lived in the first century of World Wars' and 'For OB (a Spanish Civil War poem).
Excerpts of Rukeyser's long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. She was also daring enough to write in the 1950s about such issues as pregnancy and the possibilities of loving another woman.
And in what is perhaps one of the most 'accessible' of anecdotes about Muriel Rukeyser, the Sarah Lawrence archives notes that she "knew full well that to produce something good involved on occasion producing something ‘bad’: ‘Being bad is part of it’, she used to say, ‘don’t erase the bad; let it be’.
All in all then, putting aside Rukeyser's initiative to create an 'open to all' poetry wall at the cathedral in the 1970s, the poet's work is "particularly deserving of installation here as a poet of the world," said Howe.
Since the 80s, the annual installation of a novelist or poet into the corner has grown in stature -- though interrupted by a catastrophic fire and more recently, the limitations imposed on gatherings due to the pandemic. Ceremonies and activities for such famed writers as Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Langston Hughes and WH Auden have become akin to symposia, spread over several days and filling portions of the cathedral nave for the major gatherings. And Howe is hopeful that, once the pandemic conditions allow, Lourde and Rukeyser can be feted with similar 'joy and ceremony.'
Rukeyser follows the induction of Audre Lord to the honored in he alcove of the cathedral that, since 1984, has become a touchstone to major American literary figures dating back to Anne Bradstreet and, year by year, tapping the shoulders of the true luminaries of American poetry and fiction over the course of 150 years.
As a lifelong New Yorker, she formed a relationship with the Cathedral towards the end of her life, becoming the namesake of the Muriel Rukeyser Poetry Wall. Today, the Poetry Wall continues to receive submissions of poetry from incarcerated people around the United States.
"I have known about Rukeyser's poetry, and her relation to the Cathedral, going back to when I came to Columbia in 1982," stated Howe. "In fact, I often quote from her before I do a reading of my own, particularly this quote which we have chosen for the stone we are placing in the poetry alcove: What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The universe would split open. I keep that quote close to my heart."
Howe is serving a five term as poet in residence at the Cathedral, and follows Marilyn Nelson, and before her Charles Martin and Molly Peacock, all of whom held five year terms with possibility of renewal, in that position.
A woman who biographers note grew up in what has been described as an 'assimilationist' Jewish household Rukeyser learned early a singular mixture of reticence and pride of family identity. "She grew to have an awareness of 'the silence about self in assimilationist families," notes the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Her mother, for example, insisted they were descended from Rabbi Akiba, the ancient scholar who was behind including the erotic Song of Songs in holy scripture. This penchant grew to an acute sense of the common unifying influence of a range of visionary figures in our shred history, " such as the physicist Willard Gibbs, the painter Albert Ryder, the composer Charles Ives, the labor organizer Ann Burlak, Rabbi Akiba, and Herman Melville."
Her literary associations were wide ranging and profound. Rukeyser met Robinson and Una Jeffers in 1944, when she spent the summer at the Carmel cottage of Ella Winter. This occurred a few years after Jeffers served on a panel of three judges who selected Poetry magazine’s first Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, and picked Rukeyser for the honor.
As a woman, Rukeyser was a courageous precursor to the feminist movement of the 1960s. She was independent enough to marry and divorce painter Glynn Collins (the marriage lasted only six weeks) and to give birth to William out of wedlock. Except for persons close to her, Rukeyser never revealed that William's father was Donnan Jeffers -- Robinson's son -- was Bill’s father, although she did write, poignantly, in her poem “The Gates”: “...I cannot name the names,/my child’s own father, the flashing, the horseman,/the son of the poet....”
The Gates was written in 1961 while Rukeyser was in South Korea protesting the imprisonment of poet Kim Chi-Ha. It is one of numerous examples of her fearless engagement in poetry of witness. Another major example of this is her poem cycle “The Book of the Dead” which recounts the story of what many consider one of the worst industrial catastrophes in U.S. history, the Hawk’s Nest tunnel disaster in West Virginia. Two other poems of Rukeyser's which show this profound sense of the relationship between a poet and the politics of her times are "I lived in the first century of World Wars' and 'For OB (a Spanish Civil War poem).
Excerpts of Rukeyser's long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. She was also daring enough to write in the 1950s about such issues as pregnancy and the possibilities of loving another woman.
And in what is perhaps one of the most 'accessible' of anecdotes about Muriel Rukeyser, the Sarah Lawrence archives notes that she "knew full well that to produce something good involved on occasion producing something ‘bad’: ‘Being bad is part of it’, she used to say, ‘don’t erase the bad; let it be’.
All in all then, putting aside Rukeyser's initiative to create an 'open to all' poetry wall at the cathedral in the 1970s, the poet's work is "particularly deserving of installation here as a poet of the world," said Howe.
Since the 80s, the annual installation of a novelist or poet into the corner has grown in stature -- though interrupted by a catastrophic fire and more recently, the limitations imposed on gatherings due to the pandemic. Ceremonies and activities for such famed writers as Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Langston Hughes and WH Auden have become akin to symposia, spread over several days and filling portions of the cathedral nave for the major gatherings. And Howe is hopeful that, once the pandemic conditions allow, Lourde and Rukeyser can be feted with similar 'joy and ceremony.'
CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE POETS CORNER INDUCTEES
1984 emily dickinson walt whitman, washington irving
1985 edgar allan poe, herman melville
1986 robert frost, nathaniel hawthorne
1987 ralph waldo emerson, mark twain
1988 henry david thoreau, henry james
1989 wallace stevens, william faulkner
1990 ts eliot, willa cather
1991 marianne moore, edward arlington robinson
1992 wm carlos williams, henry wadsworth longfellow
1994 hart crane, anne bradstreet
1995 elizabeth bishop, wm cullen bryant
1996 langston hughes, ernest hemingway
1997 louise bogan, ee cummings
1998 theodore roethke, william dean howells
1999 f scott fitzgerald
2000 edna st vincent millet
2001 gertrude stein
2003 robert lowell
2004 robert hayden
2005 wh auden
2006 emma lazarus
2007 robinson jeffers
2008 phillis wheatley
2009 tennessee williams
2010 sylvia plath
2011 james baldwin
2012 katherine anne porter
2013 john berryman
2014 mary flannery o'connor
2015 zora neal hurston
2016 eugene o'neill
2017 jean toomer
2018 carl sandberg
2019 ralph ellison
2020 audrey lourde
