Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win?

Lying in the grass
girl and boy
Eating oranges, exchanging kisses
like waves exchanging whiteness.

Lying on the beach
girl and boy.
Eating apples, exchanging kisses
like clouds exchanging whiteness.

Lying underground
girl and boy.
Saying nothing, never kissing
exchanging silence for silence.

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.

The truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

The fear of poetry is the fear.

We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.

I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.

The journey is my home.

I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

In all the cities of this year
I have longed for the other city.

If we look long enough and hard enough ... we will begin to see the connections that bind us together, and when we recognize those connections, we will begin to change the world.

This is the dark. Lights strung up all the way.
Depression; and driven deeper in,
by hunger, pistols, and despair,
they took the tunnel.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...

Willard Gibbs is the type of the imagination at work in the world. His story is that of an opening up which has had its effect on our lives and our thinking; and, it seems to me, it is the emblem of the naked imagination - which is called abstract and impractical, but whose discoveries can be used by anyone who is interested, in whatever 'field' - an imagination which for me, more than that of any other figure in American thought, any poet, or political, or religious figure, stands for imagination at its essential points.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling ... A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually-that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too- but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh
and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals,
water to sound, fire to form: life flickers
uncounted into the supple arms of love.

Their faces said : This is your home; and I .
I never come home, I never go away.
And they all answered : Stay.

I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice

There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.

Reality is the completion of experience ...

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

Women in drudgery knew
They must be one of four:
Whores, artists, saints, and wives.
There are composite lives
that women always live

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has
the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge
infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

Wherever
we walk
we will make
Wherever
we protest
we will go planting
Make poems
seed grass
feed a child growing
build a house
Whatever we stand against
We will stand feeding and seeding
Wherever
I walk
I will make

Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.

I am haunted by interrupted acts,
introspective as a leper, enchanted
by a repulsive clew,
a gross and fugitive movement of the limbs.
Is this the love that shook the lights to flame?

We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.

But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,
everywhere we begin to know the illness,
are forced up, and our times confirm us all.

What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

The world is made up of Stories, not Atoms.

The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories.

Waiting for Icarus "

He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets,
a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the
Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

The advertising men made it clear that there were two ways of looking at ideas in a war against fascism. Those of us who were working on the project believed ideas were to be fought for; the advertising men believed they were to be sold. The audience, those at home in wartime, were not 'citizens' or 'people.' They were 'customers.'

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

I hope for quick, fluent copy and memorable pictures. The words would not 'describe' the pictures; the pictures would not 'illustrate' the words. Together, they would carry a stamp and tell a story.

There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.

No one wants to read poetry. 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.

Dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict ... We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare