I have several newsletters I love to read and one of them is Jan Phillips, The Museletter. She is a wonderful writer, poet and photographer. In her last newsletter she included this poem that reminded me how important it is to be aware of our words and opinions. This is true in our personal lives and our artistic lives.
The power we have as individuals to make our world a better place to live is enormous!
“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”
– Muriel Rukeyser (Out of Silence: Selected Poems)
On December 15, 1913, Muriel Rukeyser was born in New York City. She attended Vassar College for two years and then moved back to New York where she took classes at Columbia University. After college, she worked as an editor of the Student Review and witnessed certain events which would make a serious impact on her life and poetry, including the Scottsboro trial in Alabama, the Gauley Bridge tragedy in West Virginia and the civil war in Spain.
The violence and injustice she saw, in the United States and abroad, led her poetry to function as a mode of social protest. She felt a deep responsibility to comment on human issues and was particularly concerned with inequalities of sex, race and class. With her poems, she frequently documented her own emotional experiences within the context of a greater political or social event. She was a powerful visionary and her work reflects her wish for a greater world community united by love.
Rukeyser experimented with language and form and her wide technical range, which includes lyrical forms and the documentary narrative, is illustrated in her Collected Poems (1979). Many women poets have claimed Rukeyser’s influence on their work, Anne Sexton among them. She died in New York City on February 12, 1980.