The Life of Poetry.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Brief Article

About a year ago, a close friend of mine started telling me to read Muriel Rukeyser's essay The Life of Poetry. I went looking for the book, which at the time had been out of print for nearly twenty years, and found an old copy at the University of Wisconsin library. The book immediately began to matter to me because it asks questions that will preoccupy anyone who loves art but who also wants to live a politically committed life. Now Paris Press has republished The Life of Poetry in a new, more accessible format.

Rukeyser's writings fell out of print after her death in 1980, even though her poetry had strongly influenced such writers as Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich. But in the last few years, two presses (Norton and TriQuarterly Books) have each published selections of her poetry. Unfortunately, both cut up Rukeyser's amazing long poems, publishing only sections of "The Book of the Dead," her 1935 investigative documentary poem on silica mining and the resulting deaths of thousands of miners in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia.

Like Harry Hay, Rukeyser got her political start during the Popular Front, and like Hay, she remained active for decades. She was arrested in Alabama while reporting on the case of the Scottsboro Boys (nine African-American boys unjustly convicted of raping two white women); she was persecuted as a Communist during the 1950s; and she vocally opposed the Vietnam War.

There is no easy separation between Rukeyser's political life and her writing, which includes poems to union organizers like Ann Burlak, who helped organize textile workers during the 1930s; feminist works, such as "The Poem as Mask," which inspired the title to the anthology No More Masks!; and her 1973 book, Breaking Open--widely regarded as Rukeyser's coming-out volume.

Rukeyser first published The Life of Poetry in 1949, and it is a book marked by World War II. It asks, "Where is there a place for poetry?"

This single question encompasses a number of concerns about the role of art in the world: Why poetry? What is poetry's relation to cruelty, to suffering? Is it...