Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser was published by West Virginia University Press in April 2026. Edited by Stefania Heim and Catherine Gander, the book is the first volume to comprehensively consider the continued urgency and lasting legacy of Rukeyser’s work as a key source and inspiration for poets working today. In lyric and braided essays, scholarly critique, hybrid investigations, documentary collages, and collaborative poetry, these poets dive deeply into Muriel Rukeyser’s work and life to interrogate, explore, and challenge the models she provides for thinking and writing in our own social, political, and poetic moment. Contributors to the book include Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Catherine Gander, Stacy Hardy, Stefania Heim, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Jena Osman, Deborah Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Solmaz Sharif, and Nomi Stone. Below are the opening sections of Gander’s braided essay on learning from Rukeyser about fear, death, childbirth, and breaking social taboos.
“Something Already in Ourselves, but Not Discovered”: Learning from Muriel Rukeyser in Ireland.
Catherine Gander
“It is belief that answers fear. Poets must bring to consciousness those things we cannot bear to face or talk about.”
—Muriel Rukeyser, “The Uses of Fear”
It is November 2012. I have taken a flight from London, where I live, to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I interview for a lecturer post at Queen’s University. Afterward, I walk around the city. I find my way through avenues and streets, some bedecked in Irish flags, some in Union. At their interface are peace walls, running tall and on and on, topped with barbed wire or spikes, and painted with murals, tags, political graffiti. At the International Wall at Falls Road, I stand in front of the famous mural of Frederick Douglass, whose visit to Ireland in 1845 aligned him with the struggle for Catholic emancipation. He is flanked by Palestinian flags and murals calling for a free Palestine. An open-top bus pulls up and tourists pile out, clad in thick winter coats, to pose for photographs.
Outside the gates of City Hall there is a protest happening. Women stand in loose groups, holding placards and makeshift banners. One woman holds a sign that reads “Get your rosaries off my ovaries.” A pro-choice rally.i The woman has been here all afternoon. I stand next to her, with her. She was here yesterday, and the day before that. And the week before that. She is tired. It is getting dark.
After nightfall I am in a different city. The center is alive with music, bodies. Light and laughter spill from pub doorways; a bookshop hosts a wine reception. But in my ignorance, I keep turning into dead ends. Barriers have been erected. Roads that were open during the daylight are now gated shut. The map I am using is obsolete.
I arrive at Belfast docks, where I find a café still open, selling buns and locally made artworks. I am given a strip of paper with my drink. “It’s for thanksgiving,” the waitress says. “Write on it what you’re thankful for and leave it in this box.” I write on both sides of the strip of paper. The next day I am offered the lectureship, which I accept.
***
“In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.”ii
The opening line to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry is one of her most quoted. During the height of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it would appear with regularity on my Twitter feed while I scrolled for news, for distraction, for the chance to interact with other human beings. The “we” carried a comfort. Collectively, we could get through this, even if we were more isolated from each other than we had ever been.
Many of us did not get through it. The coronavirus first restricted, and then removed, the ability of over seven million people worldwide to breathe.ⁱⁱⁱ
***
In summoning up our strength, if our bodies allow, we take a deep breath. The motion is often instinctive, automatic. We fill our lungs with oxygen, we straighten our backs, and by doing so, we ready ourselves, mentally and physically, for the task at hand.iv Full, slow inhalation activates the parasympathetic nervous system—the opposite of the fight-or-flight stress response. It changes the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, and increases cognitive attention.v The type of strength Rukeyser refers to in the opening pages of The Life of Poetry is a composite of moral fortitude, mental resilience, and courage. It galvanizes and excites. It is the best of what makes us human. “In time of the crises of the spirit” Rukeyser continues (and note the shift from singular to plural crises, for they accrete), “we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness.”vi
A careful reader will see there’s a circularity to her invocation. Summoning strength requires a strength of summoning. Each energy feeding the other, like breathing in and breathing out. But what does it mean to summon our fullness? Where do we reach in order to strengthen our summoning? Rukeyser gestures to what we already know, to what we have already lived:
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.vii
It takes the whole of The Life of Poetry to understand the resonance of this first page in the way that it takes a lifetime to learn how to live. Rukeyser’s primary image—not forgotten, always a resource—is a boat at nighttime, overfilled with evacuees among whose number she sails from the start of the Spanish Civil War. Wishing to report on the 1936 antifascist Olympiad in Barcelona, she is instead turned away as fighting breaks out.
“And then we turn, for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act.”viii The turning Rukeyser invokes here is a turning away from fear—in all its closures and erasures—but also a turning into it, in order to face it, to speak to it and of it. “Now you have your responsibility,” says a fellow evacuee. “Go home, tell your peoples what you have seen.”ix
***
When we feel fear, or grief, or when we try to stop ourselves from falling, or being injured, we can freeze. We tense our bodies, and because of this tension, our breathing is restricted. The reactive immobility response is a whole-body effort: The muscles responsible for breathing include the thoracic diaphragm, dorsal and intercostal muscles, and muscles of the abdomen, neck, chest, and shoulders. We breathe rapidly, but more often, we hold our breath. For a while, we don’t breathe at all.
***
There’s an image of Muriel Rukeyser to which I keep returning. It arrives exactly in the middle of The Orgy (1965), her trans-genre book drawn from her experience of Puck Fair in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1958. Puck is Ireland’s last remaining pagan celebration, a three-day, annual event combining the crowning of a mountain goat with the more agricultural activity of cattle and horse trading. On the morning of the second day of the fair, Muriel, Rukeyser’s protagonist-avatar, enters the town of Killorglin as the cattle fair is in full swing. The manure of the animals, assisted by the rain, has “covered and painted” everything—“the whole town, streets, sidewalks, all.” “A storm of smell” hits Muriel in the face, “entered the clothes, the ears, the sleeves.”x “It was palpable,” Rukeyser writes, “it was what we breathed; it was the air; it was time and the present.” Standing at the bottom of a “sliding hill” of shit, and gripped by “a panic of slipping,” Muriel freezes.xi
As her feet refuse to move, Muriel is transported to other moments of her life when fear has made her knees shake: in the vertiginous bleachers of a ballpark, on a granite wall of New England’s Baldface mountain above Emerald Pool, and “in Spain, when the firing began again, in Catalonia, the first night of the war.”xii The images arrive rapidly, associatively, allowing Muriel to unfold their meanings to her current situation. Behind each image, as behind the smell of excrement, death insists. The scene surprises me initially. This fearful, immobile version of Rukeyser is a different picture from the one most associated with her—or at least the one that has most often lived in my head—that of a practical, passionate woman, tireless in her pursuit of social justice and of the self’s full and total response to the world. But I’ve also never felt closer to Rukeyser than when reading these pages. I’m teetering there with her in the cow shit, navigating a way by pulling on the images of my life that leap into my vision like buoys flung from a passing ship.
Reviewing The Orgy for The Nation, the Irish critic and playwright Denis Johnston described Rukeyser’s writing style as “verse, under the disguise of free prose.”xiii Indeed, much of The Orgy works as prose poetry, both in form and in style. Its relationship to sentence structure and punctuation is organic, shaped often by somatic rhythms and the multidirectional flow of associative thought. It exists on the page and in the imagination, drawing on memory and metaphor, forging connections between images in the conscious and unconscious mind. In parts, it is dreamlike in its metatextuality and multitemporality, in others, it is sharply and vividly observed. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser describes the reawakening of deep knowledge that a poem can evoke in both reader and poet. The experience of poetry is not one of learning, per se, but rather of recollection, an unearthing of personal truth: “Remember what happened to you when you came to your poem,” Rukeyser writes, “any poem whose truth overcame all inertia in you at that moment, so that your slow mortality took its proper place, and before it the light of a new awareness was not something new, but something you recognized.” “That,” she continues, “is the multiple time-sense in poetry, that is the ever new, which is recognized as something already in ourselves, but not discovered.”xiv
Poems are durational—despite their capacity to suspend time, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But they are also repetitional—we come back to them, we reread them, we see something in them that we didn’t see (or notice) before. We live in them. Our frequent return to the poem that moves us, again and again, to (self)recognition may have everything to do with our acknowledgment that the end of a poem constitutes its own kind of death—and therefore signals ours.
[…]
Biographies:
Stefania Heim has published two poetry collections, most recently HOUR BOOK (Ahsahta Press, 2019), and two translations of writings by the Italian metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, most recently his posthumous novel Mr. Dudron (A Public Space Books, 2024). A former poetry editor at Boston Review and a founding editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation, Heim teaches literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.
Catherine Gander teaches modern and contemporary American literature at Maynooth University in Kildare, Ireland. Her book Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) won the biennial book award of the Irish Association for American Studies; more recent scholarly publications include The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Also a poet, Gander is the author of Matches (Verve Poetry Press, 2024).
__________________________
i Until October 2019, abortion was illegal in all cases in Northern Ireland except where the pregnant woman’s life was at risk. It is currently legal under all circumstances up to twelve weeks of gestation.
ii Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Paris Press, 1996), 1.
iii “Coronavirus Death Toll,” Worldometer, accessed April 9, 2025, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/.Worldometer stopped collecting data on April 13, 2024, although the majority of countries had stopped reporting death tolls by then. The WHO declared COVID-19 no longer a public health emergency of international concern, on May 5, 2023.
iv The embodied affect of reading is such that most people will have straightened their own backs on reading this line.
v See Caroline Sevoz-Couche and Sylvain Laborde, “Heart Rate Variability and Slow-Paced Breathing: When Coherence Meets Resonance,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 135 (April 2022):104576. Lauren Arcuri, “Take a Deep Breath,” The Physiologist Magazine, January 2021, https://www.physiology.org/publications/news/the-physiologist-magazine/2021/january/take-a-deep-breath?SSO=Y.
vi Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 1.
vii Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 1.
viii Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 1.
ix Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 2.
x Muriel Rukeyser, The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation (Paris Press, 1997), 60.
xi Rukeyser, The Orgy, 61, 62, 69.
xii Rukeyser, The Orgy, 63.
xiii Denis Johnston, “The Goat’s Minions: The Orgy, by Muriel Rukeyser,” The Nation, March 15, 1965, 282.
xiv Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 31.