Khadijah Queen Presents Muriel Rukeyser's Poetics of Possibility

Khadijah Queen close-reads the work of Muriel Rukeyser for futurefeed. "Rukeyser’s passion for delivering craft and content which embody ... possibility is matched only by her courage as a writer and a person, pioneering a unique documentary style that blends genres in honest and compelling ways that make her a definitively major literary figure," she writes. More:

Critics at times perceived her passion as sentimentality and naiveté, her style as either too simple or too convoluted and uneven, her content as strange and didactic. I disagree. She is earnest, in a cynical field and world; she is also hopeful, and bold enough in that hopefulness to push for accuracy and action. Her undeniable dedication to social change lasted until her death, even if she failed to succeed in tangible ways like policy shifts. A careful reading of her work reveals that her approach to race, like Whitman and Melville, still often operates from a position of white supremacy, whether the assumption of that position is intentional/conscious or not. But, rather than dismiss her contributions as a result of such perceived and/or actual failures and failings—failure being another subject she addresses from the perspective of its value—we can study and learn from it. Further, that Rukeyser’s intellectual curiosity leapt across genre limitations to produce a body of work that could be characterized as a philosophy of the imagination—an ambitious, powerful and valuable undertaking. Indeed, Rukeyser’s thematic consistency over dozens of books of poetry, prose and even juvenile literature, but perhaps most of all “how early she embraced the realm of the technological and scientific imagination” (xii) could classify her as more of a philosopher than a poet, demonstrating both the meagerness of labels and the expansiveness of her gifts.

Find the full piece, "Muriel Rukeyser as Major Figure: Imaginative Poetics as Praxis," at futurefeed.