You reading this book, who are you? What is your face like, your hands holding the pages, the child forsaken in you, who now looks through your eyes at mine?

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

How to adequately describe a woman who was so unafraid to inhabit many ways of being?

Muriel Rukeyser: poet, biographer, theorist, playwright, novelist, story writer, writer for children, filmmaker, translator, broadcaster, ethnographer, and innovator of social, documentary poetics. She was secularly Jewish, a single mother, bisexual, a radical feminist, and a political activist. When she is evoked, it is often, as her granddaughter, the writer Rebecca Rukeyser, has pointed out, in the form of a list. Though this Whitmanian portrayal appeals in its connection to Rukeyser’s own affinities with Whitman’s expansive, embodied, and protodocumentary poetics, it seems to contain her further, to segment her into a grid of selves nonetheless limiting. For what is clear about Rukeyser as soon as you start to read her is that no matter how you label the constituent parts of a life, or a career, or a poem, you must concede to their fluidity and evolution, as well as to their tensions and conflicts. The catalogue of Rukeyser’s selfhoods, like her famous diagram of the dynamic relations of an artwork, “is false until all the components are shown in motion.”

The multivalence of Rukeyser’s experience shaped her writing. Yet, as Adrienne Rich asserted in her introduction to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, Rukeyser was “a poet first and foremost.” It is as a poet that she approached her manifold subjects and lived realities; it is as a poet that she decided to respond to the crises of her lifetime. Rukeyser’s poetics of relation, always insistently political, infused every one of her projects—from her proletarian first collection Theory of Flight through her posthumously published Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast; her work in the Graphics Division of the Office of War Information; her groundbreaking radio series Sunday at Nine; her series of lectures during the 1940s on the connections between poetry, democracy, and psychic and social life; her multigenre biographical works on Willard Gibbs, Thomas Hariot, Wendell Willkie, and Harry Houdini; to her final collection of poetry, The Gates, shaped by her experience of petitioning in Korea for the release of imprisoned dissident poet Kim Chi-ha.

Our collaboratively edited collection, Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser is dedicated to thinking seriously about what such an approach means, to poetry, to criticism, to social and political life, in theory, and in practice. We wanted to make a book that began to answer the questions Muriel Rukeyser asked. We wanted to make a book that continued to ask the questions she asked, of ourselves, of each other. And more than this, we wanted to make a book with others—a book that responded in spirit and form to her collaborative, multidimensional legacy.

It was other poets themselves who offered us the first clue that such a book was needed. In epigraphs, op eds, interviews, and personal essays, they were reaching into the body of Rukeyser’s work, beyond the quotable lines already integrated into the public imagination (“What would happen if a woman told the truth about her life / The World would split open” and “The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms”), to her more complex, even challenging formulations. Many of these poets share the pages of Beyond Ourselves, and include Daniel Borzutsky, Susan Briante, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Deborah Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Solmaz Sharif, and Nomi Stone.

What kind of a book, then, is Beyond Ourselves? It is a book that began and begins in dialogue. The following conversation between the two of us, as editors, as people who have lived most of their careers reading and responding to Rukeyser’s remarkable body of work, is a form of collaborative criticism, an accumulative, composite picture not just of Rukeyser in the 21^st century but of her readers. We named our exchange after one of Rukeyser’s most famous and most moving poems. It was written across vastly different time zones, pulled together over emails, cell phone messages, video calls, and Google docs while one of us was in Ireland, the other on the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States. Writing to each other, we worked out the clock-time the other person was inhabiting. When one of us was halfway through the day, the other had yet to wake to it, or was preparing for sleep. There were teaching timetables, and the needs and habits of children and partners to factor into our meetings. There’s something about this projection of the self into the space and time of the other that affects the nature of collaboration, that renders it more porous, vulnerable, open—and that allows ideas more dimensions in which to be tested, to take hold and grow. This dialogue, which begins our book, is another opening—to a conversation beyond ourselves, to and with our contributors, and beyond again, to you, reading.

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Effort at Speech Between Two People

Dear S,

Over the last years, I’ve been thinking a lot about how individualism, including methodological individualism, is a bankrupt ideology. About how collaboration is the only way to address the mounting ecological, planetary, and humanitarian crises we are facing this century.

Rukeyser knew this at the start of her career in the 1930s (which is one of the reasons she is almost always described as “ahead of her time”). She sought, consistently throughout her life, intellectual exchange between people and across fields of knowledge, across sciences and the arts. The bonds she forged with photographers, artists, filmmakers, dramaturgs, directors, novelists, poets, editors, translators, anthropologists, psychologists, analysts, physicists, historians, miners, protestors, activists, athletes, sometimes led to romantic entanglements, and often led to boundary-breaking, trans-genre projects, some of which were published during her lifetime, some of which were posthumously published, others that remain in fragments, unfinished, filed away in archival boxes, or lost.

I see our project, Beyond Ourselves, in this same vein: a staging of cooperation, and an active acknowledgment that plural authorship is not only a necessity but a stark truth. There is no such thing as a single author, after all. As Cristina Rivera Garza writes in The Restless Dead:

being-in-common is a taut, dynamic, and ultimately unfinished process. Thinking about community, which means thinking about the beyond-oneself and the emergence of the between that renders us ourselves and others at the same time, is certainly among the tasks of writing. Perhaps this is its true task, if it has one. Its raison d’être, if it has only one.

Rukeyser’s best-known work, “The Book of the Dead” (1938), is the most obvious place in which a communality of voices forge a text that has lasting implications for the ways we live with, and treat, others, the ways we seek to survive amid the destructive logics of capitalism and colonialism. The poems in this extraordinary text—which still feels new to me every time I read it—inhabit the voices of the living and the dead, braiding first, second, and third person in a poetic sequence that accomplishes this “emergence of the between” that Garza describes. In these poems, the dead are not left behind; they speak. And we listen.

“How can we write in and through communities in a world sundered by war and changing notions of territoriality, a world in which belonging and loyalty often become spectacularly violent inscriptions onto vulnerable bodies?” Garza asks. Rukeyser spent her life asking the same question and dedicated her life to answering it. I return to the poem that gave us the title of our book, as well as its epigraph, “Poem”:

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves

In this manifold act of reaching, in which self-awareness unfolds to an awareness of the lived experience of others, a meeting place emerges. The “I” of the poem’s first line soon becomes a plural “we” of collective responsibility. Imagining, finding, constructing, reconciling, reaching … this is the work of poetry, and the work of our book, written together in another century of wars.

Yours, C

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Dear C,

I think often about how significant, even surprising, it is that Rukeyser wrote so many biographies, so many poems and books grounded in the experiences, creations, ideas, landscapes, and moments of individual people. Willard Gibbs, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Hariot, Harry Houdini, Wendell Willkie, John Brown, Akiba, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Anne Burlak, Charles Ives—these are just some figures explicitly named in major works. Through people Rukeyser tracked historical forces, intellectual currents, sands literally shifting beneath feet, meaning.

I’m struck by what seems on the surface to be a contradiction between this obsession with specific lives and your beautiful meditation on individualism, exchange, and collaboration. How Rukeyser wrote so many lives yet strove endlessly for that which we can only encounter and achieve beyond the rigid boundaries of an individual self. Of course, I don’t think these interests and commitments are actually contradictory. Eric Keenaghan writes about Rukeyser’s extensive life writing, pulling the term “biocracy”—with its mash-up of democracy and biography—from her archival notes and articulating how in her hands this endeavor becomes “a field of struggle and encounter,” “generat[ing]” rather than foreclosing “intimacies” between individuals including herself, her subjects, her readers. There is a dialectical magic through which intense attention to one individual opens the possibility of the “beyond” we quote in our title. I think our book, too, is animated by our shared commitment to inhabiting the energy and friction of that terrain of “struggle and encounter”—here, our own with Rukeyser herself. As she writes at the end of her 1973 poem “Flying to Hanoi,” “My life is flying to your life.”

Rukeyser asks her audience intimate, probing questions. … Her words are a wake-up call, a kind of verbal shoulder-shake.

Several essays in our collection celebrate, grapple with, question, and notice the limitations of the places and modes in Rukeyser’s work where I and you and she and he and they tangle and blur, where that blurring is desired but not achieved, or where there is insufficient knowledge or understanding for that tangling and enmeshment. As Philip Metres articulates, “Rukeyser believed in the dream of oneness, which is dangerous but rich with possibility.” Khadijah Queen’s essay opens by posing this commitment as a question: “What is an open self? In practice how might an open self operate in writing and beyond—in other fields of knowledge, as well as in everyday life?” And Erika Meitner’s essay almost echoes (which is particularly striking as none of the contributors saw each other’s pieces as we were putting together this book): “What does it mean to open ourselves again and again?”

Here, I’m reminded of another essential aspect of Rukeyser’s own work: her direct, urgent, and actual asking of questions. These questions probe her undertakings (“What is this book?”), her subjects (“Was Hariot a great scientist? A great man?”), and they reach out from the page to us: “My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?” Again and again, she makes explicit the nature and texture of active questioning.

I think this, too, is the work of poetry. We enter not through certainty and closure but through encounter, unfolding process, conversation.

Yours, S

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Dear S,

It is from this spirit of encounter and conversation—and yes, of struggle—that our book began to take shape, as our exchange does here. I want to dwell a little longer on the dialectical nature of what is at stake in coming to Rukeyser, and to poetry, that you put your finger on so perfectly in your last message.

Returning to a word in “Poem,” I think part of this grappling we do with her work, and that she does with the work of poetry, has to do with the reconcilement of apparent opposites (in her poem: waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, ourselves with ourselves). To reconcile means to return or restore to peace or unity, especially after estrangement. Here, that word “beyond” carries with it the work of reconciliation, itself being an unusual compound of the Old English words for by, representing position, and yonder, meaning “over there,” and “within sight but not near.” The word moves, internally, from proximity to remoteness, and it makes them touch. Recognition of distance might be the first step toward peace-making.

Throughout her war-time lecture “The Fear of Poetry,” Rukeyser asks her audience intimate, probing questions. “When you speak, do you believe what you say? When you act, do you believe what you are doing?” Her words are a wake-up call, a kind of verbal shoulder-shake:

War or construction. Fear or imagination. I place those opposite. What threats does fear bring to your belief? What threats arrive to your imagination? How deeply are you cut off? Is your pride so frail that it can be broken by struggle?

How to reconcile what is out of reach with what is next to us or within us? How to close—or better, how to cross—the gap between what is here and what is there? I think of your insightful piece for our book, where you reflect on the complexities of poetry’s capacity to hold and generate multiple meanings—word becoming world; a world within a word. And I think about poetry as a site both of departure and arrival; its ability to carry meaning back and forth between the images of our lives, and in that carrying, to change it. Our word for this is, of course, “metaphor”; a word that stems from the Latin and Greek metaphora, meaning, literally, a “carrying over.” Poetry comes alive in this way as process over product, igniting in us the experience of organic movement and from there, the belief in growth and change in nature and in history.

Rukeyser does not always succeed in the communication for which she so passionately petitions. I am not the only reader to get lost at times in the thickets of her words in prose and in verse—and I try, sometimes fruitlessly, to parse for clarity in her invocations and tautologies. What does she mean, for example, when she states in “The Fear of Poetry” that “the content of faith, for us, is not the opposite of another faith—it is not like the whirlpools which, north of the Equator, circle in one direction, and, southward, drive eternally opposite. It is the form that distinguishes”? I am disoriented by the metaphor. Yet the striving for understanding is, for Rukeyser, the point of poetry. “The poems” (and, as an aside, I think a whole study could be given to her use of the definite article) “will say what we have meant all along,” she asserts.

I need them to be immediate, to reach my life. First of all. To make that quick acute communication, to make contact, clearing the distance between people until the real meaning lies between them, and only meaning. There are barriers, there are the deafening lonelinesses. But here is the immediacy and the voice.

At the heart of Rukeyser’s entire sensibility: the voice. It is not writing that emerges as a site of communality in Rukeyser’s body of work, but speaking. “Speak to me” is the first, and repeated, appeal of one of Rukeyser’s most famous, and earliest, poems, “Effort at Speech Between Two People.” “Take my hand.” And then, as ever, the question, asking for response, anticipating change through the clearing of distance: “What are you now?”

To reach beyond ourselves is key to our survival. “Our lives,” Rukeyser says in the same lecture, “may rest on this; and our lives are our only metaphor.”

Yours, C

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Dear C,

I am so glad you have brought us to metaphor. When I started thinking and writing about Rukeyser, the audacity of her comparisons and “meeting-places” was what I was most drawn to; it was what I most worried about, too. Rukeyser herself was cognizant of the potential dangers. As she warns in Willard Gibbs: “We are machines of likeness. The brain is one; we spend most of our lives recognizing. We reason by the proportion of things. It is an easy step from recognition to seduction.” I love your example of the etymology of “beyond” because it reconciles, as you say, the opposites, but it doesn’t elide them, nor does it elide their history—of estrangement, or even of violent confrontation.

You point to “recognition of distance” as the first step toward peacemaking. And I think how metaphor itself is entirely reliant on distance, on difference—without it, connection and comparison risk nothing and so mean nothing. Anthropologist, cyberneticist, and philosopher Gregory Bateson (whose thinking, as you know, I find so resonant with Rukeyser’s) writes how perception—and therefore meaning—“operates only upon difference.” I imagine Rukeyser would appreciate Bateson’s definition of science “as a method of perception” and his conclusion, echoing language we’ve been using about our collective work, that “science probes; it does not prove.”

I confess that I don’t fully grasp what Rukeyser means in those haunting lines you end with, that “our lives are our only metaphor.” Perhaps it is that our lives are a metaphor because they’re what carry us across, as well as being how we are in relation to others (one more link to her writing of lives). Or, that one’s own life is the only ground from which one can begin to discover the meaning that might allow us to begin to reach beyond. Ultimately, I think Rukeyser is pointing to the impulse toward making connections and deep attention to that which connects combined with an equally acute commitment to perceiving and honoring difference, distance—how those twinned components are the work of metaphor, as they are, or should be, the work of our lives.

I’m struck by how many of our contributors, traveling such wonderfully different routes through Rukeyser’s work, come to this essential and difficult negotiation between connection and difference. I’m thinking, for example, about Jena Osman’s exploration of Rukeyser’s “mash-up” of historical fact and lyric gesture in documentary works (what Rukeyser herself calls “verifiable and unverifiable” fact), how “the poet’s voice attempt[s] to guide that truth, through craft, into a universal (totalizing?) sphere.” Jena asks: “Must the particular disappear for the sake of a general cause?” There can be no easy answer; but in taking the question seriously, each of these contributors shines a light on their own “relation[s] to the matter at hand” (to quote Jena again). In truly questioning Rukeyser in these ways, they honor and extend her work.

Now that this volume has taken shape, I have been reading it through once more not as disparate pieces, but as a new whole. A thrill has been noticing not just the ideas but the quotations that resurface across multiple essays. One of them I’ve already mentioned in this exchange, and you’ve already typed as a potential epigraph at the head of our working introduction Google Doc—this imperfect-perfect technological vehicle for our years-long collaboration, notifications pinging in my middle-of-the-night across time differences that you’ve made a change, asked a question, jotted a thought. The quotation is from the end of The Life of Poetry, where Rukeyser addresses us directly: “My one reader, you reading this book, who are you? What is your face like, your hands holding the pages, the child forsaken in you, who now looks through your eyes at mine?” Recognition and difference once again twinned to power this address. I think of the “you” beyond you, Catherine—the intimate stranger we both hope to reach.

The “beyond” in Rukeyser’s poem and in our title is also temporal—beyond Rukeyser’s time and beyond our own time, too. Lives (in actual fact and in the structure of Rukeyser’s biographies) rush and cascade beyond their boundaries. As we’ve written elsewhere in this introduction, one question this book asks is how we shall speak to each other of the poet: how we will understand her multifaceted work and life and provocations. But we’re also asking what we will go on to do with that understanding and speaking next in our lives, activism, making—both alone and with each other. For, Rukeyser is truly a “resource”—and as she herself has shown us, in these complex and violent times, there is no resource that we may afford not to use.

With love, S

In the self-reflexive, process-oriented pieces that follow our editorial exchange in Beyond Ourselves, each author interweaves Rukeyser’s questions with our own, braiding her time, our time, and our imagined futures. Each hybrid piece creates new forms through and for its acts of inquiry. This, too, is Rukeyser’s legacy. The lyric essays, scholarly critiques, documentary collages, and collaborative poems talk to each other as they talk to Rukeyser. The book that holds them is a temporary settling of the kaleidoscope of interacting concerns, put into motion across the volume and beyond.