“Biocracy: Reading Poetic Politics through the Traces of Muriel Rukeyser’s Life-Writing”

It is a common narrative: after the Second World War, the United States prized social conformity and cultural assimilation at the expense of individualism and any perceived deviation from mainstream norms. Rather than appreciate the diversity of its constituent parts, the US became a “culture of the whole,” as William Graebner dubs it, and homogeneity dominated the postwar moment (69–100). Muriel Rukeyser, believing that such a climate actually predated the country’s entry into the war, publicly militated against that conformity as early as the 1940s. The predominantly isolationist population’s “repressive codes” created a national homogenization that, as she warned in The Life of Poetry (1949), “strikes deep at our emotional lives”; even “our emotions are supposed to be uniform” (17). Rukeyser’s writing attempts to convey the rich variety of inner lives and the resulting connection that individuals feel with one another. Awareness of others’ inner feeling might spur the imagination, thus inviting readers to participate in an alternative vision of life. Her poetic politics are deeply connected to bio-graphy—that is, to the affective writing or rewriting (graphesis) of life itself (bios). During and after the war, she expanded her poetic enterprise by turning to life-writing projects that explored not just her own emotional life but also the emotional lives of others. Even when Rukeyser wrote about herself, though, her work demanded that readers reconsider what it means to write a life, as well as why it is necessary to reevaluate the politics attending such projects. To fully understand her turn to biography, then, we must overcome our own precepts about life-writing.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Rukeyser famously asks in her poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” answering with the oft-quoted line: “The world would split open” (Collected 463). Not coincidentally, these words serve as a galvanizing slogan for second-wave feminists despite the fact that Rukeyser “never defined herself as a feminist” (Daniels xiii). Since the New Left’s consciousness-raising politics in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist politics have tended to bridge the personal and the political. Despite deconstructionist and constructivist caveats today, we often still default to viewing self-expression as a transparent translation, or at least an attempted translation, of individual private experience into public, collective politics. At first glance, Rukeyser’s career seems to anticipate such an idea. As she notably theorized decades earlier in The Life of Poetry, poetry exists in a triadic relation, moving in “vectors” between the page, “the artist,” and “the audience, or witness,” to generate a shared “consciousness” (51). Writing assumes someone will be there, even if only eventually, to participate in a “process” of change that begins with such “sharing” (Life of Poetry 53). That exchange, rooted in trust and intimacy between strangers, constitutes a form of politics, as private readings invite reimaginings of public connections. Whatever such passages might suggest, and regardless of her years living in the public eye as an activist-poet, Rukeyser did not espouse the prototypical New Left ethos presuming a seamless relationship between the personal, political, and poetic. She herself was inclined toward what many would regard as reticence, never revealing the full picture of the personal experiences informing her political feeling. No matter how close readers feel to this woman reading her poetry, they cannot avoid the realization that they do not really know her.

As her son William recounts it, Rukeyser felt that speaking and writing obliquely, rather than directly, about her experience “sufficed for telling the truth.”² Readers are responsible for following the threads of those partial, somewhat obfuscated disclosures in her poetry, autobiographical prose, public lectures, essays, and interviews. In a 1964 diary entry, after she suffered a stroke that temporarily impaired her speech, Rukeyser entertained the idea of writing her life-story, perhaps in a more expositive mode: “Could I write it? An autobiog. book called perhaps EFFORT AT SPEECH?” (Muriel Rukeyser Papers [MRP], 1:1, emphasis original). She began outlining that project, but left only skeletal notes for posterity...