Muriel Rukeyser Quotes
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Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
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No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
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I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
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Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.
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If we look long enough and hard enough ... we will begin to see the connections that bind us together, and when we recognize those connections, we will begin to change the world.
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In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. 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.
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A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them.
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The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.
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We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
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Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
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The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
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The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.
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How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that to an adolescent was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?
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Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.
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The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?
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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.
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American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare
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A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
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dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.
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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
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The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals, water to sound, fire to form: life flickers uncounted into the supple arms of love.
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Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
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There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.
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