Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness, and Poetry of the 1960s
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Document Type
Presentation/Lecture
Event Date
2024
Copyright Statement
Copyright to this resource is held by the content creator, author, artist or other entity, and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any other format without written permission of Eastern Michigan University Archives (lib_archives@emich.edu).
Recommended Citation
Witonsky, Trudi and Werner, Craig, "Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness, and Poetry of the 1960s" (2024). Events. 2.
https://commons.emich.edu/rukeyser_events/2
murielrukeyser.org-The Way In Muriel Rukeyser The Speed of Darkness and Poetry of the 1960s.pdf (345 kB)
Event page on murielrukeyser.org
Event page on murielrukeyser.org
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Comments
Written and published at a time of dizzying change, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness has rarely been placed in conversation with the political and poetic upheavals of the mid/late 1960s. In their introductory comments, Trudi and Craig approach the volume as part of a broader cultural movement to imagine, as Rukeyser phrases it in “Akiba,” “a new song,” to chart “the way in” to a new political poetics. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser defined the work of poetry in ways that took on new life in this era. As “an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world,” poetry increases our “capacity to make change in existing conditions.” Rukeyser’s exploration of those possibilities places The Speed of Darkness in dialogue with the politically active poets of the Sixties, among them Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, and Amiri Baraka. Inviting viewers into a call-and-response conversation, Trudi and Craig then turn our attention to a set of poems–“Delta Poem,” “Poem,” “The Poem as Mask,” “Akiba”–that establish Rukeyser’s awareness of central “Sixties” concerns, including the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the emerging feminist movement, and economic exploitation. The final segment of the meeting consists of a detailed reading of “The Outer Banks” as an underrecognized touchstone of late-Sixties poetry.