Has anyone ever written in depth on the relationship – or lack thereof – between Muriel Rukeyser & the Objectivists? Only two women are included in the Objectivist issue of Poetry that Louis Zukofsky edited in February, 1931, Joyce Hopkins and Martha Champion, two of the writers Eliot Weinberger once characterized as “Forgotten Objectivists.” Niedecker came later.

 

But why not Rukeyser? Objectivism’s political bent was not unlike her own, in the circle of the Communist Party & hence not like the Trotskyists among the New York Intellectuals. Further, there is a specificity in her best poetry that clearly identifies her not only as a major poet, but also well within the broader aesthetic frame implicit in the writing of the Objectivists, especially in the 1930s. Consider, for example, “The Road” from “The Book of the Dead,”

 

These are roads to take when you think of your country

and interested bring down the maps again,

phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,

 

reading the papers with morning inquiry.

Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light

chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights

 

indicate future of road, your wish pursuing

past the junction, the form, the suburban station,

well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.

 

Past your tall central city’s influence,

outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,

are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason.

 

These roads will take you into your own country.

Select the mountains, follow rivers back,

travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where

 

the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,

iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down

into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.

 

Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.

Airport. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add

history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee.

 

The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine

in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,

crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder.

 

The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow,

rivers and spring. KING COAL HOTEL, Lookout,

and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge.

 

Now the photographer unpacks camera and case,

surveying the deep country, follows discovery

viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

 

John Marshall named the rock (steep pines, a drop

he reckoned in 1812, called) Marshall’s Pillar,

but later, Hawk’s Nest. Here is your road, tying

 

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.

Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river

cutting fast and direct into the town.

 

Specificity is perhaps the simplest test of a good writer: this is a variant, demonstrating its possibility without necessarily committing oneself to specificity’s fuller implications. The particular remains subsumed under a declamatory second person, a holdover from the Victorian dramatic monolog. One sees similar approaches in writers such as Hart Crane or Marianne Moore, modernists a generation or more older than Rukeyser. One sees it in Pound also, tho notably only through Mauberly.

 

I’ve wondered if Rukeyser’s disinterest in the Pound/Williams tradition – visible enough just in the poem above – or possibly even her having won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1921, then as now a School of Quietude seal of approval, didn’t create a distance between her & the Objectivists. Even her success – her work was already receiving wide distribution, they were trying to get George Oppen’s small press off the ground – could have made it harder for those young men to imagine her work in relation to their own.

 

“The Book of the Dead” clearly anticipates Reznikoff’s As Testimony & Oppen’s Of Being Numerous. It’s not at all a work calculated to garner good wishes from the agrarians who were then coming into dominance among the School of Quietude – and it’s an especially gutsy project to lead off with after having won something like the Yale. I don’t think Rukeyser’s ear is as good as any of the major Objectivists, largely because her idea of the line seems never to have accepted the impact of Pound. Given the context of her times, that’s not much of an indictment. Yet she’s not mentioned even in passing in the Williams-Zukofsky correspondence.

 

Was she too successful? Not successful enough? Is there some Stalinist factional dispute I’m not seeing at 70 years’ remove? Was it her sexuality? For the life of me, I can’t imagine how the Objectivists wouldn’t have benefited from closer contact with Muriel Rukeyser & her poetry. From her perspective, it no doubt would have been nice to have had a few more left-of-center poets around.

 

Yet that connection seems never to have been made. From this many decades’ distance – and no doubt aided by my own ignorance of the larger contexts of Rukeyser’s work & life – it comes across as one of those curious seams in the history of poetry. Something here doesn’t fit right. Can anyone tell me what I’m not seeing?