The Speed of Darkness: [Poems]

by Rukeyser Muriel

This 1968 collection is in four sections: "Clues," "Games," a long poem "The Outer Banks," and "Lives." In an essay on the poet Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich writes that Rukeyser "was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very good poems mixed with some not so good, so for me, three stars is about right.

A few of my faves -

IN OUR TIME

In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.

SONG: LOVE IN WHOSE RICH HONOR

Love
in whose rich honor
I stand looking from my window
over the starved trees of a dry September
Love
deep and so far forbidden
is bringing me
a gift
to claw at my skin
to break open my eyes
the gift longed for so long
The power
to write
out of the desperate ecstacy at last
death and madness

ANEMONE

My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening.
You are looking into me with your waking look.

My mouth is closing, my mouth is opening.
You are waiting with your red promises.

My sex is closing, my sex is opening.
You are singing and offering: the way in.

My life is closing, my life is opening.
You are here.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although celebrated by Adrienne Rich and others, Rukeyser remains one of the most clearly undervalued poets of the 20th century. She's best known for her political testimony poems of the 1930s (A Turning Wind, Theory of Flight) and, among people who dig deeply into mid-20th century poetry, her stunning sequence of Elegies.

Written amidst the tumult of the 1960s, Speed of Darkness rates with her very best work. Rukeyser is sharply aware of the political turmoil and images evoking Vietnam, civil rights and generational conflict appear with regularity. What sets Rukeyser apart most clearly from her younger piers--Rich, Denise Levertov, in some ways Ginsbert--is her ability to draw deep connections between previous struggles--the Spanish civil war, the Jewish martyr Rabbi Akiba, Kathe Kollwitz--and the current moment. And at every turn, her focus is insistently on the present, the moment in which the elders and ancestors assume meaning. As she writes in "The Outer Banks" (along with the title poem, one of the two long sequences that provide the book's centers of gravity): "There is no out there. All is open./ Open water. Open I". And in lines that could have come from Rich's Will to Change: "Who will speak these days,/if not I, if not you?"

A necessary and undervalued volume that should be read by anyone engaged with the deeply lyric potential of political poetry.

[seo eun Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms"

[Sirah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book of poetry is divided up into a few sections: Clues (which is mostly about war), Games (which was indeed playful but only had 3 poems), The Outer Banks (which is all one long poem), Lives (which includes two poems, each considering a different person), and the titular poem, The Speed of Darkness.

I don't think of myself as the kind of person who hates poetry, but this one really didn't do it for me. I like poems that are a bit cryptic and make copious use of wordplay and sound. This one ... tried? But there was no emotional impact other than the occasional "ew," which I don't think is what the author intended. Is it because this book is too old? Well, I liked reflecting on graffiti and who might have put it there and what's happened to it since, and there's something intriguing about scattering words across a page to make them feel like waves. But otherwise, there wasn't much endearing these poems to me, and there was a lot that immediately made me disgusted, whether because it connotated sexual content, sexual abuse, sexism, war, or classism.

I picked up this volume because I was looking for a particular line quoted in another book, but it turned out to be irritating to wade through this book trying to find the quote and read it in context.

[Paul Hartzog · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms" is from this book. I enjoyed the other poems also.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the writing here comes into both your ears, only one is on your body. There exists a transformed stereo: the other ear has been ventriloquilly relocated inside the history of myths. Gods, primal forces of shoal and light, volcanoes, runes of mind, are inside out. What do I mean by this? Our fossilized roles, retrampled, not rotely reoccurred. Words are off in the distance, wedged in time's dark shapes, escaping their strange geology, with muted evidence of being. "The words have taken on/all of their forbidden meanings. The words mean their opposites. They are needed." ("Not Yet")

I am attracted to the traces of this kind of language, where it doesn't really matter what the actual words are. Instead, something else comes out, a murmur of thought and perspective that went in before the writing, a way of speaking in larger forms about the plane of history. "I have forgotten what it was/that I have been trying to remember" ("Woman as Market")

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am torn between two and three stars for this book. Some of the poems were beautiful. I loved "A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida" and really liked "The Backside of the Academy", "The Outer Banks", and "Akiba". Unfortunately, even with these great pieces and a number of good pieces, some were either very strange or very uncomfortable. "What Do I Give You?" is a perfect example of the weird, poems that either make very little sense (like this one) or leave you wondering why it was written (like "The Conjugation of the Paramecium") but are well constructed nonetheless. The uncomfortable is best exemplified in "Orgy", although sections of the title poem were also deeply uncomfortable, due to the use of "bad" words or (what seemed to me to be)unnecessary sexual imagery.