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The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

Muriel Rukeyser

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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Fear
Reality
Indication
Cutting
Poetry

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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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I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
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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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What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
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The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.
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If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
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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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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
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My lifetime listens to yours.
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
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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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One writes in order to feel.
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Reality is the completion of experience.
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The journey is my home.
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
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Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.
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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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There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
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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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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
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