Muriel Rukeyser's Cohort

In his blog of November 29, 2004, Ron Silliman wonders about the relationship of Muriel Rukeyser to the Objectivists. Of course, Muriel knew George Oppen fairly well and they were politically in tune with each other. I don't know about the other Objectivists, but I can't imagine Zukofsky and Rukeyser getting along. Muriel knew Robert Duncan fairly well and kept up a correspondence with him of some length, I think. But, I do think that her cohort in poetry was the group of women that she was close friends with for most of her life, including for a period of time May Sarton, and a longer periods of time, Jane Cooper, Adrienne Rich, Jean Valentine, Naomi Replansky and Grace Paley. Her “aesthetic” must have been developed in tandem with these other writers. Not that I can tell of what such an aesthetic would consist. I would think that her work is very close to Adrienne Rich's one one side and Jane Cooper's on the other, with Jane being close to Jean Valentine and Jean to Naomi Replansky. I don't know where Paley would fit in really, but I would guess to the outside of Rich.

Paley---Rich----Rukeyser----Cooper----Valentine----Replansky.

I do think that this is the context in which Rukeyser wrote and it is largely a matter of gender and of sexuality. The Objectivists were not notoriously more welcoming of women writers than the Agrarians or anyone else at that time (think of the case of Laura Riding). And if they had any hint of Rukeyser's bisexuality I can imagine all the male poets heading for the hills (I don't think this was the case, though I believe she was fairly open about her relationships with women, and was very supportive of Robert Duncan, who was of course, quite out of the closet). My feeling would be that Rukeyser came more and more to rely on her women friends for advice and support. Certainly, Cooper, Rich and Valentine shared their work with each other and were quite candid in their reactions to each other, Rich in particular being more overbearing than might have been necessary (this from some correspondence I have seen here and there, now unfortunately restricted until some large number of years after Rich's death). In any case, I think all these poets need to be studied in relationship to each other other and in relationship to themselves.