1869, Ep. 142 with Eric Keenaghan & Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editors of The Muriel Rukeyser Era

8:14PM Nov 22, 2023

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Eric Keenaghan

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Keywords:

poetry

work

forms

muriel

thinking

rowena

book

women

eric

prose

politics

era

poetic

call

ideas

ways

essay

political

writing

archives

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editors of the new collection of Muriel Rukeyser's prose, The Muriel Rukeyser Era. Eric Keenaghan is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of English at the University of Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is Associate Professor of gender studies and 20th and 21st century women's writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of unfinished spirit and editor of Rukeyser savage coast. We spoke to Eric and Rowena about Muriel Rukeyser's life and legacy, why much of her writing was actively suppressed during her time, and how reading Rukeyser'sprose helps us better understand her ideas, her career and her poetry. Hello, Eric and Rowena, welcome to the podcast.

Hi.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about the new edited volume we have just coming out the The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. Tell us how this project came to be?

Well, it started a long time ago, I think it was 2011 is when I began when I began the project. Initially, I had been invited to give a talk. I forgot all about that. I gave a talk at a library in upstate New York, about Muriel Rukeyser, a friend of mine, who had been a former colleague in our Jewish Studies program, at the University of Albany, SUNY, had invited me to give a talk on Rukeyser. Although I didn't really work on her. He was organizing these public lectures called Jews along the Hudson, it was really it was it was a really curious thing. I agreed to I agreed to do it. And then at the same time, a friend of mine who is now the curator at the poetry collection, James Maynard, someone who had gone to graduate school with at Temple University, also, like sent me along this call for papers for the Journal of Narrative Theory about a special issue and Rukeyser is like the universe was telling me I had to work on Rukeyser. And so I was very familiar with her poetry and big fan as many people are. But I didn't really know anything about her. And I was curious as someone who works in Queer Studies and Political Studies about how we might read her as a Jewish queer forbear. And for poet activists, and so I went to the Library of Congress. And that sent me down the rabbit hole, just trying to find like anything I could about her, that led to my realizing I couldn't find anything about her, and just became inundated, and just totally immersed in the, at the archives. It's a huge archive of the Library of Congress. But that was my introduction. And I was just like, all this stuff has to get out there somehow.

And I guess mine was similar, exactly the same moment, actually, is Eric, where I have studied Rukeyser at the CUNY Graduate Center, and during my PhD, a little bit of her poetry, and in a class in the Spanish Civil War, also ended up at the Library of Congress looking for the novel that would become Savage Coast or that is Savage Coast. And it was a similar kind of experience in the archive, but also a credit to Elizabeth Dahmer. Because that Journal of Narrative Theory, especially that issue brought actually a lot of us together, who have now been working on her pretty continuously. And but it was similar going into the archive, encountering the novel as this huge unpublished and unfinished work and the excitement of that, and then realizing how much more there was. And so not only they see the novel as this kind of revolution in form and women's engagement with politics in the 30s, it became the realization like Eric that it was so vast how much had been lost and then published or left out of print. So it's kind of a moment where your kind of career trajectory changes is what you're encountering. And it's really exciting, daunting. So Eric, and I have known each other actually since that.

Yeah, I think yeah, I remember when we actually met you were reading the proofs for Savage Coast, and we were, we met up a cafe Cafe this i Yeah, yeah, we're both much younger, much younger. I'm Spending half my time in this city at that time. And, yeah, we met up near my apartment in Manhattan.

And we're just talking about her and then that's sent me like down. Rowena was working on the novel, I was like, okay, the short form, stuff has to get out. And I began a manic project lasted a long time, just recovering as much of Rukeyser short form prose, mostly nonfiction, that I could find. And I had, over the course of several years, and several grants through my institution had kept going back to the Library of Congress and Berg collection at the New York Public Library, which are the two chief repositories of your Kaisers papers. And I had initially, I mean, I think the manuscript for the original vision, no one will ever know. I mean, I didn't realize just how enormous it was probably mean, this is a pretty hefty volume, per trade volume. And you're Rukeyser era. But the original manuscript, I think, was it, it would have been, I had it as two volumes, but it was probably three. Yeah, it was huge.

It is still only a fraction away of the prose she actually did produce. And she's funny, because in a lot of her public work, she'll say, Oh, I just did the prose writing. So I could keep going as a poet, or the prose writing is like the, you know, footnote, really, to these larger poetic things. But I think what we all came to realize is actually how dedicated she was to the cross genre, kind of multimodal forms that she was working in as prose and how it informed her poetry. And so over time, we're like, this stuff really actually makes everything she writes, make more sense, and bring so much more out. So then when I started working on the unfinished spirit, which was also with Cornell, and working a lot with this material, Eric, and I kind of came to Eric and I was like, let's like, do it together and finish it, because it should be out there. I mean, it's just extraordinary work. So we kind of came on at the end to help deal with the three volumes into one volume, I guess.

There's so much material, that there could be some additional volumes, for sure, absolutely. Amazing that there's all this prose and writings that she that she wrote, and then they've been forgotten. And that's obviously what you she brought you guys together to finish the work of message and her her work to the larger population when it was unfortunately ignored in during her time. So for those who may not know that much about Rukeyser, and this is a huge question. But could you give us like a broad overview of her life and her legacy? This could be sevearl hours...encapsulated...

capsulated?

Well, in some, I mean, should I do it? Or you want to do it?

Well, why not you? Rowena is working on the biography, so we can see if she can do a... Can you do...

Well, I kind of have a three sentence thing, I have a three sentence which is. So one is that in the 1930s, as a young person, a young woman, she was like, I think probably one of the most important working poets at the time, she was considered kind of on the cutting edge of both avant garde and political left poetry. And she was popular, she produced three books, by the time she was by 1930, she produced three books of poems, right? So you can say, and she was reviewed constantly, she was like in the space of the world that was making culture in the period. And then in the 40s, and into the 50s, with the increasingly kind of restrictive Cold War climate because she was queer, because she was a feminist and a non conforming or non conforming the gender roles of women, she chose to be a single mother. And because of her radical politics, which becomes very clear, I think, in this volume, how radical she really was it radical against kind of the grain of kind of the left wing at the time as well. And it was more nuanced critiques of the period, she became blacklisted. So in the 50s, she's basically, in some ways disappeared. The cultural canon just kind of made without her and many women of the 30s. And then the seventh day, she's kind of returns again, as what Anne Sexton Adrienne Rich called Mother of Us All as kind of the center of kind of a new women's and gay liberation movement, and she wins lots of awards, and her career is kind of reassessment. But now with her prose, her poetry has kind of given a lineage much more explicitly, but the prose work is not brought along in that kind of revival of her in the seven days. So there's like, my, that's my, like, five sentence...career.

Career.

Anything you want to add, Eric?

Um, no, I think that. That's great. They're really, I mean, I guess that gets to the heart of sort of the public Rukeyser I think, you know, I think the things to think about are just for people to be aware of, because a lot of people are not aware or is that like many other artists during both popular and cultural front moment of the late mid to late 30s, after the rise of the Spanish Civil War, which she witnessed firsthand the outbreak of she was working in various ways. And sort of informed by the poetics and politics of the Works Progress Administration. And she was involved also working for the, you know, working for the state later on working for the Office of War Information as a propagandist during the Second World War. So her politics are really are really, I mean, they're a form of what I think of as like an unaligned leftism, I always want to call her an anarchist, although there's only like one brief moment when she sort of like embraces the term or thinks of it as a possibility.

And I want to call her that too, though, we both want to call her that to some degree.

But she's also very much, you know, being her politics are also quite, they evolve a lot of the course of her career. And I think that we have a very, culturally and intellectually and academically have very sort of closed understandings of like what leftism is, or could be. And one of the ways in which she's very generative for me as a thinker, as well as a poet is the ways in which she's always reinventing not only herself and her poetics, but also the possibilities for politics. And I'm pushing against our very close understandings of what activism is...

yeah, and she was really got, she got in trouble, because people basically said, You shouldn't, in some ways, they said, You shouldn't change your mind, which is, in fact, a very kind of old left idea, which is that you stay with these kinds of certain ideological forms. And you can keep pushing it that where she really her whole idea of process oriented poetics, which we talked about in the introduction, a sense that you kind of chant your change in the moment that you're engaging, it changes you, and you kind of have to be open and expansive to those changes. Now, we see that as visionary, but in the 40s and 50s, that even the 30 is that was considered problematic or wishy washy. And it's why she often got called like the poster girl of the left that seemed like she was only going with popular opinions. But really, she was trying to think about a more, far more intricate kind of engagement with the world. And thinking about how to counter hegemonic ideas, which also meant not being static as a writer and thinker.

Iike that. I like that. So she's evolving in and we could call potentially an unevolved time in your lifetime. And now we've reached the point where now you have discovered her and now many people are discovering her. And it's like, we now can accept your ideas. Whereas back in the 30s, and 40s 50s, the majority of the population just couldn't, or at least, the publisher so that you have this great line. In the book you said, during a period when few women were allowed to position themselves as public intellectuals, much less as equal citizens. Most of this writing by Rukeyser has been forgotten, not reprinted since its first appearance, if it was published at all buried by editors and publishers because of conservative mid century gender and political orthodoxies that it just hits it on the head. So if when I read that I just got so angry. It's like why did that makes me it makes me furious. But um, but now I'm happy because now her writings are out. Tell us about some of the roadblocks that she hit or do you have any stories that describe that?

We have many stories? Eric, do you want to go? Should I go? I don't know you want to talk about the response to I don't know, like Many Keys is one of the good ones, Many Keys.

So this is an essay that she was commissioned to write by The Nation in 1956. I believe Michael Rosenthal, prominent critic poet, asked her to end a friend and get this is also like the theme of a friend asks her write, write an essay that will appear and this sort of left of center periodical. And asked her specifically to write about about women's literature, which she does. She writes this amazing essay called Many Keys, which, you know, this is one of the few essays that exists in many draft forms. In the archives, the size of our archives themselves are incredible for the simple fact But she moved around a lot and was bicoastal. Um, so the fact that that much of her materials are extant like and still still accessible is amazing. But what that also meant is that a lot of draft materials for many of the smaller pieces, we don't have like the full drafts. But this is one of the few essays where we have like, many, many drafts of several drafts of this particular essay. So she was, it was really important to her. And yeah, she's submitted the essay. It's an astounding essay that really, I think pre-stages a lot of second wave feminism by over a decade, and makes a case for thinking about the ways in which women's writing is suppressed so many ways, it's very autobiographical. And she's thinking about a worldwide tradition, thinking trance historically, in a very short space. It's like a 15 page manuscript, and doing this recovery work for Emily Dickinson when people are not taking Emily Dickinson very seriously, pointing to contemporaries, who are also had been silenced or lost. And she makes this it makes a case for thinking about women's writing as a form of labor and the kind of labor that's devalued. And, you know, and that and think formally about that as well to think about how, for instance, tropes of repetition, recur, because of the ways in which if one is primarily working in terms of domestic labor, and working within the home, you're a lot of your labor is repetitive. And so she's thinking formally, she's thinking, historically, she's thinking politically, and she submits this essay, and her friend says, I'm sorry, we can't publish this. And it was it was just jettisoned, like

But they say, and they say, for failure to communicate your point, but let me just read an extract of the point she communicated. She says there is waste in nature, waste in art and plenty of waste in the lives of women. And then she asserts this amazing sentence - "Waste is an influence, and the making poetry works against waste." It is a radical theory. It's like rad..., it's a socialist feminist theory of poetic practice, right? And they say it doesn't communicate, but they just didn't like the point. I mean, I think that's the moral of the story. It was saying things that they found uncomfortable, and it was positioning gendered labor, as Eric says, as like a center of experience that if you think of like, you know, Marxists, and Lukash, gender wasn't considered important. And she's saying, Actually, it is the one of the centers of our experience and women's experiences, and how we create.

Yeah. That's just one example.

A similar thing every time where people want her to do work, though. And then they say, actually, we don't want what you have to say. And that's it's very interesting. Or if you look at her collaboration with Bernice Abbott, it was like, they're like, there was all it was basically institutions entirely controlled by men who were like, these are like amateur women scientists trying to create this. This is her project, so easy to see which we accept the introduction. They're trying to create this kind of like, Democratic idea about arts and sciences and how we look at things and institutions were like, No, this is not, you know, you're not basically an expert enough. Their gender certainly defined what expert was, and the way they kind of experimented with kind of interdisciplinarity was not considered serious. And that was one of the things she was charged with a lot. Seriousness or failure to communicate properly, or that was very...

That was very transparently gendered now, you know, and even then, to admit that, yeah, the failure to communicate and also like, how much emotion I mean, this is the thing that's got gotten me and see in exploring the archives is how much she's dismissed. And her writing is dismissed as being overly emotional. Yeah. You know, taking that there's no room for an effect or emotion, which is actually central to her her political thinking, and her poetic thinking and how these two merge.

So what I'm hearing is clearly she was ahead of her time that her messge wasn't received properly, but now it can be so there is a time element. And that you know, this now we go to the title of your book, The Muriel Rukeyser era, Eou asked this very provocative question in an intro - "What would have happened if a Jewish radical bisexual single mother had been a defining voice of postwar American poetry?" I mean, that would be amazing.

"What if it had been the Rukeyser Era," okay, now we're going to the title, and you have this great line. I love it. With the publishing of your book, you say, "This is the Rukeyser Era ,long delayed, but just in time." Tell us about this.

Well, this is a question I posed first in Unfinished Spirit. And then I posted as like a hunch question. And then, as I was working on the biography, and Eric and I were working on this, I came to the story about the Bollingen Prize am I saying that right, Bollingen Prize, in which she was the nominee in 1948. I'm forgetting my dates 48, right, with Ezra Pound and Pound won. And that kind of reinstated his career after he had been kind of institutionalized for fascist legions and treason. And I realized that when I had asked the question, originally, I was thinking about how the male canon had been made, or kind of a massless canon had made in the post war period, that really kind of reified, practical criticism that didn't want us to think about the political life of poetry, as Rukeyser had conceived it, many women had conceived it, and that it was about the canon that we had been offered as students in the post war period, all the way through a PhD, which is a very small fraction of the writing and thinking that had happened in the 20th century. So that was why I kind of said it. Originally, it was kind of a tongue in cheek thing, but then I realized it was a truth. And it was one of those moments, I was like, Oh, my God, it almost was her, because she was the only woman nominated for this first most important post-war poetry prize. It was her, William Carlos William, Pound and Randall Jarrell. And that she her books, The Green Wave is this extraordinary book about the surveillance state in the Cold War period, about grappling with form and politics, and then about becoming pregnant and this kind of parturient possibility of the period. And it's extraordinary. So it's exactly that like, what if it all had reversed, and this kind of prize winning moment was given to this woman who was writing far more expansive forms about the possibilities of the world as opposed to kind of what is basically Pound's most fascists poetics. And so there's a real sense that the hunch that I had about how the canon formed was actually a true historical reality about how the canon was formed. And so Eric, and I realized, as we were talking about the book that this was it, this was exactly what had happened in both a larger canonical sense of at the works, we have access to how we read how we're taught, but actually in the real, historical, granular reality of who was given this award to change the poetic kind of how we think of modern poetry. And it was her she was in the mix. I couldn't believe I kind of couldn't believe it, actually.

Yeah. There's also I mean, there's another sort of, there's another narrative that we don't talk about as well, which is also the ways in which the new American poetry, as it's called the avant garde, various avant garde at the moment are emerging at the same moment. And they end up going to lb, and it's the avant garde around what's called the Black Mountain School, the New York send you mean, are you saying Olson? Well, yeah, some The San Francisco Renaissance. And so you know, this is this is all happening at the same time, it's 48. Rukeyser, is returning to lectures that she started writing in 19, you initially wrote in 1940, and gave at Vassar College, which we collect in The Muriel Rukeyser Era, which is that The Usable Truth, and she goes back to those lectures, which are thinking about this

pre war from a US vantage moment and thinking about the political climate at that time. And she's rewriting them and reimagining them for this clearly, like post war moment, and, and beginning of a Cold War. Mm hmm. And she's working on this in 48. And it ends up being published in 49, when the award is actually volunteered award is actually given. And her ideas are lifted by one of the new American poetry, like, sort of foundational figures, Charles Olson, and I'm now like, as I've been, sort of, in the last month have been also just sort of been interacting with some Olson scholars, and just realizing how much he's stealing from everybody. He's built her ideas he really did but is often celebrated as like the manifesto of mid century poetry projective verse, But Olson aligns himself with with LB and actuallyvin his letters with Creely, like, makes very unkind statements about Rukeyser, who he actually was friendly with, again, this this repeated occurrence of friends actually throwing her under the bus and stealing her ideas.

So the question, you know, that Romina had posed that I, you know, could this have been the Muriel Rukeyser era, and that we've just showed her picked up and ran with like, there are many ways to think about that politically, poetically. You know, think about the ways in which, you know, we forgot this, you know, going back to this one at this period of like, 12 months, like all this stuff was happening, where it could have really been her at the forefront of everything.

And you make you point out the hypocrisy of the decision for the Bollingen Prize, which was basically let's separate the artist from the politics, but then they do they do a complete flip, when it comes to Rukeyser. Is it while your politics are too extreme?

Yeah, exactly. So I think it really shows when I was reading, I reread the introduction and how we kind of set this up and thinking about that period, that kind of like schism and thinking that's necessary to condemn one kind of political idea, and kind of elevate or kind of not elevate another, but say the other isn't as important, which is always the right wing one, right? That schism is how we are still forced to think all the time. And it really, it really questions it and pushes against it a lot, and all the pros writing. And I think that's what was interesting, too, like, I want to say, it's not just that it's the Mercosur era, now, that era was always happening, we just didn't have access to it. And so we do know that historically, there's so much interesting work that was being written, that just didn't become kind of this, really these droplets of the cannon that we have, in a way, and many people were writing, and thinking more in more nuanced ways about this kind of like intellectual schism, that we're all forced to accept as a normal

That's the point about, you know, that we are in it still, that these are persistence strains, this kind of binary stick oppositional thinking, these are these are persistent strains. So a lot of what Rukeyser can teach us, I think, is like how to think differently about right or wrong moment. And one of the reasons why, you know, aside from like, the obvious kind of novelty of thinking about music as your era, right, that then Ezra Pound era is to really think about the thinking about the consequences of, yeah, I know, fascism at this particular, you know, historical juncture in terms of like national politics and global politics. You know, it's, it's sometimes it's quite scary. To, you know, as you're reading the book, and thinking like, oh, like, things haven't changed. In the last, you know, you know, I mean, we're talking like, 80 years.

or

So now we're in, it is a long era, but we're in the Rukeyser era. Thanks to you, both. And other scholars have been bringing forth her ideas. Tell us, you know, you in the book, you have reviews, lectures, stories, essays. And for those who may just know her poetry, what did you discover in her prose that helps you understand her her poetry, her legacy, her career, etc.

Well for me, is I think for for each of us, it's something different, for sure. But for me, part of what I discovered is that there are through lines throughout her thinking, you know, there's something consistent that and sort of baring the imprint of her voice, and her worldview, but there's also something quite impressive about how varied it is in terms of what those views can be. So there's something almost formally, like consistent in terms of her if we think about how one thinks as a kind of form, but the content itself is always changing and, and also the mode in which she's writing about it is changing. I think for me, it's also one of the things that I really value about, about the variety of forms on which she's working, is to think about how the forms we adopt as writers can and should change depending upon the ways in which we're conceptualizing the the work itself, you know, in terms of the immediacy of the work, know how certain forms, beg to be used, because they're a little bit more urgent, or the ways in which we can deploy forms to You know, like us a book review, and order something that is often thought of as not being weighty, or is having a lot of significance for the understanding of an artist work or writers work, or an activist work, you know, it's a book review, like seems to be inconsequential, like something you do as a professional, like in academia, we call it like, professional service, it's not so much a publication. But like, you know, I really am impressed by like, she writes her book reviews, like I write my book reviews, like it's an occasion to, to make a point and to think through an issue. You know, so I'm really, the ways in which she adapts forms, the ways in which she overwrites forms, meaning like, sort of infusing them with her own sensibility and purpose. So that that's part of what why don't I learn from her a lot as a writer, like the possibilities of what I can do as a writer.

Yeah, I guess it's similar, actually, that her unboundedness informed the ability, the desire to cross genres to train her eye on all things and not be limited by the idea of specialization, which she really goes after as a Cold War invention, right? That you're in your discipline, you're specialized, you only look at this thing, which we of course, are also trained in as academics. But that actually, that you need to kind of exceed those forms to actually engage the world fully and understand the world. And that's really what a lot of her prose does it saying, Actually, I'm gonna train my eye, and all my thinking, and I'm gonna bring that to bear on this. And she has her whole thing about not wasting resources about using all of ourselves. And I think as an academic, and the writer, and a parent and a human partner, that's how you should approach the world, it became to me it kind of started to become more and more philosophical, as I, as myself, I gave birth, and I was reading her writing, like giving birth, and I'm trying to do kind of, you know, I want to think about all of these disciplinary spaces. And she's, she's giving us ways to think about that, that I had not had access to before, I think, and I think that's probably what readers can get. It is literally a different theoretical kind of space to weave through and learn from. But definitely the cross genre, I think, is the I mean, that is the thing with her. It's, it's what's most exciting.

Now, this, this is a, this is a difficult question. But if you could encapsulate the message that Muriel is trying to give to us in a few sentences, what would that be like? And it could be, it could be philosophical, political, you know, Can you can you boil it down? Maybe we can, maybe we can. But what's what's a what's a recurring theme in her work, that you could capture the essence of her most fundamental message?

I think, I don't know. Like, formulate to like, there's certain concepts or sort of ideas that recur in her work. And I think those become keys to sort of under understanding her and like that message that she's giving it. One is like, the importance of messages. Communication, is absolutely important to Rukeyser. And that's one of the three lines that runs throughout her work. You know, the reason for switching forms so often is to be able to not only experiment in an aesthetic sense, but also sometimes out of necessity, like political necessity, like to experiment in terms of getting one's message across, you know, how to cross boundaries between audiences, how to relay one subject position so that you're not caught in an echo chamber. You know, we're very familiar with the echo chambers today, of course, you know, we choose our social media, we choose our, our news networks and venues of choice, and hear, hear it played back to us. But that that's existed, that that's, that's a history of sort of mass media, as well as sort of different scales and grades of echo chambers. And so she's really interested in that sense of communication. It's human component, its political component, the ways in which and thinking about politics as transformation, you know, both in an investment in and commitment to social justice, but also about really trying to transform systems, but beginning at the human level. And that all begins for her as I as I've come to appreciate Rukeyser through through communication.

Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah. I think similarly, the idea that the process is the point that things don't end and she comes to that conclusion, a lot of the pros work actually, that he or she talks about living alive and now, or that we're kind of always in this continual opening to new things. And that that is that becomes the most potent political and imaginative tool. And she has this beautiful thing in the use of the bold truth, which we end on in the introduction. She says, If you come with your lives to meet what is here you are the heroes of the poem, for there is the meeting place, and that department finds the form and content of the poetry I tell you facing and communicating that will be our life in the world and poetry. And there's a real sense in a lot of issues, like see what's around, you look at the things as they really are, and face them and encounter them and engage them and be open to them, and then transform yourself and keep going to some degree. So it's a really like, you know, she's like a really hopeful writer in really hard times, in a way, because she's a realist about things. And she wants to keep encountering them. I think

Yeah, there's, there's this one phrase that she uses a lot in the 50s, and 60s, and it recurs in a lot of like, fragments, like stuff that's not it doesn't actually, that I recall, recur in the stuff, the material that we recover for the mere Rukeyser era, or that occurs in other published material, but she uses this phrase, toward a future requirement, all the time. And initially, she was going to work on a second edition of the life of poetry. And I, if I'm remember correctly, that was the title of the new chapter that she wanted to add, at the end of that, at that new volume, or that reimagining of that 1949 book. But yeah, she's very concerned with this idea of like, the sense of like possibility, but also like that possibility is actually demanded by the world you're facing. This is the core of what we've been calling process thinking, which not all listeners necessarily, you know, know or understand, like, what what that means. But it really is about a commitment to evolution and working out of the content, one's own contingent circumstances to evolve oneself in the system in which one lives. But that also means like when you're working in that fashion, as Rukeyser is you're also aware of like, the ways in which there are constraints that you have to have to face and to work through. So that sense of your requirement, and that's coming not only from the present, but also the future. I think that's really

Yeah, that would have been a good revision. I wish we had it. Yeah, me, we'll find it.

I know. There has to be another cache somewhere.

Wow. Well, this is it's been so fun talking with you, because both of you are clearly so passionate about Rukeyser. And anyone that is interested in learning more about Muriel, please get a copy of the new book, The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. I think we could go on for a long time because it's really fascinating. And I want to thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast and it was a pleasure talking with you.

Thank

Thank you so much,

Thank yoiu so much, Jonathan.

That was Eric Keenaghan, and Rowena Kennedy- Epstein, editors of the new collection of Muriel Rukeyser's prose, The Muriel Rukeyser Era. You can purchase Eric and Rowena's new book in hardcover or as an ebook at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk .Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press podcast