The Life of Poetry.

About a year ago, a close friend of mine started telling me to read Muriel Rukeyser's essay The Life of Poetry. I went looking for the book, which at the time had been out of print for nearly twenty years, and found an old copy at the University of Wisconsin library. The book immediately began to matter to me because it asks questions that will preoccupy anyone who loves art but who also wants to live a politically committed life. Now Paris Press has republished The Life of Poetry in a new, more accessible format.

Rukeyser's writings fell out of print after her death in 1980, even though her poetry had strongly influenced such writers as Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich. But in the last few years, two presses (Norton and TriQuarterly Books) have each published selections of her poetry. Unfortunately, both cut up Rukeyser's amazing long poems, publishing only sections of "The Book of the Dead," her 1935 investigative documentary poem on silica mining and the resulting deaths of thousands of miners in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia.

Like Harry Hay, Rukeyser got her political start during the Popular Front, and like Hay, she remained active for decades. She was arrested in Alabama while reporting on the case of the Scottsboro Boys (nine African-American boys unjustly convicted of raping two white women); she was persecuted as a Communist during the 1950s; and she vocally opposed the Vietnam War.

There is no easy separation between Rukeyser's political life and her writing, which includes poems to union organizers like Ann Burlak, who helped organize textile workers during the 1930s; feminist works, such as "The Poem as Mask," which inspired the title to the anthology No More Masks!; and her 1973 book, Breaking Open--widely regarded as Rukeyser's coming-out volume.

Rukeyser first published The Life of Poetry in 1949, and it is a book marked by World War II. It asks, "Where is there a place for poetry?"

This single question encompasses a number of concerns about the role of art in the world: Why poetry? What is poetry's relation to cruelty, to suffering? Is it simply a palliative? Is it frivolous? Does it have purpose in a horrifying world?

Our critical flaw as a culture, says Rukeyser, is our insistence on specialization. "We become experts in some narrow `field,"' she writes. "That expertness allows us to deal with the limited problems presented to us; it allows us to face emotional reality, symbolic reality, very little."

Rukeyser answers her own questions by insisting that, in the context of a culture of specialties, it is crucial to perceive all sorts of "unlikely" connections--not only between political movements, but among modes of thought and living that our culture insists on separating: politics and poetry, science and emotion, the "popular" and the "high" arts.

For Rukeyser, poetry is "usable truth" and "an art that lives in time." Imaginative connection, says Rukeyser, is the work of poetry--or at least the work of a poetry that doesn't fail us by isolating itself into its own kind of specialty. The poetic impulse is the impulse to form relations, to create meanings where no meanings seem to exist, to repair the places where we are most divided. To imagine such connections, suggests Rukeyser. is a democratic impulse. It is us at our "most human "

If we fail at this "most human" task, we veer toward further division and war--Rukeyser's central preoccupation throughout this book.

"The thinning-out of our response is the weakness that leads to mechanical aggression," she writes. "It is the weakness turning us inward to devour our humanity, and outward only to sell and kill nature and each other."

At this divided time, Rukeyser's wisdom is a relief.

Anne-Marie Cusac is the Associate Editor of The Progressive.