Muriel Rukeyser, Mother of Everyone

In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory. Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem,” originally published in The Speed of Darkness fifty years ago this month, is in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

Since 2016, “Poem” has become a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment, an equivocal fate for any artifact but one Rukeyser would not likely have chafed against. Throughout her career, she remained sensitized to a political and cultural landscape that was changing rapidly. When appeared in 1968, that landscape was more crowded than ever and more vividly perceived: the civil rights movement had given way to Black Power, the women’s and gay liberation movements were coalescing, the Cold War raged on, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, despite being the most thoroughly reported and divisive military conflict since the Civil War one hundred years before it. The speaker of “Poem” can’t