the truth of fact and the truth of art (4)

Exchange is creation; and the human energy involved is consciousness, the capacity to produce change from the existing conditions.

Into the present is flung naked life. Life is flung into the present language. The new forms emerge, with their intensive properties, or potentials - their words and images; and their extensive properties, existing in time: sound, forms, subjects, content, and that last includes all the relations between the words and images of the poem.

When the poem arrives with the impact of crucial experience, when it becomes one of the turnings which we living may at any moment approach and enter, then we become more of our age and more primitive. Not primitive as the aesthetes have used the term, but complicated, fresh, full of dark meaning, insisting on discovery, as the experience of a woman giving birth to a child is primitive.

I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world - so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal - are all here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.


from Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, p. 172.