Forms of Worship: Muriel Rukeyser’s Live Reading and Progressive Jewish Worship

Event details

In 1968, Muriel Rukeyser shared with the audience at a poetry reading her surprise at the poem to which she was about to give voice having been included in a progressive Jewish prayerbook. The conjunction of liturgical text and poetry reading was itself revealing. The sixties saw not only widespread change in patterns of religious worship but also the establishment of the poetry circuit as a literary institution. This paper connects the two developments. Informed by ritual studies, the paper offers a close reading of the poetry in these new liturgies; it likewise attends to the extant recordings of Rukeyser's live readings to reflect upon the liturgical dimension of her performances on the circuit. Drawing on archival research in the American Jewish Archives and Rukeyser’s own personal papers, this paper endeavours to reveal something new about the ritual impulse behind modernism as seen in the institution of live reading, while also reflecting on the religious culture of spiritual seeking that characterises the decade.