Dated August 23rd. 1978. A typed letter from Miriam M. Reik to Louise Kertesz. Miriam M. Reik, a former student of Rukeyser at Sarah Lawrence recalls Rukeyser’s”unorthodox: but “entirely common sensical” teaching style. She provides one example when the class was assigned Blake’s poetry: “When we came to class, presumably having read it, Muriel asked us to write a description of Newton on the spot. Surprised by the instructions, most of the students set about the task armed with a set of predictable ideas: Newton meant reason as opposed to imagination, science as opposed to poetry; Blake was a mystic and disliked Newton and said so; scientists like Newton looked a certain bespeckled way, and so on. So most of us described an appropriately dry, professorial-looking Newton in this impromptu exercise. When we finished, Muriel managed to jiggle all of these simplicities out of our heads, merely by passing around Blake’s painting of Newton, in which he looks rather like a Greek God, preoccupied with the wonderful symmetries of geometry. This strategy did not solve the question of the relations between science and poetry, and it did not offer a specific interpretation of Blake, but for anyone with half a brain, it set you down a new track, gave you new access to the poems, and broke down what Muriel has called ‘the resistances’ to the work of the imagination.”
