Letter from Louise Kertesz to Muriel Rukeyser

Original typewritten letter, dated June 17th, 1977. The letter is from Louise Kertesz to Muriel Rukeyser. Louise hopes Rukeyser is feeling well, and tells her that she mailed her a few pages on The Traces of Thomas Harlot, and that she is writing now to ask a few questions about those pages. Indiana University Press, who had Louise’s manuscript since early February, told Louise that the editor in charge went on vacation, and that the manuscript is in the hands of two or more experts. Louise will let Rukeyser know if she hears anything from them. Louise is now working on a conclusion to the manuscript which involves reading the critic on the so-called “new poetry” of postmodernism”, the particular sensibility which is unlike that of “modernism”. The more Louise reads, the more she sees that Rukeyser was writing this ”new poetry” even in her first volumes. When critics were complaining in the Forties that Rukeyser wasn’t ironic, they were measuring her works by standards that she found unsatisfactory even before Olson, Duncan, and Snyder, who are poets spoken of as the first “postmoderns” Louise had said something like that already, but she thinks she would like to close with a more pointed discussion of these matters, using critical terms which are now being applied. Letter is on the same page as a course selection sheet for a college.