On Margaret Rucker & Her Poetry

Editor’s Note: Originally published September 5, 2017. Updated November 12, 2020.

“History is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten.” - Milan Kundera.

Perhaps now I will drown.

It would be nice to die

Sinking lazily deeper down

Into this dreamy sea

Of golden wine.

-Margaret Rucker

It’s hard not to read tragedy into the life of Margaret Rucker.

You could see the defining events of her life as isolated incidents: the car crash, the poetry, the untimely deaths. It doesn’t take a lurid imagination to attribute an overarching narrative of Gatsby-like glamor and misfortune.

It’s an old fashioned, romantic notion: the stars seem to cross some people.

Her family name carries weight in this city. There’s Rucker Avenue, Rucker Hill Park, the Rucker Mansion on Rucker Hill.

The Ruckers came to Everett in 1889, when the peninsula was thickly forested. They threw in their lot with other developers—a list of names that reads like a modern day map of Everett: Charles Colby, Henry Hewitt, John Rockefeller. They were platting out a city. The Ruckers’ interests in real estate, banks, and timber grew as the area developed.

Margaret was born into a mansion that had recently been erected by a builder who’s name isn't written down. It was the biggest house in town on the highest hill, offered 180-degree views of Port Gardner, snowy mountains. The house was comprised of several architectural styles—Italian Villa, Queen Anne, and Georgian Revival. The basement had a card room and a billiards room. The Rucker family hosted parties in the third floor ballroom.

Margaret attended the University of Washington. That’s where she began to publish her poetry.

There’s more to her life. Her story has been told with great skill elsewhere, by others. She married a navy captain, hung out with FDR. She suffered greatly (headline: “Wife Sees Air Executive End Life Over Coffee Cup.”).

What’s left of her life is photographs and a paper trail, fished out of a dumpster.

What about her poetry itself?

Does it have any merit?

Consider her poem Night, written in 1927.

A wind ripples along the leaves

Of the moon-paled aspen;

Some frightening thing slips from sight

Into a hissing forest of grasses.

Slowly from the bottom of the onyx pool

Silence uncoils,

Crushing each whisper into nothingness,

Smothering the wind.

Yes.

If this poem resonates somewhere in my brain, it’s because the imagery it evokes comes so quickly to mind. The Snohomish River. I see the eastern outskirts of this very city.

Let me explain from another angle.

I’ve been listening to audio archives from the Northwest History Room at the Everett Public Library. Recorded interviews conducted by historian David Dilgard, compiled on audiocassette in the late 1970s. He talks with people who remember Everett from the turn of the twentieth century.

What emerges after hours of listening is that people are people. Some of these octogenarians have memory lapses, wax eloquent about the importance of tin roofs and dry goods stores, and other things that may seem trivial to anyone who isn't a hard-core history buff. So much of oral history is where you could buy bread in 1896 and whose cousin made landfall on which date.

But then there’s this other thing I hear in the interviews, something that I pick up behind the words. Maybe I should could call it more of a realm.

The Everett of Old.

It’s a place that is the ragged edge of a frontier: a place of mud streets, brothels, mill fires, sawn-off fingers, pickup baseball games on undeveloped land. This is the Everett of the mind, and I can’t go much further into the topic without putting on my poet’s hat. Because this realm, the realm of Old Everett Poetry, is a place that I’ve been able to access infrequently but truly. It’s part of what attracted me to this peninsula in the first place.

It’s something inherent in the old buildings. You can feel it in the alleys on the outskirts of town, places where the trees still sprout wild next to the river, where moonlight falls on gravel alleys, tangled and tumbled blackberries, and the chipped paint of boat sheds. It’s a vacant and spectral loneliness that still settles on Hewitt Avenue after dark some evenings. Maybe we’re too close to the strange, magnetic sea (has it always drawn men and women and filled them with longing?).

This Everett-y feeling of romantic, morose beauty— it’s the same vibe I get from the poetry of Margaret Rucker. She writes of cracked and fallen statues, carousels, of dreamy seas of golden wine. Is this the poetry of a collegiate amateur trying her hand at verse?

I think she’s more talented than that.

I Google searched and discovered that three of Rucker’s poems appear in “University of Washington Poems, Third Series”, published 1927. I understand that a hard copy most likely exists somewhere in the UW archives.

Surely, there must be more of her poems somewhere else. Notebooks. Drafts. Sketches of ideas. If so, where are they? In another dumpster? Or worse.

I believe Margaret Rucker deserves to be seen not only as a tragic symbol, but as a writer of poetry that taps into some beautiful and melancholy essence of this city.

She stands on her own by merit of her written word:

My marble god lies broken in the garden,

But I will patch him till he looks like new,

So people will not guess that he is shattered,

A lifeless Eros made of stone and glue.

Another thought: maybe her unique perspective allowed her the poetic vision.

Maybe she saw the city best of all.

She had the panoramic view from Rucker Hill, a view that took in the scope of the Snohomish River Delta, the groaning and creaking of ships in the harbor, the sounds of cedars being felled to the south to make Forest Park. From her front yard or from the ballroom maybe she could see it all unfolding before her eyes: a city cleft by railroads and buoyed by timber barons. She watched from her perch atop the changing world.

From her childhood hilltop mansion nothing could block her vision.