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This essay puts forward Muriel Rukeyser's Life of Poetry as the site of articulation of a radical and still urgently relevant experimental feminine poetics of war. The power of this poetics is rooted not in proximity to combat experience, but in the interweaving of public and political fact, personal exploration, and imaginative experiment in an era of constant and pervasive conflict. In her contribution to the 1945 anthology The War Poets, Rukeyser admits, 'For myself, war has been in my writing since I began.' If poetry, as she describes it, allows people to feel 'the meeting of their consciousness and the world,' then twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry must be war poetry; not so much a 'genre' as a mode of encounter. Rukeyser's experimental feminine poetics of war provides a way to counter dichotomies between the poetry of inner selves and outer experience, between personal and political writing, and between all of the previous and formally innovative writing, indeed, between war and peace. In addition to engaging Walter Benjamin's concept of history and Susan Schweik and Elaine Scarry's writings on war and the imagination, this essay draws upon conceptions of the feminine in work by Alice Notley, Audre Lorde, and Joan Retallack.