The Book by Mary Ruefle (#3115)

Mary Ruefle is a Vermont poet, essayist, professor, and all around great writer.  This is her fourth book which I’ve read since 2012, and they have all been wonderful in different ways.  Here’s a fantastic quote from the first book, ‘Madness, Rack, and Honey’, which perfectly describes my reading experience:  “….reading as “a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single life span to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and for the language which we alone created, without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written or, once in a thousand lives—is that too much to ask?— retrieved, and read.  Did I mention Supreme Joy.â€Â   

That book was followed by ‘My Private Property’, a book of conventional poems most of which dealt with the emotions and thoughts triggered by colors, e.g. Blue (sadness of reverie and nostalgia), purple (sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon.’).  Her third book was ‘Dunce’ written in 2019 when she was Vermont’s poet laureate. My review describes it as largely unintelligible for me but it did have this wonderful poem: “Interlude for a Solitary Flute:  What is the age of the couple/of whom there is only one left?/She spoke only a little French,/he spoke a lot./She was very fond of fruit/and ate it every day./He liked meat/and that was that./They both loved/that famous line of/Chinese poetry./The ambulance stopped/at the wrong house,/losing time./Here is their house/surrounded by violet clover/and flashing lights./Who is that weeping,/which one is that,/husband or wife?/Such a high solitary,/silver note…..”

This book is more difficult to characterize.  The poems are all prose poems, some only a few lines long but some several pages to the point where they feel even longer than Lydia Davis’s short stories.  Most of them deal with the writing of poetry or with aging. or with both.  Interestingly, Ruefle’s web site and all of the photographs of her on the web show a young, wild-haired, teasingly smiling woman of about 40.  When I viewed her reading her poems on You Tube, there she was in her 70’s. Major shock, but not inconsistent with the themes of aging, loss, and time passing.

Here’s my favorite poetry poem:  ‘The Bark’:  I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water’s edge and barked,/the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again/ he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the /other side of the lake.  Welcome to poetry, I said.”  I also loved her poem ‘The Heart, What is it?’ which describes her making a return address stamp with a haiku by Ikkyu, a 15th C Zen monk and poet.  She manages to engage several friends and her husband in trying to decide how to translate Ikkyu’s poem about the heart.  It’s funny and sad, all mixed together.

If you don’t know Ruefle, try her.  She’s entertaining and also deeply insightful. Poetry at its best.