Mary Ruefle, The Book

 

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.

It would be impossible not to absolutely delight in the lyric gestures of Bennington, Vermont poet, essayist and erasure artist Mary Ruefle’s latest, a collection of short and shorter prose and prose poems simply titled The Book (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2023). Ruefle is the author of well over a dozen full-length titles, most recently Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here], Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], and this latest collection offer pieces that sit within a wide gradient, from prose poem to the very short story and everything in-between. There is something quite magical in the way her pieces exist within this collection, this “book,” offering the notion of genre as something wonderfully fluid. Within compact lines and wonderful flow, she offers intimate and lyric slivers of life and thinking, meditations on ordinariness that is never truly ordinary, or spectacular simply because of that ordinariness. The variations on her prose structures hold an enormity, packing nuance into every phrase. “That book sat on my various shelves for decades until I got around to it,” she writes, to open the piece “THE BOOK,” “and then it seemed to be written especially for me. I hope this provides some hope to the other unread books surrounding me who are wondering what will happen to them when I die.” There is such a joy within these sentences, these phrases, one that appreciates and explores with such a level of curiosity and wonder combined with a deep and abiding wisdom that it is it be envied. Writing on a misquoted haiku, and seeking the advice of friends as to which version they prefer, the “correct” version or the narrator’s mis-remembered variation in the piece “THE HEART, WHAT IS IT?,” she writes:

David said he didn’t like either version because he didn’t like the haiku to begin with—it was full of too many words and “not enough emptiness.”

My opinion was that if someone wanted fewer and fewer words and more and more emptiness they shouldn’t bother with poetry at all, they should neither read it nor write it but simply live their lives, walking through the city or the forest without a thought to language. I knew in my heart that the outer world was without written language and that pages of writing were ultimately meaningless, I knew all that, but I also knew that humans are particular and often lead long lives and try to do things that make them happy, and that writing was one of those ten thousand things.

 

Mary Ruefle, Dunce

DUNCE

I am always up for a bog, said Mary.

I, too, am always up for one, said I.

And so we put on our rubber boots.

I love being in rubber boots, said Mary,

and I said the same. The ground sprang

as we bogged, the bog wavered as we sprang,

orchids & mushrooms, mushrooms & orchids,

slender & pink, squat & brown.

And as the light fell the eyes of the fireflies

were all around, like Tinkerghosts.

There is in my house, she said, a stovelight

that never goes off. And in my car, I said,

there’s a dashlight that never goes off.

What warning has no end and ends without warning?

She thought I didn’t know!

A new Mary Ruefle title is always worth celebrating [see my review of her prior collection], and her latest poetry collection, Dunce (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019), is an assemblage of short lyric narratives composed in fresh and unexpected turns. Through a dozen or so poetry titles, as well as a collection of essays, Bennington, Vermont poet Mary Ruefle is known for composing poems that utilize meditative precision amid abstract reflection, striking hard facts into the ether, even as she writes in the striking poem “LITTLE STREAM”: “I couldn’t be born again, ever, / so I sat by a little stream / with my eyes closed.” There is always something wistful in tone in Ruefle’s poems, even as she speaks to mortality, sadness, grief and death, an underlying current of hard pessimism (or realism, depending on your perspective) that runs throughout her work, and this book as well, no matter what her subject matter in each individual poem. It is almost the effect of watching a leaf twirl through the air before it lands in the mud, knowing that the leaf, there, is still beautiful. One might point to the poem “LORRAINE,” a short piece that twists and twirls before the final third, that reads:

Like a wild swan

with a blue shadow,

I no longer care what I say.

You no longer exist.

I try to remember my dream

but as soon as I turn on the shower

it’s gone.

An interview with Ruefle that Cecilia Tricker conducted for The White Review earlier this year references the time she referred to herself as “eight years old at heart,” and asking about metaphors and a sense of wonder. As Ruefle responds: “No, making metaphors doesn’t create a sense of wonder, what creates a sense of wonder is the human brain, in which metaphors arise spontaneously and unexpectedly (as they don’t ‘exist’ in nature); for me, it’s the brain behind the act that now astonishes me, the mysteriousness of our brains, and, of course, life itself in all its forms, plant, mineral, and animal.” There is a sense of wonder to this collection, one that does, at times, seem child-like in its openness, connecting the body and the heart to the natural world, but that sense could just as much come from the array of references to childhood throughout (that suggest, but do not presume, reminiscences from her own childhood), such as the poem “BATH TIME,” that ends: “for even a small child / knows the affliction / of language.”

Apart from being one of the few contemporary poets able to properly use exclamation marks (and so many!), there is something about Ruefle’s poems that switches from the mundane to the fantastic to the moment within the moment (concurrently managing both dark and delightful), intertwining and interconnecting in such a way as to suggest that the mundane and the fantastic are simply two sides of the same moment. The difference might be only one of perspective, approach or through the connections that she, herself, makes. Through such an array of information, Ruefle makes the impossible connect, and her connections seem comforting, and all-encompassing. “You loved and were loved,” she writes, in the poem “A NEW DAWN,” “said the bee to the lily / before buzzing off.” How does she manage such complexity and grief with lightness and ease? Or the opening of the poem “THE HEART OF PRINCESS OSRA,” that reads:

I want to slow down and reflect,

like the top waters of a lake

or the heart of Pincess Osra

who had nine suitors at one tie.

I want to thank my clothes for

protecting my body. I want to

fold them properly—I want

the energy that flows from my hands

to engulf the world.

Keegan Lester, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it

if comets raining overhead. if we turn into a museum for the living before

the big one hits. if language, an improbable opponent to gravity & stars,

came up with new names for gravity & stars, what force could trick a river

north, but the dreams of those who fear sleeping through this version of

the world. if against better judgement we went out at night, run like roman

candles against the wick of sky. if they find us in the riverbank. if our

hearts in our stomachs, a pile of stones, tell them to tie my shoes together.

tell them to throw them over a power line of rusty apricot; silkscreen t-

shirts with our likeness; tell them to inspire bedtime stories in the foreheads

of small children; tell my children to go out at night & sing.

Winner of the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize, as selected by Mary Ruefle, is New York/West Virginia poet Keegan Lester’s first collection of poems, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Greenfield MA: Slope Editions, 2017). Constructed out of a series of untitled “ghost notes,” along with a short three-poem “Coda,” Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it is composed as a kind of lyric sketchbook, a catch-all of sorts, giving the impression that everything has been included in this collection, yet everything fits. As he writes: “now that we know we’re average. there are / no special snowflakes. we’ve become what / we’ve watched from afar. we’ve become / the photos we orchestrate into meaning.” There is an enormous amount happening in these poems, an enormous amount packed into a book writing on such small, seemingly mundane considerations, such as falling in love, being alive, watching television and considerations of the domestic and day-to-day. He makes the daily come alive and appear beautiful, precisely because, as we all know, it is.

My only real complaint about this book, which is beautifully designed, I might add, is that the type is so damned small. Why is the type so damned small?

i don’t want to be saved

by my lover, my lover says to me

with her eyes closed

on a park bench,

& the al pastor is a little too chewy

& our stomachs turn u into less sexy versions of ourselves

in our heads, but we are old now anyways.

sexy is relative. we are like two thirteen-year-olds at a dance on opposite sides of the room,

waiting to make a move & our eyes meet during that country grammar song

& nelly’s syntax makes us believe

in what entire flocks of seagulls can be capable of,

miles from a beach.

every time a person takes a selfie,

a piece of them dies.

Matrix #103 : Prose poetry

The Invoking

Careful not to reveal the words that confess what she is, busy twisting her ring thinking of the scattered half-cocked passions of her teens. In the cleave of a myth her forgetting opens the muscled sky.

It swells to release a banshee wail and draw a sword against the sea. Strange literacies emerge from the well of its throat. Here it is, she was empty for something and now it is here. (Ashley-Elizabeth Best)

On the heels of their Ottawa issue, Montreal’s Matrix magazine’s latest issue features a healthy section of prose poetry, guest-edited by Sarah Burgoyne, Nick Papaxanthos and William Vallieres, and includes new work by Paige Cooper, Mary Ruefle, Gabe Foreman, Hilary Bergen, Jaime Forsythe, Marie-Ève Comtois (trans. Stuart Ross and Michelle Winters), Kyl Chhatwal and Andrélise Gosselin, Alma Talbot, Sue Sinclair, Madeleine Maillet, Jim Smith, Lillian Necakov, Gary Barwin, Nick Thran, Mark Laba, Lee Hannigan, Melissa Bull, Harold Hoefle and Anna-Maria Trudel. In terms of form, the mix is quite intriguing, especially given the range of emerging (I’d not heard of a couple of these writers) to established (Forsythe, Sinclair, Smith, Necakov and Barwin) to very established (Mary Ruefle) writers, as well as the inclusion of translated material (although I’m sure there might be some curious to see the work in the original).

A Strange Thing

Maybe I read this, or dreamt it, for my mind wanders as I age, but I have always believed Odysseus, when he heard the sirens, was hearing the Odyssey being sung, and in fear of being seduced by his own story he had himself bound. And he was in even greater fear of hearing the end, for he could not bear the possibility he might become someone other than who he was now, a war hero of great courage and unexcelled strategy, trembling against the cords of his own mast. Or he might become an even greater man, one without a single fear in the world, one who would balk at a man having to tie himself up in fear of anything, and then it would be revealed that the man he was now was actually a coward. Either way, he felt doomed as he sailed past his own story. He sailed past the island, he sailed past the sirens just as they were coming to the end, and once out of earshot he did a strange thing, of which there is no record, the story having ended in some far away sound which was no more distinguishable than an eye dropped of sweetness in the vast and salty sea. (Mary Ruefle)

I find Burgoyne’s introduction to the feature, which is itself impressive, rather curious, as she writes an introduction that does little but really say “here are some prose poems,” instead of pushing to answer some questions on the form (which, I suppose, is more of my issue than hers) [see my own piece on the Canadian prose poem up at Jacket2 here]. As her introduction opens: “One thing I love about the dubiously titled word cage that is ‘prose poetry’ is the dubi-titley-ness of it. By definition, it’s already divided against itself. is it poemly prose, or prosely poems? Can any old poemaster pull one off? These are questions one old poem ghost Mr. Eliot asked himself in a very difficult-to-find essay he published in The New Statesman in 1917. His conclusion: obscure. He knew at least bad prose poems came from those who thought the form was somehow a mash act between two genres. A magic mix. Cookies and dough. (No).” While Eliot’s response is interesting, has there really been no progress in the intervening century? I very much like the examples she presents from earlier on in the previous century, perhaps it is more a criticism on the lack of scholarship/attention on the prose poem generally that she has barely an example between Charles Baudelaire and Claudia Rankine [her book really is remarkable; see my review of such here] to present (American writer Sarah Manguso, for example, has quite a lovely essay responding to the T.S. Eliot essay Burgoyne references). Given so much has been done in the form in the decades between (there was even a decade-plus worth of journals produced in the United States, exclusively exploring the form, and the questions of form, of the prose poem), where are all the other examples? Lisa Robertson, Sarah Mangold, Sina Queyras, Meredith Quartermain and Nicole Markotić, just off the top of my head. What are the current questions on the form that the prose poem presents? Her introduction presents the suggestion that this section is presented more of an opening salvo into those kinds of questions, rather than an exploration of those questions themselves. And yet, the selection of works does far more than that, presenting such an array of work that, if not seriously challenging the form, certainly presents a questioning, and a variety of examples, of what the form of prose poetry is capable of. Burgoyne continues:

Over the years, prose poetry has housed kooks like Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire. What connects these poets is perhaps (too simply) possedoffèdness. Was it just a matter of linebreakennui? Were they saving paper? What did the prose poem once mean? (Especially today when it’s actually hard to find a poet who hasn’t dabbled in the chunky realm). Well, once upon a time, the prose poem was actually a political statement. (Not to say it can’t be now. One need look no further than Rankine’s 2014 publication Citizen). But in a day when reading poetry was a popular pastime (let me be clearer: among the upper class), Baudelaire hurling his unrhymey bricks of prose (discussing donkeys slouching down the mucky streets of Paris and the hardworking-workingclass) was hardly a welcome blow for a fine fellow to receive.