A ROMP THROUGH RUEFLELAND MARY RUEFLE’S By Mark Irwin *** The Montréal Review, March 2025 |
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Art Nouveau Fish Bowl (1975) by Joe Brainard. © 2025 Estate of Joe Brainard “I don’t know where to begin” Mary Ruefle says, with a kind of Beckettian humor in the opening lines of the title lecture from her enthralling prose collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey, and in doing so allows the reader to feel, with a delightful, induced bewilderment, his or her exact plight at the end of a post-modern era jam-packed with high-tech information and the resulting burden of What to say now? “Let it take the form of a letter, an epistle,” Ruefle suggests, which leads to a rant on Coach Bag advertisements using and misusing the word “poetry,” which leads to how the phrase Madness, Rack, and Honey came to her in a dream, which in turn leads to a wonderful poem, originally written in Farsi, dictated to the poet by an Iranian woman, a poem that of course after “exhaustive searching” by the author can’t be identified, but could be attributed to Hafiz:
Although the poem might be unidentifiable, what Ruefle says about it is identifiable and profound: “This is truly the Word made flesh, the fictive made real, water into wine... There is transformation in the poem from “the figurative to the literal [...] the flies have gotten wind of the sweet verses and started to pursue them--” (130-131). Ruefle goes on to define “metaphor as event” in a startling manner: “Metaphor as time, the time it takes for an exchange of energy to occur. [...] A poem must rival a physical experience and metaphor is, simply, an exchange of energy between two things” (131). She continues to comment that if you accept this premise then you realize that “everything in the world is connected” and “if metaphor is not idle comparison, but an exchange of energy, an event, then it unites the world by its very premise—that things connect and exchange energy.” Alas reader! If this prelude was not too long, you might begin to reckon the wild associations that Ruefle makes in her own poetry, and to access what an elliptical poet she is. Let’s start with some of her titles: “Standing Furthest,” “Cold Pluto,” “Attempting to Soar,” “Among the Musk Ox People,” “My Life as a Farmer (by James Dean),” and “The Imperial Ambassador of the Infinite.” -But this caveat. Often it is in the poems with the least elliptical titles that we travel the farthest, experience transformation and the exchange of energy between unlikely events. Here’s an early masterpiece in its entirety from The Adamant (1989).
The miniaturation of the subject, coupled with the austere nature of the models hired by “the man at our head” (the ambiguity between the painter and Christ) gruesomely intensifies a conflict between good and evil, and also between spirit and body. The entire feast consists of the meat from “half a walnut,” a purple grape “lit from within and the fly / bearing small black eggs.” Although these intended ones are starving, they are not allowed to eat because they “had been hired as models.” And of course we think of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but the ambiguity and slippage between signs and identity seems critical to the anonymity toward which these souls will move, perhaps in purification. Ruefle has created a poem that provides an unsettling aura, not unlike those that appear in canvases of Caravaggio, da Vinci, and Rembrandt. Everything that Ruefle asks of metaphor in her title essay is fulfilled here: “Metaphor as time, the time it takes for an exchange of energy to occur,” and this exchange of energy, whose miniature feast suggests both the Eucharist and a fasting so severe (“we grew faint with hunger”) that it connects the models’ spiritual act to their lack of physicality in an artistic sense:
Was the supper merely staged as a lesson here? Was the real “Last Supper” also not staged in a sense? Would models that appear “on the canvas” suggest a vanity beyond dispute? Starving, their “eyes devouring these things / provided the infinite light.” I’m reminded in a different way of the paradox in Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist”: the artist fasts because “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else” (Kafka 90). Does hunger provide a kind of infinity? Fast-forward seven years to “The Butcher’s Story” from Cold Pluto, 1996.
Once again we have an event where the poem “rivals a physical experience” and “time passes” here from boyhood to a quasi-eternity in which “beautiful cabinets” are made from petrified trees. The evasive metaphor creates an odd exchange of energy that unites three people, the speaker, father, and uncle, with a lost quest for a missing boy that results in three trees fashioned into “beautiful cabinets” as a memorial. Three’s prevail in the poem, as does the mystical leader, a horse named Samuel. In Samuel 3:8, the Lord calls Samuel three times, though he was initially mistaken and thought that it was Eli calling. The title raises the poem to an even higher power and is central to the poem’s notion of dislocation. As we read the poem we assume initially that the speaker is the butcher but then realize that the young man could also be the butcher; hence a kind of slippage occurs between speaker and object. The young man’s demise seems memorialized in the grain of polished cabinets that remind us of coffins, just as the polished glass reminds us of a display case for freshly slaughtered meat. If the speaker is the butcher, then the story becomes more disjunctive and horrific since it is told when he is older and his occupation becomes more gruesome in retrospect. In a different tenor, consider the expansiveness and imaginative range of Ruefle’s comic side. Here’s the opening stanza of “Why I am not a Good Kisser” (Tristimania, 2004).
This self-reflexive criticism continues to spiral throughout the poem and its world, but less successfully perhaps as the poem struggles to find associative links: “Because Cipriano de Rore was not thinking / When he wrote his sacred and secular motets” or later, “Because at the last minute I see a lemon / Sitting on a gravestone . . .” etc., etc. Certainly we are entertained here but the metaphorical unity is less convincing in its comic sprawl as associations become more far fetched, though we remember how in other works the comedic moments often amplify the tragic. In “Concerning Essential Existence” from the same collection, the comic distraction swells from an equine event to a profound comment on mortal identity.
It was Flaubert who said, “God lives in the small details,” and Ruefle seems to amplify this notion from “ piece of straw” (earthen) to “sad toy”(human-made) to “half a cloud” (heavenly) that-- lodged in the beast’s “wet eye”-- summons great emotion without being sentimental and then leaps profoundly toward a comment on human Eros and identity: “Nothing is forgot by lovers / except who they are.” For all her elliptical and wide-ranging displays of imagination in individual poems, it is usually those with a more compact narrative that become memorable. From Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007), here’s “Thirteen.”
Are you beginning to notice that form, in the classic sense, doesn’t play a central role in Ruefle’s poetry? One almost senses that any overt casting of form (certainly some of these could become sonnets) would violate their sincerity and casual authority. Certainly others will criticize Ruefle for this, but her best poems display an uncanny economy and intuitive sense of where to begin or end. “Thirteen,” however, addresses interior forms through free verse. The form of the cast for example is likened to pottery and then transformed to the hybrid form of plastic art/writing, a form of temporary bodily tattoo, but one that is shed like an insect’s pupa: “And when I healed / they broke it— / I walked away / without a shard.” Hatched from the cast/cocoon, the speaker is transformed, different. The poem becomes a kind of Ars Poetica for the poet: you wrote on me, my cast, but I’m changed, different. Time has passed. I will not be able to minister to you in the way that you ministered to me.
The poem’s last two lines function in both an anterior and future sense. The speaker, bored and incapacitated in the past, passes the time by reading, and in a sense dying from the tedium, but it is that past tedium, and a death akin to insect metamorphosis that has provided the speaker a new life, resurrected into the writer/poet. Was the broken leg the transformative act, the event, the continuing metaphor? It might be useful at this point to consider, in retrospect, some opening lines of Ruefle’s poems after a brief look at the first lecture from Madness, Rack, and Honey, “On Beginnings.” In it she recalls a memorable quote from Valery: “The opening of a poem is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall” (MRH 2). Ruefle, echoing Stevens, goes on to say that because a poem is “an act of the mind,” that it’s easier to talk about the end, since the act of conception is often something more indefinite and lingering. This certainly opposes Yeats’ view “that everything happens in a blaze of light,” and Ruefle’s notion is probably true for the majority of beginnings. Certainly the openings of Ruefle’s poems don’t approximate the architectural splendor of something like “That is no country for old men, the young” where the poem’s narrative arc is essentially completed in the first line. One might say the same thing about the opening of Stevens’ “The Snowman.” No, Ruefle’s openings certainly don’t function in this manner, and often they do not resemble “a piece of fruit that you’ve never seen before.” They can be much more humble and often introduce a simple narrative that like a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel headed downhill has a fierce mind of its own and an uncanny ability to surprise and change course with often breathtaking results. Of the recently discussed Ruefle poems here are a few of the first lines: “It made a dazzling display” (“The Last Supper”); “When I was a boy” (“The Butcher’s Story”); “The horse mounted the mare slowly and precisely”(“Concerning Essential Existence”); and “I was thirteen” (“Thirteen”). Rhetorically, quite an un-dazzling display of technique, yet each poem continues to change direction, often through an act of strange perception, vulnerability, ritual, or dislocating metaphor: “Paula? Carl? Whoever you are / I will not be there to drink the water / beside your bed.” From “On Beginnings” she goes on to comment, “You might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart. Between the first and last lines there exists—a poem—and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other” (MRH 5). What’s marvelous in a Ruefle poem is what “intervenes” and wants “to fly apart.” I read her best poems as I might watch an explosion at a distance—with a sense of astonishment at the unwieldy narrative that I’m struggling to assemble from the images around me. Later, Ruefle quotes Cy Twombly quoting John Crowe Ransom: “The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim” (7). What’s most refreshing in these lectures, which is also true for the poems, is that Ruefle remains vulnerable and open to those experiences which often overwhelm us: beginnings, fear, sentimentality, and memory. In a last lecture entitled, “Lectures I Will Never Give,” one reads, “I love pretention. It is a mark of human earthly abstraction, whereas humility is a mark of human divine abstraction. I will have all of eternity to be humble, while I have but a few short years to be pretentious”(288). -Hard not to like that though some of these “Short Lectures” recall Anne Carson’s Short Talks from Plainwater. Carson, however, is even more disjunctive, architectural, and postmodern in her sensibilities, while Ruefle is much less of a classicist but more courageous about her own misgivings or shortcomings. The lecture “On Fear” includes questions directed toward a poet, a doctor, pilot, and philosopher. The doctor and pilot essentially answer that fear is overcome by procedure. Tony Hoagland responds to Ruefle by saying that “fear is the ghost of an experience” and then quotes Auden: “And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain.” What perceptively rises out of Ruefle’s inquiry is found in her salient remark: “Try putting less emotion and more feeling into your poems.” She goes on to argue that feelings seem to represent a more personal and complicated thought process in which “emotion combines with intelligence.” The opening of the last poem “Lullaby” in her Selected Poems seems to inflect wonderfully the emotion of fear toward writing, an emotion whose infinite boundlessness creates the sublime while juxtaposing “fathomless sum” with finite “sun.”
Perhaps the most powerful of Ruefle’s lectures is “I Remember, I Remember,” which closely resembles I Remember, the well-known poetic memoir by New York artist Joe Brainard, first published in 1970 by Angel Hair Books, then reissued by various publishers, including Granary Books in 2001. Here are some selections from the Brainard classic whose model Ruelfle sometimes follows.
Although Ruefle doesn’t mention Brainard, she specifically recalls the poems by Thomas Hood and Philip Larkin with that same title and thus establishes a strong literary precedent. Hood’s poem begins, “I remember, I remember / The house where I was born.” Naive (in the good sense), emotional, acutely sincere and keenly perceptive, this miniature memoir builds symphonically in emotional power, especially through its lyricism, humor, courage, and vulnerability. Commencing with the naive line, “I remember being so young I thought all the artists were famous,” Ruefle soon after defines an artistic beginning in her backyard:
The child-poet also remembers sending her first book to Little, Brown & Company, and suggesting, “ they title the collection ‘The Little Golden Book of Verse.’” Dipping in and out of literary references, Ruefle continues into her college days and recounts her scorn when a classmate defaces her well-used and guarded The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens in a lit class: A classmate “leaned over my book and wrote in it with her ballpoint pen: I’m so bored!!! Are you going to the party tonight? I remember feeling like my blood had stopped and reversed course. . .” (233) Ruefle remembers reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies until she “got” them and “something burst over me like a flood...” She remembers being broke after college and her teacher Bernard Malamud sending her a check for $25 with instructions to buy food with it: “I went downstairs and bought The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats” (238) Lyric momentum builds as Ruefle remembers book-encounters with Berryman, Neruda, Djuna Barnes, and John Berger—all interspersed with poignant, sometimes delightfully disorienting personal flashes that recall the Thomas Hood poem and her lecture’s own heartstrings:
In fact it’s this essay’s velocity, in which a person might try to look toward familiar landscapes from the window of a speeding car, that infuses it with mortality and a hint of the sublime, all through a quirky, close-up-lens: “I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet.” Some of the entries reoccur in various permutations, slashed across the speeding pages with the rhythmic power of strophes:
We race with the poet, implicit, marooned in her memories and in our own toward the final moving lines:
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*** Works Cited
*** FROM THE ARCHIVES *** KAFKA TEACHES ME HOW TO TEACH KAFKA By James Martel The Montréal Review, March 2025 *** “VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D”: TEACHING WALT WHITMAN By Stephen Haven The Montréal Review, August 2024 *** TEACHING MILOSZ: THE EVOLUTION OF A POET by Ira Sadoff The Montréal Review, February 2025 *** |
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