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Mark!Irwin!
A Romp through Ruefleland: Mary Ruefle’s
Selected Poems & Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
“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 new 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:
I shall not finish my poem.
What I have written is so sweet
That flies are beginning to torment me. (MRH 130)
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).
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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 Last Supper
It made a dazzling display:
the table set with the meat
from half a walnut, a fly
on a purple grape
lit from within and the fly
bearing small black eggs.
We gathered round the oval table
with our knives, starved
for some inner feast.
We were not allowed to eat,
as we had been hired as models
by the man at our head.
Days passed
in which we grew faint with hunger.
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Later we were told
that although we did not appear
on the canvas
our eyes devouring these things
provided the infinite light.
(Selected Poems 13)
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:
Later we were told
that although we did not appear
on the canvas
our eyes devouring these things
provided the infinite light.
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
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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.
The Butcher’s Story
When I was a boy
a young man from our village
was missing for three days.
My father, my uncle and I
went looking for him in a cart
drawn by our horse, Samuel.
We went deep into the swamp
where we found three petrified trees,
gigantic and glorious. From them
we make beautiful cabinets,
polished like glass.
(Selected Poems 55)
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.
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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).
Because I open my mouth too wide
Trying to take in the curtains behind us
And everything outside the window
Except the little black dog
Who does not like me
So at the last moment I shut my mouth.
(111)
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.
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Concerning Essential Existence
The horse mounted the mare slowly and precisely
and then stopped.
He was profoundly disturbed by a piece of straw.
He was profoundly distracted by the sad toy
upside down in the tree.
He was profoundly disengaged by half a cloud
in the corner of his wet eye.
And then he continued.
Nothing is forgot by lovers
except who they are.
(104)
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.”
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Thirteen
I was thirteen,
my whole leg in a cast.
It was like lugging
a piece of pottery around.
And every human face I knew
took a pen and wrote on me.
I used to lie in bed at night
and read it.
And when I healed
they broke it—
I walked away
without a shard.
Paula? Carl? Whoever you are,
I will not be there to drink the water
beside your bed.
I read three thousand books,
and then I died.
(134)
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:
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“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.
Paula? Carl? Whoever you are
I will not be there to drink the water
beside your bed.
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
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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,
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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.”
My inability to express myself
is astounding. It is not curious or
even faintly interesting, but like
some fathomless sum, a number,
a number the sum of equally fathomless
numbers, each one the sole representative
of an ever-ripening infinity
that will never reach the weight
required by the sun to fall.
(Selected Poems 142)
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.
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I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second
Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt
with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I
remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember
that I liked him instantly.
I remember liver.
I remember Dorothy Collins.
I remember Dorothy Collins’ teeth.
I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston
Public Library, but soon losing interest.
(Brainard 37)
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.”
Naïve (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 naïve line, “I
remember being so young I thought all the artists were famous,” Ruefle soon after
defines an artistic beginning in her backyard:
I remember—I must have been eight or nine—wandering out to
the ungrassed backyard of our newly constructed suburban
house and seeing that the earth was dry and cracked in irregular squares and other shapes and I felt I was looking at a map
and I was completely overcome by this description, my first experience of making a metaphor, and I felt weird and shaky and
went inside and wrote it down: the cracked earth is a map. (MRH 226)
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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:
I remember driving by the hospital where I was born and glancing
at it—I was in a car going sixty miles an hour—and feeling
a fleeting twinge of specialness after which I had no choice but
to let it go and get over it, at sixty miles an hour. (242)
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:
I remember “remember” means to put the arms and legs back
on, and sometimes the head.
(245)
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We race with the poet, implicit, marooned in her memories and in our own toward
the final moving lines:
I remember more than I can tell.
I remember heaven.
I remember hell.
(246)
Mark Irwin
Los Angeles
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Works Cited
Brainard, Joe. I Remember. New York: Granary Books, 2001.
Kafka, Franz. The Basic Kafka, Erich Heller, ed. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1979.
Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack, and Honey. New York: Wave Books, 2012.
Ruefle, Mary. Selected Poems. New York. Wave Books, 2010.