Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle is a poet of visionary imagination, in love with the world and the power of art. She sees the strange in the ordinary and vice versa. She weaves them together by way of wild association, and then uses omission and conflation to blur the lines. Christened the “Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas” by the Harvard University Press, Mary Ruefle describes herself as a “wandering fool, searching and seeking, searching and seeking, with no end in sight.”

Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, Mary Ruefle grew up traveling throughout Europe and the U.S. with her military family. She graduated with a degree in literature from Bennington College, and has since gone on to publish ten poetry collections, including Trances of the Blast, Among the Musk Ox People, The Adamant, which was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Selected Poems, which won the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published The Most of It, a book of prose, a comic book Go Home and Go to Bed!, and Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. While they were in fact delivered as lectures, these pieces levitate and swoop, ponder and dive and careen, just as her poems do. She is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow.

Since Ruefle is interested in the pliability of language as raw material, it is no surprise that she gravitated toward erasure, creating poems by erasing much of the surrounding text of an already existing work. Ruefle’s erasures are sketches of life and memory, showcasing how “presence is born of absence, and an absence made present.” In many ways, her own poems similarly inhabit the realm of negative capability, a term Keats first used to describe the desire to live in the uncertainty of human existence without relying on explanations and reason. She traces the boundaries between the subjective world and the world everyone else lives in, giving weight and wings to the unseen and the surreal. Ruefle is at ease with uncertainty. As she told The Volta, “The difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing.”

While her overarching themes are universal—loneliness, love, death—Ruefle interrogates the nature of the lyric itself, stitching together speech rhythms, sounds, visual flashes and ephemera with the thread of the overheard and the under the breath. Her “talky” speakers favor fragments, direct address, questions, misreadings, and conjectures. Ruefle writes, “The power of the human imagination is to invent ways that enable us to survive, perhaps survival is but an act of the human mind,” and she delights her readers with how the mind works when it’s working most pleasurably. To quote the poet David Rivard, “Even at her most outlandishly playful—and who is more outlandish than Ruefle?—she speaks with an unbelievably sly wisdom.”

Mary Ruefle has received various awards including an award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College and lives in Bennington, Vermont.

is a poet of visionary imagination, in love with the world and the power of art. She sees the strange in the ordinary and vice versa. She weaves them together by way of wild association, and then uses omission and conflation to blur the lines. Christened the “Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas” by the Harvard University Press, Mary Ruefle describes herself as a “wandering fool, searching and seeking, searching and seeking, with no end in sight.”

Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, Mary Ruefle grew up traveling throughout Europe and the U.S. with her military family. She graduated with a degree in literature from Bennington College, and has since gone on to publish ten poetry collections, including Trances of the Blast, Among the Musk Ox People, The Adamant, which was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Selected Poems, which won the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published The Most of It, a book of prose, a comic book Go Home and Go to Bed!, and Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. While they were in fact delivered as lectures, these pieces levitate and swoop, ponder and dive and careen, just as her poems do. She is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow.

Since Ruefle is interested in the pliability of language as raw material, it is no surprise that she gravitated toward erasure, creating poems by erasing much of the surrounding text of an already existing work. Ruefle’s erasures are sketches of life and memory, showcasing how “presence is born of absence, and an absence made present.” In many ways, her own poems similarly inhabit the realm of negative capability, a term Keats first used to describe the desire to live in the uncertainty of human existence without relying on explanations and reason. She traces the boundaries between the subjective world and the world everyone else lives in, giving weight and wings to the unseen and the surreal. Ruefle is at ease with uncertainty. As she told The Volta, “The difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing.”

While her overarching themes are universal—loneliness, love, death—Ruefle interrogates the nature of the lyric itself, stitching together speech rhythms, sounds, visual flashes and ephemera with the thread of the overheard and the under the breath. Her “talky” speakers favor fragments, direct address, questions, misreadings, and conjectures. Ruefle writes, “The power of the human imagination is to invent ways that enable us to survive, perhaps survival is but an act of the human mind,” and she delights her readers with how the mind works when it’s working most pleasurably. To quote the poet David Rivard, “Even at her most outlandishly playful—and who is more outlandish than Ruefle?—she speaks with an unbelievably sly wisdom.”

Mary Ruefle has received various awards including an award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College and lives in Bennington, Vermont.

is a poet of visionary imagination, in love with the world and the power of art. She sees the strange in the ordinary and vice versa. She weaves them together by way of wild association, and then uses omission and conflation to blur the lines. Christened the “Poet Laureate of the City of Ideas” by the Harvard University Press, Mary Ruefle describes herself as a “wandering fool, searching and seeking, searching and seeking, with no end in sight.”

Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, Mary Ruefle grew up traveling throughout Europe and the U.S. with her military family. She graduated with a degree in literature from Bennington College, and has since gone on to publish ten poetry collections, including Trances of the Blast, Among the Musk Ox People, The Adamant, which was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Selected Poems, which won the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published The Most of It, a book of prose, a comic book Go Home and Go to Bed!, and Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. While they were in fact delivered as lectures, these pieces levitate and swoop, ponder and dive and careen, just as her poems do. She is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow.

Since Ruefle is interested in the pliability of language as raw material, it is no surprise that she gravitated toward erasure, creating poems by erasing much of the surrounding text of an already existing work. Ruefle’s erasures are sketches of life and memory, showcasing how “presence is born of absence, and an absence made present.” In many ways, her own poems similarly inhabit the realm of negative capability, a term Keats first used to describe the desire to live in the uncertainty of human existence without relying on explanations and reason. She traces the boundaries between the subjective world and the world everyone else lives in, giving weight and wings to the unseen and the surreal. Ruefle is at ease with uncertainty. As she told The Volta, “The difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing.”

While her overarching themes are universal—loneliness, love, death—Ruefle interrogates the nature of the lyric itself, stitching together speech rhythms, sounds, visual flashes and ephemera with the thread of the overheard and the under the breath. Her “talky” speakers favor fragments, direct address, questions, misreadings, and conjectures. Ruefle writes, “The power of the human imagination is to invent ways that enable us to survive, perhaps survival is but an act of the human mind,” and she delights her readers with how the mind works when it’s working most pleasurably. To quote the poet David Rivard, “Even at her most outlandishly playful—and who is more outlandish than Ruefle?—she speaks with an unbelievably sly wisdom.”

Mary Ruefle has received various awards including an award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College and lives in Bennington, Vermont.