Tina Cane | September 2021

Mary Ruefle’s most recent collection of poetry, Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle’s debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).

  Ruefle’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Whiting Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Frost Place residency, the Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, a Lannan Foundation residency, and the William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems. She was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Criticism, and she has won the Robert Creeley Award.

  Mary Ruefle’s poetry reflects a stark wisdom and wry humor. For Ruefle, a poem is “an act of the mind.” Her operating system centers on the poet writing alone in a room and she limits her readings to once a month. While many poets require solitude, Mary protects her time and space more than most these days. She opts for connection over “connections” or “connectivity,” and thus maintains a zone of privacy that is compelling and rare. Ruefle’s poems, like her mind, assert a singularity worthy of primacy and devotion.

Tina Cane: When we began this conversation via postcard, shortly after you were appointed Poet Laureate of Vermont, my first question to you was: How would you describe what a poem is to people who don’t write poetry?

  Your answer came typewritten on a slip of paper:

I would read them poems of different kinds, different sounds and styles. I would say that a poem is a body of words, and like any body it has a heart and a mind, and these two things are sometimes in sync and sometimes not. I would say that a poem is a letter written to everyone, and to no one in particular, and expressly for them.

I love this response. The idea that a poem is a letter written to everyone resonates with me as a letter writer and as a poet. I often refer to my own poems as missives or dispatches. You don’t use email or texting for correspondence. That’s a refreshing departure. Have you always opted out, or was this a choice you made after having had some experience with these forms for communication?

Mary Ruefle: I opted out, then I caved in and bought a computer and had it for a couple of months and sold it—I didn’t like it; I opted out again. I do have an iPad that I look at for weather and news, and a certain amount of email, which I check once a week. I see the convenience, and I see the pitfalls. Obviously, if I were young I would have no choice, but I am old and I have a choice—I choose to die without this in my life, despite that the world I die in is in part comprised of it. I don’t want to sound anti-technology; I merely want to assert my right as an individual to choose. I am particularly alarmed by how many lower-income families are forced by our culture to spend their scanty resources on smart phones and computers when they can scarcely afford food, shelter, and clothing. Whenever people don’t have a choice, this alarms me.

Cane: In your book Madness, Rack, and Honey, you call the poem an “act of the mind.” Would you elaborate on that?

Ruefle: What else can they possibly be? They are the mind elaborating itself in language. They begin in the mind—where else could they possibly begin?—and other minds receive them. They are mind to mind communication, it could be thought, it could be feeling, but they are a human form of birdsong or whalesong.

Cane: Does the body figure in? If so, where? How?

Ruefle: Of course, the body figures in, for the mind is a physical part of the body, and if it is damaged, we lose the capacity of mind-act. Language can be impaired or stolen altogether.

  It is terrifying to think (!) how fragile the system is. At the same time, we often read with our body—I know I do—in so far as so much poetry seems to bypass our mind and go straight to the heart, or send shivers up the spine, or cause us to levitate or become heavy as a stone. Different rhythms have different effects on us—when the mind acts, the body is affected, and vice versa. Intertwined, deeply so. Even as I know this, I must say that for myself, I have always lived more fully in my mind than in my body. I have no desire to climb a mountain, though I know it would be exhilarating. “The mind has mountains, too” (G.M. Hopkins).

Cane: You are a poet, and also an “erasure artist”—well-known for your wonderful book, A Little White Shadow. In my limited experience with erasure, I found it to be such an engrossing process that the product became secondary. And yet, as you show, the product can be striking and evocative—even if one knows nothing of the process. You consider “erasures as poetry but not poems.” That’s an interesting distinction.

Ruefle: First of all, I too have the same experience as you; the process can be so engrossing that the product becomes secondary. I am addicted to the process, which is my morning ritual (I’ve made 110 books of erasure!), yet so much of the result is dross. I don’t care that the result is dross because doing it makes me happy, and I can say the same thing about poetry, about writing poems. I have these repetitive acts in my life that I love being engaged in, and it has taken me a long time to see how extraordinarily fortunate I am to have them, and as I am running out of time on earth, I feel this joy more intensely than ever—I can do these things, I love doing them, why yearn after results? There is always, of course, a little bit of that, but if there were too much of it the joy would be taken out of it. I also like making the bed, and some days I make it “better” than others, and I notice that, but that does not stop me in my tracks. I keep going.

  As for “erasure as poetry, not poems,” I say that because the effect of reading some of the books can be the same as reading poems. They aren’t narratives, but lyrical fragments or juxtapositions or associations that work the same way. Like poetry, it’s hard to talk about, it has to be experienced.

Cane: You’ve also called erasure “like writing with your eyes instead of your hands.” How did you discover the form? And what kind, if any, parameters do you set for yourself?

Ruefle: I don’t really remember. I no longer remember if I discovered Tom Phillips before or after I began making erasures. But they really are like writing with your eyes because the eyes scan the page of text searching for words; I have likened it to picking flowers in a field, which we do with our eyes; why one daisy and not the next?

  Parameters? I wish I knew the meaning of the word! I regret that I have never set parameters in my life, I really do, but the only parameter I can think of is that I set myself the goal of two facing pages a day. It can take minutes or hours. Is that a parameter? Isn’t a parameter a margin? I begin in the margin! I begin in the parameter, always. Erasure is itself a parameter, it’s a form.

Cane: It’s interesting that you locate writing in the “hands.” Visual art so often involves the use of hands as well as the eyes. I wonder if you have ever painted or done collage?

Ruefle: Yes, I once wanted to be a painter, but writing was cheaper so I wrote instead. I very much still do collage as my erasures now involve collaging text and image. Some of my poems, not all, but some, are verbal collage.

  And of course, the physical act of writing by hand is drawing; the wrist moves; it’s delirious.

Cane: Erasure brings me to death—which exerts a presence in your work. As a theme, sure, but I’m also thinking covert logic. Your most recent book, Dunce, is at once dark and pithy. Like so much of your poetry—spare and clipped—there’s an unnerving sing-song aspect. There’s also a balance of self-deprecating humor tinged with hints of heartbreak. Unsparing in its insight. Not one bit self-indulgent. How do you do it? I mean get there.

Ruefle: Well, thank you for those kind words; you are being very generous. I haven’t a clue as to “how I do it.” All I can say is that very often I do not do it, in the sense that you mean. My mind works in a certain way. I don’t work at making it work that way; my poems are the result of how my mind works. And my mind refuses to work in a great many other ways which would be beneficial to me, personally. I have no sense of direction, literally: I could get lost in my own home. And I have observed my mind shutting down completely, against my will, when certain subjects are discussed, or written about. Legalities, for instance, or finances, or how my car works.

Cane: Do you work it out in your head? On the page? Has it always been this way?

Ruefle: Yes, I write in my head. I mean a poem always begins in my head, not on a blank page. It has to be at least halfway through before I will commit to paper. After that, I do what everyone does: I revise, if that’s what you mean by working it out. Sometimes I don’t revise, but those poems are gifts. I think everyone has that experience and feels the same way. This stuff is hard to talk about. Writing poems comes naturally to me. I don’t think of it as work, though we all use that word when we are discussing it.

  I don’t know where my poems come from if that’s what you mean. I don’t have an agenda, and in today’s world that’s very often looked down upon—how can you not have an agenda? Well, I don’t—I have no poetry agenda, and part of not having it is not caring what others think.

Cane: In your essay, “Pause”—from My Private Property—you write about the “cryalog” you kept during your experience of menopause in which you catalogue how often you cried each day.

  That impulse to commemorate—compelled by strong emotion—reminds me of a condolence archive—which somehow also reminds me of poetry. The need to document is not just the writer’s province, but is central to a writer’s operating system. What’s it about for you?

Ruefle: “Condolence archive,” that’s a great phrase! Perhaps that’s what poetry is. Perhaps if more people thought of it like that they would read it without worry or fear. As for my need to document, I am most definitely a list-maker. My shopping lists are insane, I might write “distilled water, Aisle 3” when I could just write “water,” for I know perfectly well that I want distilled water and that it is in Aisle 3. At the same time, I am not a document-keeper; I don’t use notebooks unless the pages are perforated and can be torn out and thrown away. I don’t save drafts or manuscripts. I throw out birthday cards the day after, sometimes the day of. But my life is still full of little things I can’t bear to part with, like a pink feather someone handed me twenty-five years ago.

Cane: Laughing/crying is a phrase I’ve been using for the past few years. It’s a response to the frightening absurdity of our current culture, but as I read your piece on menopause, I wonder how have you, your body, and your mind weathered the changes in our cultural and political climate?

Ruefle: “Weathered” is an interesting word, because weather changes, but as the body ages its changes become permanent, which is why older people talk endlessly about their ills, and their aches and pains. It’s all we talk about! My mind has not done such a good job at “weathering” either, as shown by the fact that I don’t have a computer and am not even vaguely interested in social media. Yet my mind is resilient, and can go with the flow, so you figure it out! Politics? You mean man’s inhumanity to man? Compounded by man’s destruction of the planet upon which he commits such atrocities? It’s overwhelming; this year (2020) marks the 25th anniversary of the mass murder of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica—but who remembers that? History eats history for breakfast. That’s my point. I don’t have much faith in “humanity.” I’ve lived too long, I guess—I attended the funeral of President Kennedy! And I’ve witnessed all kinds of history—politics—that happened centuries before I was born, through reading. And, as a result, I’ve lost my faith in humanity, but not in the supreme gift of consciousness, if that makes sense. If I were an educator, I’d require students to pick a war, one war that happened at any time, and learn everything they can about it. Let them study atrocity in detail. But I’m not an educator, I’m an artist, and my work is not—let’s face it—overtly political.

  The world is a very big place, you know, and as soon as you insist all artists are political you have basically founded a controlled state. I’m glad there are political artists, because I’m not very good at it, and I admire so much of their work, which is pressingly important. I am invested in the environment, as I live in the country, and we are at a tipping point in that respect; wouldn’t it be nice if we turned our attention to the natural disasters which we have caused or are causing; what if armies existed to help out in cases of natural disasters and not human-made ones? You see, there’s hardly a difference any more, it’s all a terrible mush...

Cane: It’s true; there are aspects of human nature that never seem to change—its capacity for cruelty, its insistence on pleasure. And yet, as individuals, we change, are maybe changing all the time.

  In describing the so-called “change of life,” you invite the reader to imagine “You are a thirteen-year-old with the experience and daily life of a forty-five-year-old.” As a woman in her early fifties, with a thirteen-year old daughter, I understand this special brand of harrowing. What were you like as a thirteen-year old girl?

Ruefle: Like any thirteen-year-old girl, I was hell-bent on defying my elders, my parents, and my teachers. I was hell-bent on being sad, mad, and bad. I think I was miserable, but I know I was infused with the incredible energy of adolescence. At the same time, it was around this age that I began to read really great stuff, like Russian novels and the British Romantics, and perhaps in my subconscious to see there was a way of life other than the one I was trapped in. But my emotional intelligence was zero.

Cane: I find reading fiction and poetry cultivates emotional intelligence. Was that the case for you?

Ruefle: No, I was never smart enough for that to happen! But going to a great therapist helped me to see how dumb I’d been, and for how long. But all the reading I’d done made it easier for me to change, in the long run.

Cane: When I first read your poem, “Middle School,” I laughed out loud when I read the lines:

“Our team was the Bitter Herbs.
 Our club the Reconsiderers.”

Yes! I thought. A school for skeptics and poètes maudits! When did you begin to write seriously? To seriously consider yourself a writer? Were there any people who were important in that regard?

Ruefle: I began writing poems in the third grade, but I didn’t begin to write “seriously” until I was in college, I guess. It is hard to know what one means by “seriously.” I didn’t call myself a writer until I was around thirty, I mean if asked. The people who have always been most important to me were the writers I read and loved. I didn’t “decide” to become a writer—I guess people do that today—my vocation evolved naturally, out of what I loved to do and did most. What I could not do without.

Cane: Any books that were instrumental?

Ruefle: Oh, I have always loved, from a very early age, classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. I still do.

Cane: What about Chinese and Japanese poetry, in particular?

Ruefle: I felt a presence in real time, not something from out of the past but something contemporaneous with my own consciousness at the moment I was reading. And of course there was the imagery, the imagery that seemed greater than the sum of the words. But I also loved and love Western poetry that thinks itself out. I am not beholden to one or the other, and I try in my own poems to do both—well, to be honest, I don’t really “try” to do anything, but it seems to me my approach, my method, is one we could call This n’ That.

Cane: In your poem, “Provenance,” you write:

“I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive.”

Ruefle: I guess that just about sums it up!

Cane: For all its intimations about death, absurdity, and finality, your work does not reside in darkness. On the contrary, your poems manage to convey a kind of languid exuberance—if that odd oxymoron makes any sense. What makes you love being alive?

Ruefle: The sensual delight of light and warmth and cold and color, of plants and animals and other bodies, other minds, speech and language, reading and talking—the daily, the ordinary; the supreme gift of consciousness. To be able to suffer is part of it.

Cane: Your essay, “Pause,” ends on an expectant note with: “Happy old age is coming on bare feet, bringing with it grace and gentle words, and ways which grim youth have never known.” I am delighted, if that’s the word—and yes, I think it is—that you characterize youth as “grim,” that you envision old age “bringing with it grace and gentle words.” I’ve grown less grim with age, and I like to believe the part about grace. Do you believe in wisdom? What is it? Where does it come from?

Ruefle: I do believe in wisdom. Wisdom comes with time. It takes a long time to see the patterns in things, to see things disappear and reappear; when you are young and something disappears, you think it is forever, ditto the appearances. But everything changes, it keeps changing, and if you face that with openness and curiosity it can be something less fearsome than one might think. Patience is a large part of it, and we are so impatient when we are young, and waiting. But what are we waiting for? Nothing you wait for turns out to be true, I mean it doesn’t turn out to be exactly what you had in mind—so, I think, acceptance has a lot to do with it. Patience, time, acceptance, these things are part of the mesh of wisdom.

Cane: Patience is, I think, a capacity. I hope that age—and child-rearing—have made me more patient over the years, but I fear that technology increasingly cancels that out. I reserve no reverence for technology, but I do admire the “openness” and “acceptance” you refer to. Those are goals, and bring to mind Buddhist thought. Have you ever you practiced any faith? Do you now?

Ruefle: Well, I was raised Catholic, but I certainly don’t practice that particular faith. Nor am I Buddhist if that’s what you were hinting at. I do not participate in organized religion, though I love all of the iconography and rituals. Faith for me is a kind of chaos, one day I’m calm, the next day I’m frantic. When I read something like “Flowers preach to us if only we could hear” (Christina Rosetti), I do swoon, but in the end I just believe in experience, being aware of being alive, again the supreme gift of consciousness, which Shakespeare possessed, and Anne Spencer, and millions of people who didn’t write and whose names we don’t know. The perceptual gift includes not only how beautiful the world can be, but how badly we treat one another. And yes, it has been noted that I love the word “God” and use it often, but for me it is shorthand, a symbol not a fact, the grand trope of language, signifying the whole shebang; for me God is the thing that happened before the Big Bang—it’s nothing we can ever know or understand as it precedes our knowing or understanding. Evil is real, evil is part of it, but so is tenderness and a consciousness capable of righting itself, of changing. But what would I know? Nothing. God is nothingness, too. Sometimes I think that for us here on Earth God is no more than the sum total of all the individual consciousnesses at any given moment. So please try to think kindly, in the grand flux of things it might make a difference.

Cane: You close “Pause” with the advice: “You must pause first, the way one must always pause before a great endeavor, if only to take a good breath.” When I read this sentence, I pictured you seated at your desk—poised to write something great. Have you learned to pause? In writing? In life?

Ruefle: I have never sat at my desk poised to write something great! Never. One thing I want to remark upon is that women are always quoting that essay and asking me to comment on it but as my menopause is far far behind me it is nothing I think about or care about anymore. I did at the time but that time has passed and the subjects that consume me now are aging and dying—it is very hard for me to inhabit the place I was in when I wrote that piece.

Cane: It’s amazing how we shed concerns, as we work through and move past them. Still, the writing which documents those phases can be instructive and, indeed, wise. Aging and dying are universal predicaments, which many of us spend our entire lives confronting. What is interesting to you about this stage?

Ruefle: I don’t think we spend our whole lives confronting aging and dying, except in an abstract, almost theoretical way—I don’t know about you, but when I was young I behaved as if I was going to live forever. Which is the way it should be; the way it is, the young have no alternative but to behave this way. And the aged have no alternative—literally—but to behave in another way. Perhaps when you were young you knew someone who lost a parent—years later you suddenly understand for the first time what that meant to your friend, and how you would have reacted differently. But there is no going back.

Cane: Does the actual act of writing—as in active examination—impact your understanding or acceptance of ageing and death?

Ruefle: God, no. The actual act of writing is a joy of life, and the acceptance of the gift of perception. If one were to accept death completely and in every way, one would no longer write.

Cane: It’s funny, because some writers find writing quite difficult—the actual act of writing as the opposite of joy. But I am interested in this idea of the acceptance of the gift of perception. When did you become aware of perception as a gift and how did you come to accept it?

Ruefle: I think when I was younger there were isolated moments when perception reached me as a gift, and that many of my earliest poems came out of those moments, but, as I said, they were isolated, and now that I am older, an elder really, such moments seem everywhere, all linked in a continuum that stretches as far back as I can remember but doesn’t go forward for very long, and perhaps that is where my later poems come from. Seeing that and trying to accept it, and I don’t think of this as morbid, life is a gift that was given to many before me, some of them poets, and will be given to many after me, some of them poets. That’s what I accept, and it makes me happy.

Cane: “Metaphysical Blight,” a poem from Trances of the Blast, asks “What if the women were ground/ to a Turkish grind for some worthy cause/ and there were no women?” What if?

Ruefle: Obviously, life would grind to a halt!

Cane: I love that you include the phrase “for some worthy cause”—which acerbically evokes martyrdom to me. What are some of the “worthy causes” you imagine women are/have been sacrificed for, or sacrifice themselves for?

Ruefle: Off the top of my head I can’t think of any. Some worthy causes are useless—you can’t save the rainforest by reusing toothpicks—but to be fair, men as well as women have devoted themselves to worthy causes. I don’t think it’s sex-exclusive. Men marched with women for the vote. But what would I know? I’m a poet, pretty far down on the worthy-cause pole! But historically, women were literally sacrificed—thrown into volcanoes, stuff like that—to appease the gods. A maiden, a virgin, just might do the trick when all else failed. Thank the gods those days are over. Or are they? Many cultures still have rituals that subjugate women.

  Worthy causes become terribly complicated when you try to rank them. If you have one dollar to give, or one afternoon, do you give to poetry, or to a political candidate who might make a difference? Just try mapping the flow-chart of a single instance of giving, or, for that matter, a single action of any kind, and I promise you, the results will be unpredictable.

Cane: Being a poet “far down on the worthy-cause pole” is a choice—and a legitimate one, I believe. Some poets, however, are very politically engaged. Some even risk their lives for it. Where do you see the poet’s role in society? Especially now, in your capacity as a poet laureate?

Ruefle: When you say they risk their lives for it, I’m not sure what you mean by “it”—poetry, or a political cause? Keats and Shelley were writing at the same time and one (Shelley) literally risked his life for his political views while the other (Keats) literally risked his life for his poetry.

  That said, the poet’s role in society has evolved over the centuries; it seems more marginalized now than it was two hundred or two thousand years ago, and so on. But there have always been poets who took politics as their subject, and there have always been poets who took beauty (for lack of a better word) as their subject. We have poems of lament and poems of praise. Why do we have to choose?

  A poem is an act of attention, and an act of attention is a political act. I see the poet’s role in society as one in which the poet is free to be oneself; whatever they want to write is fine with me. I suppose my views are terribly unpopular, but I have observed that some poets write for the masses and some write for their cats. We have in our lives both private and public moments. As a poet laureate, I feel my job is just to be a poet writing in a certain state, no more, no less. Does that shock you? Frost continued to be the Poet Laureate of Vermont after he died! It’s kinda like a state flower or bird—do we ask the thrush or the clover to do something different? Have we given them a job? Let’s face it, very few people, when asked, could name the state flower or bird or tell you who the poet laureate was.

Cane: Well, as a fellow poet laureate, I am delighted that you’ve put us on par with the state bird and flower—though we cycle in and out, and they stay the same. I’ve approached my position as more of a public service post than a title. I’ve never felt freed up enough to “just be a poet”—there are many reasons for this—but I am always galvanized by other poets’ insistence on it. I think it’s becoming easier, the older I get.

  In your “cryalog” piece, you write that as women age, they become more invisible—more “ground” down, if you will. I find I write to be seen and heard, sometimes if only by myself. What does that invisibility mean to you, as a person and as a writer?

Ruefle: Invisibility is also complicated; for a race or creed or any group worthy of equal representation, it is a nightmare. But for an individual, it can be liberating, not to be beholden by anything or to anything. There is a great deal of freedom in invisibility, I wouldn’t want to be famous for the world; look at how scrutinized celebrities are, and how that impacts their lives. I think it was Heather McHugh who said “the higher you climb the more your ass shows,” or something like that. Thank God “there is no such thing as a famous poet.” John Ashbery said that.

  As an older woman, I am invisible in all the ways older women are, and I find it empowering. When I was young, I suppose putting on a new dress felt empowering. What rubbish! But not for the young, the young are empowered by their own youth. Age gives gifts to everyone...of any age.

Cane: “Spikenard,” another poem from Trances, offers the stealth and stunning observation:

I spend more time with my journal
than I spend with myself.
The end.

I relate to this in an almost visceral way, especially “The end.”

Ruefle: I always wanted to end a poem with the words “the end,” so I did. When we are children, and we write anything, we always write “the end” at the end—I love that. And novels said it on the last page—I miss that. I wonder what year they stopped doing that? I guess if I had a smartphone I could find out, but thinking about it and wondering about it is enough for me. More than enough. At some point it stopped, that’s all you need to know. The end.

Cane: Yes, smartphones really do kill so much of life’s mysteries. Not compulsively chasing answers has become an acquired skill. Your fondness for “The End” makes me think of film—the “Fin” that comes at the close of French movies. What are some movies you love?

Ruefle: That’s like asking me who are some of the poets I love—there are far too many, and if you name a few, you are sure to forget others who should also be named. And it’s not so much that I love certain films as I love certain directors, like Abbas Kiarostami and Hirokazu Kore-eda, but if I name them then I am certainly forgetting Almovodar, and then there are certain actors I’d watch even in a bad film, like Isabelle Huppert and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and then I’m forgetting Nina Hoss, so the problem with your question is the problem of all art—there are so many great artists that when we focus on one we forget all the others! It is maddening and very often overwhelms me. I have a poem somewhere about this; it’s called “Lillian,” as in Lillian Gish.

Cane: Yes, “Lillian” is in Dunce, in which you write, “When I look into / Lilian’s eyes I forget everything else, / which is what love is”. You call that “the trouble with the spirit of art”—the forgetting. Maybe that’s also the trouble with love. It reminds me of the notion that we must “kill” one person or thing to love another. I don’t know if that’s true, but there is a singularity to devotion—which leads me to the fact that I often feel I am not fully myself when I am not writing. What does the act of writing have to do with who you are?

Ruefle: Everything. And nothing. It depends on the day. There’s a lot of weather that wafts through a self. Some days, writing is the most important thing in the world to me and my sense of self. Other days, I think I’d be happiest if I never wrote another word, if I just stopped, gave it up.

Go figure. By the way, I don’t think there has to be a singularity to devotion—I still pretty much love everything and everyone I’ve ever loved. For me, love is not a narrow thing, but an ever-widening event.

Cane: What is most difficult about writing for you?

Ruefle: Time. Doesn’t everyone feel the same way? Finding empty days.

Cane: I certainly do. There are no empty days! And yet somehow the poems get written. Do you allot yourself dedicated writing time? Or do you write on the fly?

  What’s your ideal scenario?

Ruefle: I write on the fly but I have dedicated erasure time. My ideal scenario is an ocean breeze lifting a thin curtain and a round wooden table with a bowl of fruit on it.

  Which is funny because I have never lived near the ocean, and I don’t like fruit as much as other people seem to.

Cane: Have you ever gone through a long period of not writing?

Ruefle: I’m sure I have. I just don’t remember. When you are young, and you can’t write, you think you will never write again, but as time passes you see that that is not true, so you learn through experience and over time that there are cycles of various kinds in life. You grow patient, you have a bigger picture; well, hopefully you do, hopefully you have learned something.

Cane: If so, what did you do?

Ruefle: I must have gone on living, for here I am.

Cane: Who are the poets you turn to?

Ruefle: I don’t like to name names, so I will name just one: Issa.

Cane: Dead?

Ruefle: Poems are never dead. Poets die, not poems.

Cane: Alive?

Ruefle: Dead or alive, their names are mingled in me.

Cane: I once told a friend I wanted to come back as Lydia Davis’s brain. Whose brain would you choose?

Ruefle: Well, I have a friend who doesn’t want to come back as a human. As for myself, I wouldn’t mind your choice, not one bit, but the fact is we don’t get to choose, so if I do come back, I’ll just let that brain evolve naturally during its lifetime, as mine did during this one.

Cane: Right now, I am home—like you—during the global self-distancing era of the COVID-19 pandemic. What do you see on the other side of this crisis? As a poet? As an American?

Ruefle: First of all, I might not live to see the other side of this crisis, I see that. But I would hope that people who survive would see the pleasures of staying at home, quality time with their loved ones, reading a book, less shopping, that kind of thing. And most of all I wish the world would triage their problems to the extent that the environment and natural disasters become universal concerns, that all nations everywhere come together and get on board.

  I’m afraid I don’t really see things “as a poet” or “as an American,” even though I am an American poet. I think of myself as Mary and I think as Mary thinks. I can’t think for huge groups of people; if I could do that I’d be a politician!

Cane: Let’s close our conversation on a note of hope. What’s the best advice you ever got?

  And where do you find wonder in the world?

Ruefle: The best advice I ever received was when you told me that putting a wooden spoon across a pot of boiling noodles would stop them from boiling over. I tried it and it really works, and it is a mystery to me. I do not understand the science of it and I stand in my kitchen and look at the spoon on top of the pot and am filled with wonder.

  And stuff like that happens to me every day.

---

Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island and is the founder and director of Writers-in- the-Schools. She is the author of Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz, Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, and Year of the Murder Hornet (forthcoming). Her debut novel-in-verse for young adults, Alma Presses Play, will be released this September.

Excerpt

from Dunce

APPLE IN WATER

I was swimming
with the taste of apple
in my mouth
a shred of appleskin
between my teeth I guess
It doesn’t get any better than this
said the water
These are troubled times
said the shred
and the apple, the apple
wasn’t really there,
only a lingering taste of it,
as if it were the last apple,
or an earlier one that had lasted,
either way it was silent
and I swam with the silence
in my mouth, listening to
the pretty crimson dot
and the great slipping glimpser,
not knowing if I heard
a night of love
or a love of night,
such was the knowledge gained
during that long languid swim.

 

GENESIS

Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
And a purple fog descended upon the land.
The roots of trees curled up.
The world was divided into two countries.
Every photograph taken in the first was of people.
Every photograph taken in the second showed none.
All of the girl children were named And.
All of the boy children named Then.

From Dunce. Copyright © 2019 by Mary Ruefle. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.