Eight Meditations about Mary Ruefle
“You haven’t even begun,” she admonishes the younger version of ourselves. “You must pause first, the way one must always pause before a great spirit, if only to take a good breath.” ...more
Posts Tagged: Mary Ruefle
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
What is lost still has substance, is malleable, can take on new impressions, and be molded again to our experience, often resulting in the most lasting force that determines how we see the world. ...more
The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age. ...more
Rescuing Asian Art from American Artists
...moreGenerations of American writers have approached Asian cultures with the best of intentions but repeatedly missed the mark. How can we rescue Asian artists and thinkers like Hokusai from our own desire to experience them as foreign? How can we experience Hokusai not as the Japanese artist, not as one of the roots of European Japonisme, not as a spiritual guide, but just as a person who made some art?
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sandra Beasley
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Sandra Beasley about her new book Count the Waves, sestinas, and how actions can serve as signposts in the time stream. ...more
The Sentimental Thinker
“If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental,” she writes, “that is only the half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?”
For the Kenyon Review blog, Cody Walker takes another look at Mary Ruefle and the balancing act between sentimentality and logic.
...moreIt Has To Do With Attention
Q: What is the difference between a poem and a cloud?
A: Not very much, according to the poet Mary Ruefle in this (delightful) interview, found in Music & Literature:
...moreThe clouds are written to us, as we are the only ones to receive them, we the living.
I remember, I remember
A good thing to do on a Monday is to go and read, or re-read, Mary Ruefle’s beautiful essay I remember at the poetry foundation — a beautiful meditation on childhood, cows and her first electric typewriter (and also, just about everything else).
...more
Lectures I Will Never Give
Mary Ruefle wasn't good at teaching on the fly so she wrote a series of lectures for her poetry classes. This is one of them. ...more
Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle
Madness, Rack, and Honey is a gift from a rigorous intellect, unflinching critic, and a big old sloppy heart. Ruefle has created a work of poetry from the daunting task of writing about it. ...more
