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From Stephen Elliott
“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.
...moreQ: 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.
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
Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems is best appreciated not for its message or its drama, but for its expert way at guiding a reader through the writer’s lively imagination.