>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Mary Ann Brownlow: I'm Mary Ann Brownlow. Welcome to Hill Center, and for the latest instalment of the life of a poet, a wonderful, in-depth, quarterly series of conversations with American poets. And we're so thrilled to welcome this evening Mary Ruefle. The series just wouldn't be possible without Ron Charles, the Washington Post editor of Book World and we're thrilled that the Washington Post and the Library of Congress are our partners in this series. Also, just crucial to the series, is Rob Casper, who is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, and who essentially curates the series. Just how this will work this evening is well Rob, in just a moment, will introduces Rob -- excuse me, Ron and Mary and we'll have about a 60 to 75 minute conversation. And following that we invite you to join us across the hall for a reception and a book signing. So without further ado I'm going to turn the proceedings over to Rob Casper. >> Rob Casper: Thank you, Mary Ann. I should say that she gave me more credit than is due. We really curated this series together, Mary Ann, Ron, and I. So I'm proud of the group of poets that we've had and the capacity of audiences we've been able to garner for these events. It's worth coming here as you well know. Many of you are people I've seen before. I realized as I was writing this introduction that I have run out of things to say about how great Ron Charles is and how much I love this series. I will say that there is no other series I've ever been a part of that so thoroughly and wonderfully exhausts me afterwards. After this is done and we all get up, I'm surely going to have a moment where I sort of have to, you know, psychically shake off the intensity of the exchange that is about to happen. So I'm, as always, excited about it and I know I'll sleep well tonight. Let me just say a little bit about the Library of Congress and the Poetry and Literature Center before we start. We are home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Our most recent Poet Laureate, Charles Wright, just finished his appointment as the 20th Poet Laureate. We also do events, readings, lectures, symposia, stuff like that throughout the year, a few off-site but mostly up the street at the libraries, Jefferson Madison buildings. To find out more about those events you can go to our website, which is www.loc.gov/poetry. And now I'm very excited to introduce Mary Ruefle, who will conclude our 2005 -- 2015 spring season of life of a poet. She is the author of 10 books of poetry, including selected poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from my old -- my old home, the Poetry Society of America. She has also published Madness, Rack, and Honey, Collected Lectures, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and has published a book of pros and a comic book. She is an [inaudible] artist, too, whose treatments of 19th century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in the book A Little White Shadow. Her honors include the Robert Creeley Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Award, and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and from the [inaudible] the Arts. Do we have anybody from the NEA here tonight? No, oh those [inaudible] people, they're missing out. She lives in Bennington, Vermont and she teaches intermittently at the [inaudible] program at Vermont Collage and will do so this summer. So Ron wrote a wonderful intro about this event and about Mary in the Washington Post this week. If you haven't read it, you should go back after this event and check it out. He talks about in that -- in that intro, which is sort of a primer, he talks about Mary's strikingly original poetry, which he says is quote marked by flashes of sorrow and wit end quote. He also says her poems contain echoes of Emily Dickinson, which makes intuitive sense to me. I first learned of Mary's poetry and heard her read when I was a graduate student up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the kind of place that can inspire poetry, arguably as much if not more than anywhere else. The concision, the imaginative charge, the beautiful directness and playfulness, this is how both Emily and Mary win us over in poem after poem. But Mary's ability to move among genres and even art forms makes her an inspiring figure in a different way. To me, Mary is a reminder of the essential nature of artistic practice. It allows for a kind of freedom and a kind of discovery that no other practice can offer. I am so lucky to know her and to know her work, and I'm delighted we all will have the opportunity to spend the next hour or so learning about both. So please join me in welcoming Mary Ruefle. [ Applause ] >> Ron Charles: Thank you, Rob, and thank you for coming. It's such a pleasure to have you here. >> Mary Ruefle: Thank you. >> Ron Charles: It's been a pleasure to read your work. >> Mary Ruefle: Honor to be here. >> Ron Charles: This is the biggest crowd we've had. Yeah, so thank you all very much for coming, too. You once told an interviewer I didn't grow up anywhere. What did you mean by that? You said, I grew up without a singular home. >> Mary Ruefle: My father was in the military and we moved every year, every two years. The longest we ever lived anywhere was three years. But since I said, I have heard an even more wonderful answer, which I would outright steal from the [inaudible] Powell [assumed spelling] who said, where did you grow up? He said, I'll tell you when it happens. [ Laughter ] >> Ron Charles: In a poem called The Review you said, all my life I felt the heavy hand of the poet making connections, which is a shame because my life did have its moments of grace and strength. Did -- >> Mary Ruefle: I said that? >> Ron Charles: You did. >> Mary Ruefle: Was it in a poem? >> Ron Charles: It was in a poem, Among the Musk -- >> Mary Ruefle: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: When did you really feel that calling as a poet? It wasn't always surely? >> Mary Ruefle: Subconsciously or unconsciously I believe when I was a child. >> Ron Charles: And was it a calling, like a religious feeling, a impulse? >> Mary Ruefle: I think that becoming a poet is a vocation that you don't choose, it chooses you. And you feel it, instead of looking at all possible vocations in the world and choosing among them -- >> Ron Charles: Lawyer, doctor, poet. >> Mary Ruefle: You feel it inside yourself. And inside yourself is a voice telling you this is what makes me happy. This is what I want to do. In the beginning it doesn't say this is what I should be doing, but this is what I want to do. Then I think after certain period of time it starts to say this is what I should be doing, and eventually it -- the voice begins to say this is why I was put on earth. And that may sound very prideful or inflated, but it is a definition of faith to believe that. >> Ron Charles: Were you encouraged? >> Mary Ruefle: No, I was never encouraged at all. No, I was not. I was not born into -- >> Ron Charles: You can understand why. >> Mary Ruefle: I was -- >> Ron Charles: I mean it is an impractical career choice. >> Mary Ruefle: Yes, my parents were never happy with my career choice. Although I later, after they died, found out that they were secretly proud [laughter]. They never heard me read and they never read my books. >> Ron Charles: Why? >> Mary Ruefle: But they bought my books and they had them displayed in the living room in a pile. My father didn't like poetry. If you don't like poetry why should you -- you would -- you shouldn't -- you don't have to read it. My mother, I think, read the books looking for something she might recognize, a place name or person's name and found it once, and that's the only time she ever responded to anything I wrote. She said, oh, you mentioned you know the street or something. But that's okay. I mean -- it means I had to find my own way and I think I found my own way in books. I think we come to -- we become writers in one of two ways. Either were born into a family that loves the arts and encourages them and introduces every child from birth to their cultural heritage and to all cultures in the world, creative cultures the world over. And as a child you're very, very fortunate if you have parents who constantly read great books to you and take you museums and help you fall in love with painting and music. Those of us who didn't have that, can't really complain because what happened in my case, and from my discussions with other people, many other cases, is you feel very lonely and weird and you feel you were born into the wrong family and go into your room, if you're lucky enough to have one. I was, I had a room of my own after a certain age, and close the door and read. And in a book I said, oh, someone else is lonely, too and that was -- that was it. I mean, then they became my friends and they became my family and my closest friends growing up. I mean, I had real, you know, fleshy human friends. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Mary Ruefle: But the friends -- the kinds of friends you make in books when you're a lonely child it's like nothing else. And they've remain my friends my whole life. I still love, you know, the books that you might read as a child. The Wind in the Willows is one of my all-time favorite books, you know, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or who -- it's not just, I love children's literature. And then eventually one day you're reading Salinger and then you're reading Tolstoy, and then you're reading, you know, Gertrude Stein, and so it goes and. >> Ron Charles: Do you remember these self-deprecating lines? My inability to express myself is astounding. >> Mary Ruefle: Yes, I still feel that way. >> Ron Charles: I don't have that impression. >> Mary Ruefle: I think we all feel that way. >> Ron Charles: 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. Was that -- are you being -- are just being -- are you being funny there? Is that really the way you feel? Or is it just kind of a comic expression of exasperation? >> Mary Ruefle: That's a -- that's a good and interesting question. I think when I wrote that particular poem I really was feeling that, but in another poem when I say such an outlandish thing, it might be I was being outlandish. But I think I was feeling that at the time. >> Ron Charles: And -- >> Mary Ruefle: Sometimes when I get carried away I -- it's hard. Sometimes I get carried away in a poem it's an expression of my innermost being, which is being swept away. And then sometimes I'm very conscious of it and I'm doing it on purpose and having fun. Both can happen. >> Ron Charles: Yes. You once told an interviewer, I can't gauge my work at all. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh that. >> Ron Charles: How can that be? How do -- >> Mary Ruefle: That is true. >> Ron Charles: How can that be? How can you know when a poem is done or when you should send it in or share it or sell it? >> Mary Ruefle: I can -- I know when a poem is done, but I meant gauging the quality of a poem. I can -- I know when a poem is done. A poem is done when it stops bothering me. That's my definition of doneness, when it stops bothering me. If I write a poem and I spend days, and this happens all the -- I spend days walking around with those lines that are not right. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: It's not done. But, oh gauging my work, the poems that I've written that I love, like nobody pays any attention to or has any interest in, they're not published or my editor rejects them from books and things. I think they're like, you know, and then the poems that I'm like that's ridiculous, everyone likes them [laughter]. I don't know. >> Ron Charles: Would you read a poem for us? >> Mary Ruefle: Sure, I'd be happy to. >> Ron Charles: This is the first poem in your latest book. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, Saga, yeah. Everything that ever happened to me is just hanging, crushed, and sparkling in the air waiting to happen to you. Everything that ever happened to me happen to somebody else first. I would give you an example, but they are all invisible or off gallivanting around the globe, not here when I need them now that I need them, if I ever did, which I doubt. Being particular as its problems. In particular, there is a rift through everything. There is a rift running the length of Iceland and so a rift runs through every family and between families a feud. It's called a saga. Riffs in sagas fill the air and beautiful old women sing of them, so the air is filled with music and the smell of berries and apples and shouting when a gun goes off and crying in closed rooms. Faces, who needs them? Eating the blood of oranges I in my alcove could use one. Abbas and ammas! Come out of your huts, travel halfway around the world, inspect my secret bank account of joy! My face is a jar of honey you can look through, you can see everything is muted, so terribly muted, who could ever speak of it, sealed and held up for all? >> Ron Charles: Thank you. It's lovely. You published a collection of your lectures called Madness, Rack, and Honey. It's a great, great collection. I hope all of you get a copy. You write in there, I don't think I really have anything to say about poetry, which is not true at all, by the way, other than remarking that it's a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer's eve. If you persist in following the thrush, it would only recede deeper and deeper into the woods. You'll never actually see the thrush. The hermit thrush is especially shy. But I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge or as close as one can come. Now I thought you were kidding with that metaphor. But as I read your work, I did feel like I was chasing the thrush for the last few days. I could hear it. I thought it was beautiful. But I couldn't always see it. There were poems of yours that affected me and I had no idea why. Do you feel that way sometimes? >> Mary Ruefle: Yes. I feel that way every time I read a poem I love. >> Ron Charles: Like you try and analyze it but somehow the analysis seems inadequate, or even irrelevant to the emotional effect of a poem. The simplicity of your language, for instance, completely belies the complexity of what you're doing, which I think is the real genius of your work. In one of your poems you call poetry a sphinx in a sandstorm. It's great. >> Mary Ruefle: It can be that. I -- when I was younger I read all sorts of things that went right over my head, but I loved them. I knew that I loved them, even if I didn't understand them, and that's part of what keeps a person reading, I think. >> Ron Charles: Yes, yes. >> Mary Ruefle: I mean now I am older and I can understand a lot more of what I read. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Mary Ruefle: But, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Right. Like this poem, Kiss of the Sun. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, okay, yeah. Kiss of the Sun. If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something among people, then let this be prearranged now, between us, while we are still peoples, that at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry and wheat and evil and insects and love, when the entire human race gathers in the flesh, reconstituted down to the infant's tiniest fold and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge of that fathomless crown with an orange for you, reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which does not at this time seem like such a wild guess, and though there will be no poetry between us then, at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas, I hope you will take it, and remember on earth I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw, and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd or anything else so that I am of it, I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can. >> Ron Charles: That's one of those poems, it's beautiful, it's affecting, and I'm not always entirely sure what's going on. >> Mary Ruefle: Well, when you listen to music you're also not entirely, music and poetry, of course, share ancestors and they're related. I believe that if a poem gives you pleasure, you have understood it. And if you're a student, and you're taking an exam and your teacher asks you to explicate the poem I want you to write, this poem gave me pleasure; therefore, I understood it and have nothing else to say [laughter]. And if your teacher gives you problems, give them my phone number [laughter], have them call me. >> Ron Charles: In one of your poems you say, one pair of eyes is simply not enough. And I -- listening and looking are the essential activities of your poems, do you agree with that? >> Mary Ruefle: I totally agree with that. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, paying attention to, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Yes, they're all about -- well I get the sense that you think poetry is an act of extreme and inspired attention. >> Mary Ruefle: Yes, I do. I do. >> Ron Charles: You write in one of your poems, they noticed, you see, that I was a noticing kind of person. In another poem you say, poetry is a tourist, it wears cameras around its neck and takes nice pictures of deadly things [laughter]. >> Mary Ruefle: True. >> Ron Charles: In a poem called The Late [inaudible] in April includes these lines, every time you are amazed you are a poet amazed at exactly the right thing. That's the key, looking. >> Mary Ruefle: I think all poets are noticers and pay attention, but we pay attention to different things. Hence, the wide variety of poetic concerns and subjects and styles. Some people pay attention to -- The evolution of their past. And some people pay attention to language, always a great thing to pay attention to. And some people pay attention to what they see, like a flower, nature, or if they live, or urban things, and urban. You know, you pay attention to different things. >> Ron Charles: Your poems make us pay more attention, I think. They sort of train us to pay attention. >> Mary Ruefle: Well that's the greatest compliment that anyone could give another person, to pay more attention to the world around you. >> Ron Charles: And sometimes it's very ordinary things. In one of your poems this line struck me, the elaborate stillness of a hard-boiled egg wrapped in wax paper at the bottom of a lunch pail. >> Mary Ruefle: Hard-boiled eggs, have you really looked at a hard-boiled egg and they have that sheen. >> Ron Charles: The elaborate stillness. >> Mary Ruefle: And then Bob Dylan has that great line, speaking of poetry, in which it's a song, he's totally ripping off the Scottish poet Robbie Burns, it's my heart's in the highland and he walks into a restaurant and he compares the waitress's long legs to a shiny hard-boiled egg [laughter]. I don't know, that just popped into my mind. You said hard-boiled egg and I said they're amazing and I thought of that line. >> Ron Charles: That's good. >> Mary Ruefle: I mean, hard-boiled eggs, they're everywhere [laughter], they're everywhere. Once you start thinking about them you see them everywhere. >> Ron Charles: That poem ends by the way, so you see it all, everything, so terribly clear. My little sticky notes here. Here's a poem about looking and seeing, all your poems are but that one struck me in particular. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, early. This is my first book. Wow, okay. I haven't read this in 40 years, A Street. One, it begins in the window and is broken by the elms with a root for drinking. Everything is alive in a glass. The woman in a clear plastic coat, cellophane over the bread in her bag. Through a windshield I can see her face half cut by a wiper. There a man stands in a gutter of water, shifts in the drunkenness of leaves, like his feet he has taken a single unnecessary step. From here on out things will be different. His heart, an engine, a small yellow sun that appears to be stopping traffic. Two, it is painful to look at the snowman. His eye socket shoved with coal. He is melting like white bread in the rain. Only the luster of his eyes will be left, hard in the tall grass, awed that the deadly event seemed to be sagging with birth, unable to sleep or let go. Or perhaps it is everything happening at once, a black coat taking with it the stock still man inside. It is a dangerous thing to be walking without looking up, and a chair is a terrible thing sitting next to a third story window, beautiful though that the dead do not have to look both ways. It's a really early poem. This dates from about '75, 1975. I haven't read it in ages. And I see all sorts of interesting things in it that I did then, like consistently that I would never do now. >> Ron Charles: Interesting. >> Mary Ruefle: But that was, yeah, yeah. I was in an apartment and it was on the third story of a building and I had a chair right next to the window, and I would sit and just look out the window. Thank you for that. >> Ron Charles: Sure, thank you. You don't have a computer, I understand. >> Mary Ruefle: No, I don't. >> Ron Charles: Why not? >> Mary Ruefle: I just don't have any time. >> Ron Charles: There's so many great cat videos you're missing [laughter]. >> Mary Ruefle: I have an iPad and I do have a favorite YouTube video. It's about the only thing I like on the computer. It's called Pet Penguin in Japan. So if you have if you haven't -- if you haven't looked up Pet Penguin in Japan. >> Ron Charles: I have not. >> Mary Ruefle: It is an absolute cure for depression, it works every time. I don't have a computer, not because I have anything against them at all, but because I, myself, personally for my own reasons, it has to do with attention. We live in a culture that more and more tells us what demands what we pay attention to. That we should pay attention to all these things. I reserve the right to choose what I pay attention to, and I choose not to pay attention to the world online. It hurts me in many ways because all of literature is moved online. I'm well aware that. And, you know, I suffer from that a little bit, but I have time to look out the window and, you know, open the fridge and check out the hard-boiled eggs and [laughter] and all sorts of things like that. I -- it's just -- it's a personal choice of attention. I do have an iPad. It's not hooked up to a machine or anything. I couldn't print anything out but I mean I'm not -- I have experienced that world. >> Ron Charles: I thought it had something to do with wanting not to be distracted. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Because I read your work. You say in one of your poems, I have done nothing for long periods of time and learned to do it well. >> Mary Ruefle: I, yeah. >> Ron Charles: And I love this line, ducks never acquire any knowledge because they never shut up [laughter]. >> Mary Ruefle: That's true. That's true. Quack, quack, quack, quack, they do, I love ducks, too, and squirrels and animals and -- >> Ron Charles: And you lived in Vermont a long time. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, I moved there in 1971 and. >> Ron Charles: 40 years. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, I've been there more or less ever since. Except I have been away to live in other states for a year at a -- I've been away for a year at a -- I was five years in Massachusetts and then I've been many other places for a year, but I always -- its home. >> Ron Charles: And nature is the primary subject of your work? >> Mary Ruefle: Well, it was, but now I live -- for years many of these books were written, I was very, very fortunate and I lived on a lot of wilderness. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: But those days are over and I now live in a really, really bad neighborhood, in a depressed mill town, like right downtown in subsidized housing. And at first I thought oh this is going to be depressing. And I feel a great sense of solidarity now with the neighborhood and I love -- I've been there 12 years now and I love getting slowly observing the acute, insane, suffering of the teenagers and the older people and the younger, and the kids, and the adults, and I have -- I have friends who, you know, have kind of idyllic setting and they live in -- they go why does she live there? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: Why does she live there? And I've realized I can express it again, my inability to be articulate about where I live and my love of it. But I do feel now a defensive solidarity with the stratum that I live among, social stratum that I -- that I live among, yeah. >> Ron Charles: And this is new, recent, or relatively new. >> Mary Ruefle: No, 12 years I've been there. >> Ron Charles: Oh, 12 years, okay. >> Mary Ruefle: But all before that I was sort of caretaker for an estate with, you know, apple orchards and deer, and all of that. >> Ron Charles: And those were the subjects of your poems? >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, for the most part. >> Ron Charles: [inaudible] not entirely. >> Mary Ruefle: You see -- well -- but you see a lot of that in them. >> Ron Charles: What did it represent to you? Did it represent something else or was it just what it was, just nature as nature? >> Mary Ruefle: Well, nature's not just nature. It's a planet moving through outer space and we are sharing that planet with plants and animals. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: So that's the main picture we have to keep in our minds at all time. Right now we are in outer space. We are in outer space. Literally, we are on ball of earth in the middle of endlessness. Nobody knows where it ends or how big it is, they only know it's a lot bigger than they thought. And we're in the middle -- well, we can't say middle, right, because -- >> Ron Charles: Right, could be on the edge. >> Mary Ruefle: We could be on the edge, you know, so literally this is our position. We are in outer space. It's the given. You don't have to do anything weird or say anything weird to be in outer space, you are in outer space. And we are sharing this space with plants and animals. If you wake up every morning and remind yourself of that, the day will be pretty interesting [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Do Not Disturb. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: Do you remember these little guys? >> Mary Ruefle: I remember these. Do Not Disturb. In a milk white mist in the middle of the wood there are two dead vowels. The vowels in the wood are cared for by birds who cover them in strawberry leaves. And in the winter when the bodies are mounded with snow, owls keep a vigil from a nearby branch by the light of the moon. Poor vowels in the wood. Poor vowels in the wood. They can't remember the vows in the word when they did wood. How before they were dead they lay on their backs and looked at the clouds, speaking softly to one another for hours. That poem is a riff on an old children's verse, English children's verse, Babes in the Wood, which I kind of fell in love with and sort of riffed -- I turned the children into vowels, I don't know, Babes in the Wood. Which one? [ Inaudible ] This one? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: Intermittence. The anxiety of spring will come and the birds build nests out of circular ideas. Slender of means, sparing of words, the rain will fall. The sun will shine and make things certain. These things will remain a mystery. Next, no [inaudible] from anywhere and the air be seriously entangled. That was a spring poem. It's hard when you, you know, live in the country not -- you know, you have spring -- every spring you write a spring poem, every fall you write a fall poem [laughter]. You can't help yourself. >> Ron Charles: Now, not to embarrass you, but the Emily Dickinson comparison does come up again and again, in writing about you. And I felt it as I read your poems, too. The use of nature, the wit, the strange paradoxical phrase. And you're a great student of Emily Dickinson I understand. >> Mary Ruefle: Student of? I love Emily Dickinson and read her but I never studied her in school. I don't, you know, but -- >> Ron Charles: What do you think about the comparison? >> Mary Ruefle: Three things. One, I think the comparison began, I could be wrong but in my head it begun because I had a reputation for extreme reclusiveness. And then it morphed into -- which is one thing, right. And then it morphed into the work and I was like [inaudible] entirely inappropriate, it's inappropriate and it's entirely untrue, you know. Actually, I'm more reclusive than she was [laughter]. I'm jumping back. No, no, because she lived with her sister and her mother and her father and I no long -- no, I guess I still live alone. Well, I lived alone my whole life until recently. Okay. And she never lived alone a day in her life. So there was that reclusive, you know, that reputation. And then it got, the work which I felt was embarrassing and inappropriate and simply not true. I mean I know her work and I, you know, not true. And then my third take is it -- on it is deep inside of myself, the thrill bell goes off [laughter]. I think all those other things like and the thrill bell is always there, I'm not going to lie. >> Ron Charles: Well I heard it again and again in your work. I didn't know you were a recluse so, and not all reclusive women are like Emily Dickinson. >> Mary Ruefle: That's for sure, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Ordinary words, extraordinary lines. There are such distinctive moments in your poetry when you self-consciously use very ordinary language. And a beautiful poem about pain, for instance, you write it is a mistake to hope, but not a biggie. Not a biggie [laughter]? Is she quoting T. S. Eliot there? Or sometimes you lay some cliche or nursery rhyme as in why am I not a good kisser, you say a sailor went to sea in me to see what he could see in me. And one of your poems begin starlight star bright first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might have tranquility of mind in sight. What are you doing in moments like that? >> Mary Ruefle: I was wishing on a star on that one. >> Ron Charles: No, I mean rhetorically, what are you doing by taking this either cliche language or [inaudible] language, or the language of a -- of a -- of a nursery rhyme and weaving them into your own language. >> Mary Ruefle: I love cliches. If there -- if they're put in a context where the world -- they become new or fresh again. So I'm not afraid of using cliches. I think English idioms are amazing, well idioms in any language, and so I'm very fond of idioms and nursery rhyme and archaic texts. I don't -- I want to reinvent that stuff. I don't want it to be lost. You know, when I was a little girl we played patty cake and it was, a sailor went to sea to see what he -- a lot of girls today don't know what that is. But I grew up singing that and I used it in that poem. I mean I didn't think consciously I'm going to use this in a poem. While I was writing the poem, for whatever reason, it popped into my head and I incorporated it. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Mary Ruefle: I will incorporate in a poem anything that pops into my head while I'm writing. And so that showed up. And another thing -- and I'm not only speaking for myself because many, many [inaudible] I will take anything figurative literally and anything literal figuratively, which is almost the definition of being a poet. I mean, if you, yeah. You just -- you hear things wrong, it's as twist. >> Ron Charles: Right. It makes it alive to us. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: There's a lot of humor in your lectures. And there's humor in your poetry, too. You've got a very [inaudible] sense of humor. It can be wickedly dark, too. You've written possibly the greatest poem about middle school I've ever read. I want you to read this, you know the one I'm talking about, maybe. It's called Middle School. >> Mary Ruefle: Middle School. I went to Cesare Pavese Middle School. The gymnasium was a chapel dedicated to loneliness and no one played games. There was a stained-glass window over the principal's desk and innumerable birds flew against it, reciting Shelley with all their might, but it was bulletproof, and besides, our leaders were never immortal. The classrooms were modeled after motel rooms, replete with stains, and in remedial cases saucers of milk on the floor for innumerable cats, or kittens, depending on the time of year. In them we were expected to examine ourselves and pass. The principal himself once jumped off the roof at noon, to show us school spirit [laughter]. Our mascot was Twist-Tie Man. Our team the Bitter Herbs. Our club the Recondsiderers. It was an honor to have gone, though a tad strict in retrospect. You have probably heard that we all became janitors, sitting in basements next to boilers reading cheap paperback books of Italian poetry, and never sweep a thing. Yet the world runs fine [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: So many middle schools. There is this constant tension in your -- in your poetry I think between happiness and sorrow, joy and despair, often in the same poem, sometimes in the same line, sometimes for comic effect. It's a very painful thing to part company with what torments you, typical witty line. Or this line here, life is the sweetest thing in this world, when you fall it's awful. You spend the first half of your life acquiring feelings, spend the last half trying to lose them and the spooky music of failure will haunt you all your days. That's really dark. >> Mary Ruefle: What's the title of that poem? >> Ron Charles: [inaudible], is that? >> Mary Ruefle: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: Toward the correction of youthful ignorance you write, I think they are right after all, there's no love in this world but it's a beautiful place. In Fireworks you write, the world was designed and built to overwhelm and astonish, which makes it hard to live. >> Mary Ruefle: It does. >> Ron Charles: What is it? Is it melancholy, depression? >> Mary Ruefle: Well, I have suffered from depression in my life but I don't think that's it. I think, how to -- okay, basically what I'm trying to say is this. You know, life is not easy. It's just not. I mean, don't terrible things happen? Don't you -- don't -- isn't it just awful sometimes? Rejection, failure, accident, illness, death, poverty, I mean, I do I have to go on? I mean, don't things break down, don't you have bad days? But there's all that stuff and you have to deal with it. I mean, you have to sign leases and go get rabies shots for your dogs and, you know, get -- it's just, it's 80% maintenance [laughter]. You run errands, and it consumes us. And I think all of us are really sitting around saying everyone else has all this free time, I'm the only one, you know, which is not true. But it's all that and then great personal, but you're alive, and you possess the greatest gift on earth, which is consciousness. And it's such a gift. It's so -- that's always going to be joy, pure joy, joy. So there's the joy of being -- just being alive and then there's the terrible stuff that happens, you know. So you survived the accident but you lost a leg, you know. I mean it's mind-boggling. I don't know, there's, yeah. Maybe that wasn't articulate enough. I just -- >> Ron Charles: Like a Daffodil. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, Like a Daffodil. >> Ron Charles: Such an [inaudible] title. >> Mary Ruefle: Where did I get that title from? Is it in the poem? >> Ron Charles: It's a paradox. >> Mary Ruefle: Like a Daffodil. What went on when I suddenly understood him, yellow with age and disillusioned with the despair that had fired his student days? I unfolded a map of the city, knowing it would never fit in my pocket again. In the very depths of myself I dug a grave, no path leads to it, and there I planted every bulb I ever felt for him. I had the sudden urge to eat postcards of famous paintings. I had a perfectly lucid definition of wine, blue marble powdered down to sea. I had the belief it all comes down to one untranslatable word in Parmenides. He was pained to see me with no other career than my emotions about things. Yet I was continually borne forward by his sense of runes. I wandered like a flashlight through every room. I spotted clocks everywhere, but each one told a different hour. My accurate heart, these rough chimes and our dead bodies. These three things occupied my mind. And joy and joy and joy. I was in love [laughter] and it was a big mistake [laughter], huge, bad news. But one day it occurred to me, you know, it's the same as the other stuff, if you ever -- some of you who are younger if you ever find yourself in that situation because you often have to pass through it, you know, you see it's the same thing I was saying before, you know, there's nothing worse than a bad love relationship, and yet your power to love, the human capacity for that kind of passion is never anything but pure joy. Your capacity to love is a wondrous thing. So instead of being awestruck by the dumb lover, be awestruck by your own capacity to love the person that's being a jerk [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: It's that closing line, that closing line. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: That so surprises and so makes the poem become electric. >> Mary Ruefle: Joy. >> Ron Charles: At the very darkest point of the poem and joy and joy and joy. It's a very daring thing. There is a lot of loneliness in your poems. In the poem called Blue you refer to the leopard of solitude. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, whoa. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, that's great isn't it [laughter]? Yeah, that'll be my band or my blog. I haven't decided. >> Mary Ruefle: Now I'm the pythoness of paprika [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: In Replica you write, you've wasted another evening sitting with imaginary friends discussing the simplest possible arrangement of an iris. I want you to read a couple of your loneliness poems to us. One is called The Great Loneliness. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, okay, I know that one. The Great Loneliness. By March the hay bales were ripped open exposed in the open fields like bloated gray mice who died in December. I came upon them at dusk and their attar lifted my spine until I felt like turning over an old leaf. So I walked on, a walking pitchfork. From every maple hung a bucket or two collecting blood to be distributed across America so people could rise from their breakfast healthy, hoping to make a go of it again. Now this is a riddled explanation but I am a historian of pagan means and must walk five miles a day to cover the period I will call The Great Loneliness and the name will stick so successfully that for years afterwards children will complain at meals and on sunny days and in the autumn and at Easter that their parents are unnecessarily mute and their parents will look harshly down upon the plates and beach towels and leaves and bunnies and say you don't know what you are talking about you never lived through The Great Loneliness and if you had you would never speak. And the children will turn away and consider the words, or lack of them, and how one possible explanation might be that inside our bodies skeletons grow at an increasingly secretive rate, though they never mention it, even amongst themselves. >> Ron Charles: And My Hotel. >> Mary Ruefle: My Hotel. My hotel darkened, the bed sobbed to it itself. I sat naked on the bed reading The Book of Job. He overcame them in the night and they were crushed. When I woke up the book was already back in its drawer like a genie in its lamp. I looked out the window. The outskirts were gone. I wanted to say something but it was very un-English, so I did something unheard of. I left the soap and the shampoo, the shoe mitt, and shower cap, and sewing kit behind. Without these things how did I go on? Call me a deciduous person, the way sometimes a photograph falls down through a family and no one knows who it is. So my life without me was lived. Huh. >> Ron Charles: I thought I was so clever to notice this theme of loneliness in your work, and then I ran across a poem of yours called Q and A that includes this line, we notice you use the word lonely in many of your poems [laughter]. The speaker says, why is that? So, Ms. Ruefle, why is that? >> Mary Ruefle: You want me to read the poem? Wow, why is -- what's loneliness? >> Ron Charles: I mean, you obviously -- >> Mary Ruefle: I know -- I'm not, I'm incapable of being bored and I'm incapable of being lonely. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: There is a difference, of course, between solitude and loneliness. I truly do not feel -- A weight of loneliness, but there was a period in my life when I did, and I think many of the intense loneliness poems came out of a period when I was not in my right mind and I truly was ex -- felt excruciatingly lonely. But that is certainly not the case, you know, most of -- most of the time. I don't know. I was a lonely kid. I spent a lot of time alone in my room reading. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Mary Ruefle: Because, you know, when you move around a lot it takes a while to -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, I was a lonely kid. >> Ron Charles: At some point you noticed this in your poems though, that's why you wrote this funny poem about it? >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. Well, I was on the radio and I was asked that. >> Ron Charles: Oh, and you put it into the poem? >> Mary Ruefle: I completely froze. I said, well, you know, she said I noticed the word loneliness in a lot of your poems, why is that? You know, and -- you know, I just kind of -- I thought that was getting a little personal or something [laughter] and I just -- and I wrote the poem a few days later. >> Ron Charles: Did that in some way exorcise the loneliness from you once you became self-conscious about it in your work? Not that your work is therapeutic but -- >> Mary Ruefle: It's so hard to talk about that because I know that it's everywhere in my poems, and yet I'm not a lonely person. People have always said to me, you know, I have friends that tried to live alone and they can't do it. And I'm like it's the easiest thing in the world. I don't know how can live with another person [laughter]. So there's that versus my emphasis on it in my work. And it's -- again, it's hard for me to articulate. Maybe it's just kind of a French [inaudible] or a Japanese melancholy or something. Yeah, I don't know. The only way to really get to the bottom of the question is I'd have to -- it can't be done. I'd have to date the poems and look at the dates. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Mary Ruefle: You know and compare the dates with something. [ Inaudible ] Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Let's talk about the [inaudible] poems of yours. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: Which I had never seen before. And I'm sorry you can't see them, and this is completely inadequate, but here's an example. This is a little book called The White Shadow, and she's taken a 19th century book and she's whited out most of the words. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, the words are all missing. >> Ron Charles: Almost all the words are gone. Would you read, I've marked -- >> Mary Ruefle: I'd love to. >> Ron Charles: Three of them here. >> Mary Ruefle: It's a joyful book. You can read the entire thing in five minutes. It's great [laughter]. No one at the villa made me secretly think of children chasing butterflies. The flapping white dresses of the fish rising sharply against the sky. My ignorance was a refining influence. The view from the window stopped and said here I lie day after day and the only things I possess which can travel can go no farther. I think what will always linger longest in our memories of her we never would any of us miss. Suffering would lay back on her pillows exhausted with the intensity of hope. >> Ron Charles: Thank you. Hearing them is totally -- is a totally different experience than seeing them on the page. >> Mary Ruefle: Than reading, yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's one of those art forms -- >> Mary Ruefle: Because you have to see -- yeah, you can visually, yeah, visually see the white out and. >> Ron Charles: It's fairly effective to hear, but they're not the same. >> Mary Ruefle: No, it's not the same. You have to -- it's the hard thing with the erasure books is they're -- I made 78 of them. >> Ron Charles: This is the only one you've published. >> Mary Ruefle: One is coming out next week. Another one. But this is -- was the first. And it's an obsession and it's me coming to terms with the fact that basically [inaudible] failed visual artist and so it's a way to incorporate. Anyway, I work on them every day of my life and I -- >> Ron Charles: Whether you write poetry? >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: Isn't that odd? >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, but it just happened. It's a ritual to -- it's a routine now. >> Ron Charles: Do you think of it as a creative process or a destructive process? >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, totally creative. >> Ron Charles: But you're mostly taking away someone's words. >> Mary Ruefle: Well I'm -- but I'm creating something new and I don't choose famous people, you know, I don't choose -- I don't erase poetry first of all. And I don't erase the works of -- I choose really obscure little books, with the exception of The Bible [laughter], but that -- you know, that -- >> Ron Charles: We've heard of that. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, that's -- yeah, I've heard of that. But I've done -- I've done the Gospels, but -- >> Ron Charles: You erased the Gospels? >> Mary Ruefle: Yes, yes, I did. >> Ron Charles: You and Thomas Jefferson. >> Mary Ruefle: Yes. >> Ron Charles: You're scissors. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, exactly, so, but the books are very much, you're absolutely right, it's a physical one-of-a-kind experience of turning the pages and seeing on the page what's been taken away though. I don't read from them anymore. For a few years I read out loud at readings and then someone I trust came up and, what's the point, why do you do that? So I stopped. >> Ron Charles: Because you have to see it. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Mary Ruefle: Otherwise it just turns into a bunch of punchlines or something, which is okay. >> Ron Charles: Is it analogous to the kind of constraint that someone with a rhyme scheme deals with or someone working in a particular forum where you really can only choose particular words? >> Mary Ruefle: You put -- you put your finger on it. This is one -- this is how I explain it. I write in free verse my poems. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: But the erasure to me might be -- some people call it found poetry which infuriates me. It's like excuse me, I worked to get those -- you know, I didn't find what the text, I had to work at erasing text to create poetic text or interesting or funny text. It's a form. When I write a poem I can choose from any word in the English language. I can only use the words on the page. Now occasionally I will cheat and I will -- if I need the -- a word the in a certain place and it's not there I have little transfer letters, you know, or I can cut it out of another book and glue it on. But for the most part I can only choose from those words. >> Ron Charles: So you've got -- >> Mary Ruefle: It's very restrictive. >> Ron Charles: [inaudible] words? >> Mary Ruefle: It depends on the size of the book. I mean, they're all different, but it's a challenge. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Mary Ruefle: You can only choose from the words on the page, and obviously choosing -- I'm very picky about the books, that help. I mean I won't -- some people say oh here, I think you'd like to erase this and I can take one -- you know, spend a minute looking at the text and going uh-uh, not going to work. >> Ron Charles: Is it like a sculpture, you know, like I just carve away what isn't the tree, that kind of thing, or what -- how do you see it there on the page? >> Mary Ruefle: I, oh, all the words rise up and they hover -- they hover like a quarter inch above the page. It's like a field and they're hovering. I don't actually read the -- I don't read the page. I read the words, which is different, so I'm looking and I see all the words and go and I pick a phrase or a word that's delicious that I really love. Like I might see the word spine and I go, okay, I like that word, I can use spine and then, of course, I can use the word pine, which is inside of it, because you can -- there are words inside of words. So even though there might be 100 or 150 words on a page, you also have all the words that are inside of words. So you -- so you learn to see that. >> Ron Charles: You're also limited by the order on the page though. >> Mary Ruefle: Absolutely you are limited by the ordered. You have to make some phrase out of the order. I love it. Oh, I love it so much. There's nothing like it on earth. I'm crazy about it. >> Ron Charles: And it's a completely different -- is it a, as you say, completely different than your free verse poetry. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, I find it meditative and I find it infuriating sometimes and challenging and I like the smell of the white out, dreadfully toxic [laughter], really toxic. And I like my hand doing this. But the new books are not just text, the new books juxtapose image that I've cut out of another book. It's -- I could never read them out loud because you -- the text only makes sense, it's only meant to make the sense I want it to make when you see the picture that goes with it. >> Ron Charles: Oh, okay. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, picture and this didn't incorporate any images this book. >> Ron Charles: How did you think of this? Is this like something that lots of people do? >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, no, no. >> Ron Charles: And I just didn't know of it? >> Mary Ruefle: Tom Phillips, the great British 20th century British artist sort of started this craze I suppose with his great -- one of the great art works of the 20th century, Humument. You can buy it in paperback. Although he was treating a novel to be read again as a novel. So that's different than what I do. I don't, you know, I don't -- he was treating a novel so that you could read pages and there would be characters and stuff would happen. Some of my books -- erasure books are sequential and there's an ongoing story loosely and some aren't, you know. >> Ron Charles: That's just fascinating. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: And I was surprised how effecting they were to look at. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah, and a lot of people hate them, which is -- you know, that's okay too. >> Ron Charles: [inaudible] hateable. >> Mary Ruefle: Oh, I've talked to people just -- why do you waste your time doing that? >> Ron Charles: Oh, no, no, no. >> Mary Ruefle: Yeah. Because it's fun and I love it [laughter]. That's why. >> Ron Charles: I'm looking for -- Would you mind ending with this poem? >> Mary Ruefle: Not at all. To Be Mimed. Unable to actively love you for the rest of actuality, I will love in your stead as if they were you. The blue clouds beneath the wings of planes, wintered over faces ascending on an escalator and nothing else. I will not love the trees, the rain, the stars, or dusk, the backs of coats, or the shadow struck matches make in cupped palms. I will not love the sea or layers of cake, anything having to do with ink or horses, houses or the moon. None of these things and nothing else shall I love but the clouds above the wings of planes and wintered over faces descending on an escalator shall be sacred to me. The un-christened unclarified stunned ones, the disappearing un-personal ones, the ones who stop when they are behind and let the strange winds sweep through Sunday, April 4th and never look where they are going. And the title of that poem is To Be Mimed. I don't know if I would title it that today, because that sort of turns it -- and can you imagine having to mime that? How [laughter]? You know, we should try it. Unable to love you. It would be crazy. >> Ron Charles: It's a lovely poem though. >> Mary Ruefle: To Be Mimed. >> Ron Charles: Very lovely. It -- >> Mary Ruefle: What was I thinking? >> Ron Charles: This has been an incredibly special experience for me. I really have loved talking about your work and thank you so much for coming. >> Mary Ruefle: Thank you for having me [applause]. I'm -- you're questions, you just nailed it right there. Thank you. Thank you. >> Ron Charles: Thank all of you. >> Mary Ruefle: Thank you [applause]. >> Ron Charles: And now we have a reception across the hall with Artisanal cheese, is this right? >> Artisanal cheese? >> Ron Charles: Do we have Artisanal cheese? This way. Oh, it's not in our usual place. It's at the end of this hall. Thank you so much for coming. >> Mary Ruefle: Thank you all for coming. You're a wonderful audience and thank you so much. >> Ron Charles: Oh the pleasure is ours. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.