Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle’s ‘Lapland’

Mary Ruefle created a powerful moment for the audience here in Tucson when she read at The Poetry Center last fall. I was there and will never forget what she did. She read her poem “Lapland,” which she wrote fifty years ago. Then she read an essay about how the word Lapland is not offensive, but now it is offensive to use the word Lapp to describe the people in Lapland. She ended her essay by saying that although the poem’s title is “Lapland” and it’s set in Lapland and the word Lapp appears twice, it’s not about Lapland. Then she uttered this sentence, which enveloped the room:

“And if you don’t understand that, then I would go so far as to say you don’t understand poetry.”

Then, in the tradition of several poets who’ve come before her, she read the entire poem again without comment. So that we would hear it. So that, with our hearts and minds adjusted, we could hear it or have the hope of hearing it.

It was powerful. It was incredible.

Click on the image below to experience Ruefle reading “Lapland,” then her essay, then “Lapland” again. The recording of the entire video is on the VOCA Audiovisual Archives. I’m just sharing the section that contains “Lapland” so you can have the experience attendees had that night at Ruefle’s reading.

An Imagined Craft Workshop with Mary Ruefle

This may or may not be anything she would say:

Poems are everywhere. Find them. On social media, in thrift stores, in the air, tucked inside your body, in old typewriters, under rocks, on islands, in what you misread, in the margins, in dreams, in the dead.

Pay attention. Not the kind of attention that excludes multiple forms of attention, but rather the kind that embraces polyattentionality.

Write everything down. Keep it or throw it out, but always save what you’ve thrown out or at least part of what you’ve thrown out. Maybe tear what you’ve thrown out down the middle and rewrite the missing half or join two different halves and see what happens. Maybe take some Wite Out to ninety percent of it and see what emerges. It might be what you were trying to say all along.

Save what others throw out. Rummage through lives and handwritings not your own. Put a gilded frame around discarded words and see if they wriggle back to life.

Don’t be afraid to see a poem in a grocery list or a patient education handout or a menu or a box of rusted paperclips.

Collect things. The stranger, the better. Handle what you collect with love, always. All things are related to each other and to us. Treat things the way you want things to treat you.

Do the work. Make your way. Write as yourself and for yourself. Never write for others. To others, perhaps—letters are a lost art, after all. But if you write for others, you may get lost inside them when you need to get lost inside yourself.

Find one poem you wish you could write but can’t. Carry it with you until the paper it’s printed on is worn thin. When you can write that poem, find another poem that you can’t yet write. Carry it until you can. And so forth.

Know that you will die. If that bothers you, write about it. If not, just write.

The Subtle Ordering of Words

One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.

My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Ruefle. He didn’t even say Mary Ruefle or Ruefle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.

My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.

I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.

What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Ruefle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.

We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.

I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Ruefle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Ruefle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.

Rae-Ryzhykh

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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The art that moves me most is art that points out unfair or unethical practices in today’s society—especially practices which have become so routine that either they go unnoticed or they are assumed to be “normal.” — Erena Rae

Come / winter they walk outside into the snow, which makes an empire of erasure / a beautiful white shadow dreaming its way behind the closed lids of eyes. — Doug Ramspeck

Nobody wants to make anybody else uncomfortable. Nobody wants to step out … and say, What you have done is unacceptable. — Claudia Rankine

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Open this gate. Tear down this wall. — Ronald Reagan

We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. — Layne Redmond

sometimes, we need a reason / To die and sometimes we need only an excuse: / A lover and then nothing like a lover: a car keyed: / The doors rusting in the salt and swagger of a bay — Roger Reeves

Years ago before a massage I’d tell / the therapist there’s a good chance I’ll cry / because my divorce now thirty years on / lives where the trapezius and rhomboid / overlap. — Lisa Rhoades

a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep. ― Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words and also with silence. — Adrienne Rich

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. — Adrienne Rich

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. — Adrienne Rich

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, / as it goes toward action — Rainer Maria Rilke

We were nostalgic for dirt, / the smell of ruin. / Old things that relinquish their grip. / And we knew, then, / the burden of the former gods— / not the making. The smiting — Laura Ring

From those centuries we human beings bring with us / The simple solutions and songs, / The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies / All in service to a simple idea: / That we can make a house called tomorrow. — Alberto Álvaro Ríos

The jackrabbits and the Tucson Mountains — / We love them, not easily but fiercely, fiercely / In the new way we have had to find. / We love them as who we are now. / We love because that’s what’s left. — Alberto Álvaro Ríos

When something explodes, / Turn exactly opposite from it and see what there is to see. / The loud will take care of itself, and everyone will be able to say / What happened in that direction. But who is looking / The other way? — Alberto Álvaro Ríos

& the world / was suddenly made / of bridges over low / rivers & these poems / your aviary — Anthony Robinson

Here in the wild oregano / We can’t touch the wind, we / Can’t even see each other. — Anthony Robinson

Plague doctors be walking around looking / Like sinister birds. In 1986 I lost my / Virginity to a blonde plague doctor and now / I still write about birds who’ve split me open — Anthony Robinson

Poetry fits into the world for people who find it important, for people who cling to it, who hold onto it. In the long run, it is essential to me because I always find things I’m going back to, um, you know, that will buoy me. It seems like a weird cliché thing to say, like, “Oh, it helps me survive”—but—you know—it really does. — Anthony Robinson

This is my body, but still I carry yours. I long to be. — Anthony Robinson

White Supremacy is a pervasive system and anybody can be inured to that system. — Anthony Robinson

It’s incredible; You should see it- / But I don’t want you here / And it is mine. — Bailey Rodfield

Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own. — Mary Ruefle

Is it really so / that the one I love is everywhere? — Rumi

My heart has become a bird / Which searches in the sky. — Rumi

Ours is not a caravan of despair. — Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing there is a field. / I’ll meet you there. — Rumi

The cure for the pain is in the pain. — Rumi

Until you’ve kept your eyes / and your wanting still for fifty years, / you don’t begin to cross over from confusion. — Rumi

Thanks be / to god—again— / for extractable elements / which are not / carriers of pain, / for this periodic / table at which / the self-taught / salvagers disassemble / the unthinkable / to the unthought. — Kay Ryan

Unborn kittens wait for news / from the water / in their mother’s belly. — Mykyta Ryzhykh