Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.
Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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“Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life.”
“The teacher asks a question.You know the answer, you suspectyou are the only one in the classroom who knows the answer, because the personin question is yourself, and on that you are the greatest living authority,but you don’t raise your hand.You raise the top of your deskand take out an apple.You look out the window.You don’t raise your hand and there issome essential beauty in your fingers,which aren’t even drumming, but lie flat and peaceful.The teacher repeats the question. Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,a robin is ruffling its feathersand spring is in the air.”
“After hearts shot through with arrows, we have bunnies followed by a warlike fire in the sky, then ghosts, turkeys to honor more ghosts, and a baby born in a barn who is not yet a ghost but also a ghost, for whom we drag trees inside where they do not belong.”
“The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.”
“Attempting to Soar"A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights.As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window,cupping it around the wind. He’d been assuredthis is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you putyour hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew,and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, untilthe weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up.For many years afterwards he was perpetually attemptingto soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breastin his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep.He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now.As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refusedto abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He oftenpretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings,he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow.He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.”
“I like to read becauseit kills me.”
“I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”
“If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life’s work.”
“Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time.”
“For years the tears fellwithout touching the ground.On this night they hit the floor.”
“Something unpronounceablefollowed by a long silencepoints out my lifeis becoming a landscape.”