Background

Mary Ruefle was born on April 16, 1952, in Mckeesport, Pennsylvania, United States. Her father was a military officer, and she spent her early life traveling throughout the United States and Europe.

Education

Mary Ruefle studied literature at Bennington College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974.

Career

Upon graduation, Mary Ruefle attended the writing program at Hollins College. Now she teaches in the Master of Fine Arts degree program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2011 she served as the prestigious Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.

Ruefle has published many books of poetry, including My Private Property (2016), Trances of the Blast (2013), A Little White Shadow (2006), an art book of “erasures," a variation on found poetry, The Adamant (1989), and Memling’s Veil (1982). Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008. She is also the author of a book of collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and a comic book, Go Home and Go To Bed (2007).

She has been widely published in magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Believer, Harper's Magazine, and The Kenyon Review, and in such anthologies as Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002).

She is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow. Her most recent book is Dunce. In Dunce, Mary Ruefle returns to the poetic practice that has always been at her core.

Achievements

• Mary Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Whiting Award, William Carlos Williams Award, and Robert Creeley Award. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was a finalist of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Works

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  • Indeed I Was Pleased With the World

    (The cover of Mary Ruefle’s 10th book of poems, Indeed I W...)

    2007
  • Selected Poems

    (Selected Poems brings together the finest work from Mary ...)

    2010
  • Dunce

    (Through her many projects across numerous genres, Mary Ru...)

    2019
  • On Imagination

    ("It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; ...)

    2017
  • A Little White Shadow

    (Selectively painting over much of a forgotten nineteenth-...)

    2006
  • Madness, Rack, and Honey

    (Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a...)

    2012
  • The Most of It

    (Fans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this...)

    2008
  • Trances of the Blast

    (Trances of the Blast is a major new collection from belov...)

    2013
  • Post Meridian

    (There's a line in a Mary Ruefle poem that speaks of the s...)

    1999
  • My Private Property

    (Author Mary Ruefle continues to be one of the most dazzli...)

    2016
  • Apparition Hill

    (Mary Ruefle is an observer who seeks to bring sense and o...)

    2002
  • Life Without Speaking 1987
  • Cold Pluto 1996
  • Among the Musk Ox People 2002
  • Tristimania 2004

Views

Mary Ruefle traces the boundaries between the subjective world and the world everyone else lives in, giving weight and wings to the unseen and the surreal. She is at ease with uncertainty. While her overarching themes are universal - loneliness, love, death - Ruefle interrogates the nature of the lyric itself, stitching together speech rhythms, sounds, visual flashes and ephemera with the thread of the overheard and the under the breath. She is not reticent about her struggle between wanting the safety of certainty and accepting that life is uncertain

Quotations: "The difference between myself and a student is that I am better at not knowing what I am doing."

"The power of the human imagination is to invent ways that enable us to survive, perhaps survival is but an act of the human mind."

"Poems are my inner life, take it or leave it. I don’t particularly care what the reader thinks because I’m just not invested in other people’s responses to my inner life. I’m a nervous wreck when I write prose, and I’m not in the least when I write poems. If I’m writing a poem, it never occurs to me that somebody is going to read it. It’s taken me an entire lifetime to get over the fact that there are people out there who read my poems."

"I like to read because it kills me."

"I study nature so as not to do foolish things."

"Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet."

"Irreverence is a way of playing hooky and remaining present at the same time."

"The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it."

"Hands are unbearably beautiful. They hold on to things. They let things go."

Personality

Mary Ruefle describes herself as a “wandering fool, searching and seeking, searching and seeking, with no end in sight."

Quotes from others about the person

• "Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result (for those with ears to hear) is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter." - Tony Hoagland
  
  "Mary Ruefle investigates the multiplicities and frailties of being with an associative inventiveness and a lightness of touch; the purposefulness of her inquiry never eclipses the remarkable beauty of her work." - Lisa Beskin
  
  "Mary Ruefle is a poet of visionary imagination, in love with the world and the power of art. She sees the strange in the ordinary and vice versa. She weaves them together by way of wild association and then uses omission and conflation to blur the lines."
  
  "Author muses on ordinary things like keys or clouds, yellow scarves or golf pencils, until those descriptions unfurl and beget larger, existential meditations on sadness and boredom, on language and lullabies and autonomy in old age." - Caitlin Youngquist