Being Invisible: On Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems
David Gorin
Mary Ruefle does not write the sort of book with a digestible concept, or what Dorothy Lasky, in Poetry is Not a Project (UDP, 2010), has called a "project." She has not written a “long poem” or book-length sequence that announces its seriousness through scale. She has not written a book of sonnets, dream songs, or any other serializable unit that allows for the constellation of smaller pieces towards some larger unity. She has published two books of poetic prose, a rightly-beloved book of lectures, and one tiny (and delightful) book-length erasure called A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2007)—and in fact has made over a hundred and ten book-length collage-erasures, some of which have appeared online and in museums and journals, some of which she has given away to friends, most of which we are not likely to see “in print.” But mainly, she writes short poems in verse. She has published eleven books of verse to date, the first nine of which have been distilled into a Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010). Her poems are not so strongly bonded to their siblings that they protest when sent to different summer camps. Most are no longer on the page than one or two human hands.
I think this why her Selected Poems works so well as such. Reading it just feels like reading an extra-strength version of the other books whose poems it collects—particularly the ones she published after 1989, which are all worth reading if you can get a hold of them.[1] Another reason her Selected works so well is that you probably can’t get hold of them: the nine volumes she published on university presses between 1982 and 2010—four-fifths of her ouevre, not counting the prose—are rarely available online at any price, and when one does appear it is not unusual to see it going for hundreds of dollars. I once saw a copy of Tristimania (Carnegie-Mellon, 2004) on sale for $750.
These prices don’t surprise me. Ruefle flew under the radar for a while, but now—thanks in part to her late-aughts move to Wave Books, a major indie press whose catalogue hits the sweet spot between smart and cool and fun—a lot more people know how great she is. And many of the poems in her Selected are about flying under the radar, being home alone and traveling one’s inner world. Here’s an echt Ruefle passage from “Topophilia” that begins with the speaker waking up and wandering around her house in a bathrobe while her mind goes places:
There goes the coach. The coach is of real gold
and the new queen is in it. I like trips, I book them all,
and I’m one of the lucky: my memories are actually finer
than those of those who go. I suspect the queen is going
to the despot’s private party where they shove sweetmeats
down your décolletage and have a goose so slowly roasted
the poor bird cries whenever you pull off a piece
and everyone shrieks with joy. What does the outer world
know of the inner? It’s like listening to wolves or loons…
The new queen is not flying under anyone’s radar. She’s someone the “outer world” has selected as worthy of note, “one of the lucky” by its metrics. So many Ruefle poems generate their remarkable things to say in the absence of such a life. Here’s another example, from a poem that begins by speaking of how much more elevated the poet’s life would be if only she had “pruned the wild rose bush” earlier that day (“If / I had […] my life / could continue walking on new stilts”) and works itself up towards other counterfactuals:
I have never suffered
and I have never known a hero. My father never said or did
anything of interest. He never said “If you are angry
pour everything you have ever eaten into the sea,
let the sea foam at the mouth, keep your own lips clean.”
He never said that. He just sat in a comfortable chair
and let the news slip out of his hands and onto the floor.
He could not compete with it.
Something wonderful happens when the speaker starts talking, as Ruefle’s speakers often do, about what has never happened to her: she can say something “of interest”—something wild she imagined, that happened in her head, the “gorgeous nonsense” of high poetic utterance that Stevens says must compete with the “pressure of news”— without telling a lie, without losing the poignance of the distance between the life she dreams up and the life she has on earth. It’s hilarious and sad at the same time. And that combination is part of what makes her work feel so generous to me, the way she takes serious things seriously by touching them lightly. “I like trips, I book them all, / and […] my memories are actually finer / than those of those who go.” That’s a joke, complete with linebreak-as-punchline-delay for comic timing, but it’s also two other things: the utterance of someone pretending to be happy to be stuck at home while her stepsisters are at the ball, and a hint about how the girl stuck at home is the one who learns what the imagination is—and so gets to write the tale.
As you can see, the story I am trying to tell here is of a poet who went underappreciated for years until a fairy godmother published her Selected and a bunch of other things, whose inner royalty is now widely acknowledged. But to be honest, I don’t know how well this story fits reality. Ruefle was a “successful” poet for decades before her Selected was published, if success means being able to pay for your life while you write astounding poems and win recognition from institutions in your field. And today, she has larger following for sure, but she is far from a ubiquitous presence in American poetry. And yet I cling to my fairy tale because there is something about her writing—something permission-giving, something about the way her poems feel like transcripts of the poet herself having fun, being silly or lonely or both as she pleases—that seems to me formed in the crucible of anonymity.
“Being invisible,” Ruefle writes, “is the biggest secret on earth, the most wonderous gift anyone could ever give you.” She says this in “Pause,” a prose piece about menopause in My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), and clearly means to name the surprising freedom that lies beyond the pains of growing older as a woman. But I imagine she is talking also about what happens when your first book doesn’t crown you Queen or fix your life, and as an artist you learn—maybe you are forced to if you are going to stay an artist, maybe even if you do get rich or famous—to pass through the desire to be seen and discover the secret of the gift: that the act of making itself is the durable source of joy, and that when you are “invisible,” so long as you have enough to eat, you are free to live in that act as you please. Her poems are not “about” this freedom, exactly; they exemplify it, they point to it with how they play the way that paint on a Pollock canvas points to the painter dancing above it. Reading her, I find myself in the presence of someone who writes not to leave her name behind so much as to fill her time on earth with acts of looking and imagination. I return to her Selected Poemsfor the same reason she says she returns to the writings of Agnes Martin: “She reminds me of what matters, of what I would rather be doing than anything else.”
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[1] “Desire is a principle of selection” one poem in Ruefle’s Selected reminds us, and if your desire was structured by an encounter with a particular volume of her poetry published before 2010, you may view the Selected Poems with melancholic awareness of what has been omitted. And if you feel this way, you belong to Ruefle’s poems, which often give their full attention to objects discarded or unacknowledged by the wider world. The trouble with me is that I—like many, I assume—discovered Mary Ruefle first through her Selected Poems, and so instead of being melancholic about the violence of selection I can be happy: one day, I realized that one of my favorite poets had written a thousand poems I had never seen, and all the excluded work assumed the gently erotic aura of the rare.