Mary Ruefle, The Book

 

THE BARK

I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water’s edge and barked, the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.

It would be impossible not to absolutely delight in the lyric gestures of Bennington, Vermont poet, essayist and erasure artist Mary Ruefle’s latest, a collection of short and shorter prose and prose poems simply titled The Book (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2023). Ruefle is the author of well over a dozen full-length titles, most recently Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here], Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], and this latest collection offer pieces that sit within a wide gradient, from prose poem to the very short story and everything in-between. There is something quite magical in the way her pieces exist within this collection, this “book,” offering the notion of genre as something wonderfully fluid. Within compact lines and wonderful flow, she offers intimate and lyric slivers of life and thinking, meditations on ordinariness that is never truly ordinary, or spectacular simply because of that ordinariness. The variations on her prose structures hold an enormity, packing nuance into every phrase. “That book sat on my various shelves for decades until I got around to it,” she writes, to open the piece “THE BOOK,” “and then it seemed to be written especially for me. I hope this provides some hope to the other unread books surrounding me who are wondering what will happen to them when I die.” There is such a joy within these sentences, these phrases, one that appreciates and explores with such a level of curiosity and wonder combined with a deep and abiding wisdom that it is it be envied. Writing on a misquoted haiku, and seeking the advice of friends as to which version they prefer, the “correct” version or the narrator’s mis-remembered variation in the piece “THE HEART, WHAT IS IT?,” she writes:

David said he didn’t like either version because he didn’t like the haiku to begin with—it was full of too many words and “not enough emptiness.”

My opinion was that if someone wanted fewer and fewer words and more and more emptiness they shouldn’t bother with poetry at all, they should neither read it nor write it but simply live their lives, walking through the city or the forest without a thought to language. I knew in my heart that the outer world was without written language and that pages of writing were ultimately meaningless, I knew all that, but I also knew that humans are particular and often lead long lives and try to do things that make them happy, and that writing was one of those ten thousand things.