Episode 123: Mary Ruefle
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Libby Lewis Photography
Rachel speaks with poet and erasure artist Mary Ruefle about menopause, thresholds, death, reading, museums, schools, podcasting, trees, wind, created violence, real violence, haiku, love, the erotics of reading, Yom Kippur, erasure, how to walk around the world two babysteps at a time, and more.
Books by Mary Ruefle:
Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012)
Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007)
Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2007)
Also Referenced:
3 Days of Poetry hosted by Wave Books
The Will-O’-the-Wisps Are in Town by Hans Christian Andersen
Diane Wolkstein’s Hans Christan Anderson: Classic Stories
Mary Ruefle on David Naimon’s Between the Covers (podcast)
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Mary Ruefle on Jordan Kisner‘s Thresholds (podcast)
My Dinner with Andre (movie)
The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
Being with Dying by Joan Halifax
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The Essential Haiku by Robert Hass
Bio
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including The Book (Wave Books, 2023), Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.
In honor of this episode our charitable partner will donate $250 to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, chosen by Mary Ruefle.
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