Mary Ruefle - Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012)

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Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

Mary Ruefle
It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

Mary Ruefle
If you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven't even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error.

Mary Ruefle
People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?

Mary Ruefle
We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.

Mary Ruefle
In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

Mary Ruefle
Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event.

Mary Ruefle
In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

Mary Ruefle
Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own.

Mary Ruefle
I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

Mary Ruefle
I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry.

Mary Ruefle
A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

Mary Ruefle
Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.

Mary Ruefle
In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That's why I read when I was a lonely kid and that's why I read now that I'm a scared adult.

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

Mary Ruefle
The wasting of time is the most personal, most private, most intimate form of conversation with oneself, as well as with another.

Mary Ruefle
Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

Mary Ruefle
Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don't know what it means.

Mary Ruefle
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

Mary Ruefle
I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

Mary Ruefle
The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn't love it but because it is not afraid of it.

Mary Ruefle
A poem is a neutrino — mainly nothing — it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.

Mary Ruefle