by Tyler Barton | Contributing Writer

The Book
By Mary Ruefle
Wave Books, 2023  

Dear Unknown Friend. That’s how I addressed the first letter I wrote to Mary Ruefle. It was a reference to “Are We Alone? Is it Safe to Speak?”—an epistolary poem in her 2013 collection, Trances of the Blast.”  The unknown friend: I’d become obsessed with that idea. It served a reminder of possibility, that the world was full of people and creatures and quiet places that might become companions. During the pandemic, when real friends felt far away and increasingly unfamiliar, especially when seen through social media’s bad mirror, the unknown friend became myself. In Ruefle’s poem, the unknown friend is the reader: “I know I am real to you / and though you aren’t that real to me / without you I would not exist.” 

I was in graduate school, struggling to write prose, and I wondered if she’d give me some advice on a story—but I also wanted to let her know what her work meant to me, how it comforted me, and how it increased my daily capacity for wonder. A Mary Ruefle poem might miss me on first read but appear years later as if shining on the page. 

Soon a typewritten response on linen paper arrived. “Dear Known One” is how it began. This letter was—as many great letters are—one page in length. She closed it with this advice for me:

I have a suggestion for your story about a church that meets in a dog park though, and I will share it with you even if you think me presumptuous for I believe you are barking up the wrong tree and that is why the story keeps failing: write instead about a church that dogs attend. A real church, a building they enter. On Sundays, presumable, though it may be that dogs go to church on another day when humans aren’t using it. Goodluck! And thanks again . . .” 

And then she signed her name. 

There are many things about her letter that enamor me, like her typo in paragraph two (“frind” for “friend”), her eliding the space to make goodluck one word, how graciously she turns down my request for an interview, but above them all I love her use of the phrase “a real church.” What is real and what is not, especially in the sense of writing fictional stories about dogs? What is ‘real’ to the person who wrote in her first book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), about coming to the conclusion “that life is unreal” because “reading is unreal because it is literally an imaginative act.” This “real church” moment unlocked for me the secret thesis of all of Ruefle’s work: no one thing is really knowable at all. 

Mary Ruefle is the poet laureate of not knowing. She famously claims in Madness, Rack, and Honey (the book which came out in 2011 and quickly became required reading for poets both novice and veteran, and for writers of all stripes): “I don’t know what my poems are about, save for rare occasions, and I never know what they mean.” There’s little discomfort in Ruefle’s not-knowing, nor is there triumph. In all of her poetry and prose—and especially in her newest collection of prose, The Book, her eighth release with Wave Books—there is rather a determination to describe and inhabit that state of not-knowing. Keats called it negative capability, the ability to refrain from “grasping” for answers. For Ruefle, not-knowing is even plainer than that, un-compartmentalized, and a consistent source of equal parts humor and humility. 

Despite her ease with uncertainty, Ruefle’s newest, The Book, does lay claim to one dependable field of knowledge: friends. The Book is dedicated to them, and it’s tent-poled by a lengthy essay detailing the core friendships she’s nurtured over the course of her more than seventy years. On either side of that essay, thirty-eight short works of prose-poetry accrue into an argument for one of Ruefle’s central tenets: “We’re all one person.” (She said those four words to Courtney Balestier on the WMFA podcast when pressed to explicate another oft-quoted line from Madness, Rack, and Honey: “Poets are dead people talking about being alive.”)

The Book opens with “Untitled,” which explores the idea of the first unknown friend, the self: “I was in the beginning named after someone else who was named Mary but I was neither this person nor the one they called Mary after her, I was nameless, and in this state I perpetually wandered among fruit and flowers and foliage, among vines and overhanging rock and untamed animals, none of whom I could name, none of whom knew my name . . .” In the next poem, a photograph of a long-gone relative makes Ruefle reflect, “We are both alive, she in the picture and I with the picture in my hands, and we both know nothing of the other.” The self, the family, they are friend-like, but not quite. 

Ruefle goes on with stories about other friends: her dog; fellow poets;  a childhood crush; the spouse-as-partner-in-the-project-of-material-grasping; a metalsmith friend; the bestie who can do more than finish her sentences and in fact can translate her lyrical gibberish; and another contemporary prose stylist of the small and overlooked, her friend Lydia Davis. In another piece, after failing to decipher the intent of a seemingly urgent conversation between two shrilling, twilight insects, Ruefle puts into a single, final sentence what might be called her life’s goal: “To pay such close attention, to hear with every fiber of my being, and remain completely ignorant.” 

The Book is held up in the middle by an uncharacteristically long essay, one that amplifies the book’s theme. Though it begins with a very Boomer-like take on the idea that “the Facebook friend” is a misnomer, “Dear Friends” blossoms into a tour of portraits that work to prove out her one claim of certain knowledge, her friends: 

“I know my friends, I know the sounds of their voices, their speech patterns, their inflections, their hand and body gestures, the wet of their eyes, what makes them laugh, what makes them cry, how their nose was broken and how they became beautiful after that, and mysterious, so mysterious I cannot reconstitute them even as I try, because they are people, they walk this earth, and they will die here.” 

Thirty paragraphs follow, each one describing a different friendship. Ruefle puts down for each of them the first or strongest memory or feeling she can conjure of that person. Some of these sections are brief and pithy (“I have a friend who has never read a single word I have ever written. I love being with her.”) and some grow to over a page or two (“I had a friend in high school, I had a crush on him, he was gay but I didn’t know it . . . .” We meet the friend who has never peeled an orange in public, the friend who believes birds have souls and humans do not, the friend she hasn’t spoken to since “the world opened up” twenty-five years ago. As these odes accrue, they flesh out a life lived in company, which is quite the opposite of the solitary character of the Mary Ruefle I’ve long held in my mind. (She’s never used a computer, has lived most of her adult life in a small town in the mountains of Vermont, prefers to be at home, alone with her typewriter, notebooks, and erasure projects. She’s not curmudgeonly, but is vocal about “not being too keen on cocktail parties.”) Readers of her poetry are quite used to the image of the speaker at home, wondering alone through the house, into the woods, through the stacks of the library. Much of Mary Ruefle’s  poetry takes place inside the head, the mind, the memory, the bed; she hardly ever writes dialogue. But with “Dear Friends,” Ruefle shows us she is no recluse, that “the other half of the equation is community.” 

And then on to the final friend—the friend Mary always returns to in her work and life— literature. The last pages include the pieces “The Novel” and “The Book,” the latter of which ends with a reader speaking to the book they’re holding, “Old friend, you were written especially for me.” It recalls something Ruefle has said about her first epiphany-by-poetry, reading a heavy volume of children’s verse: “Oh, someone else is lonely too.” 

The writing in The Book is like all of Ruefle’s work: ordinary, playful, composed of simple, unadorned concrete nouns, with “god appearing on every third page.” Unlike her lineated poetry, which takes associative leaps and lets asides blossom into focal points, each piece in The Book presents a premise, or a path, and mostly hews to it. Which is why I think her lineated poetry will always speak to me more fully than her prose poems do. The poems in Dunce (2019), Trances (2013), or her Selected Poems (2010) are more elastic than these, replete with surprise and swerving. That’s not to say I don’t cherish The Book—I do, so much so that I’ve begun cataloging my own friendships, realizing just how many of them have arisen from the pursuit of the writing life. The prose works in The Book illuminate for me the context around some of the mysteries in the Ruefle poems I’ve loved over the last decade. Ruefle often talks about her writing process, how she sits down with the intent to write prose, but poems come regardless, filling up the notebook (poetry) she keeps beside her typewriter (prose), uninvited but never unwelcome. Thank god for that. Her poems—be they flush against the left margin or blocks of pauseless text—are what keep me soft to the world. 

It is so hard to make friends as an adult. It was so hard to maintain old friendships during the pandemic, and so hard to build on them again now that the lockdowns have lifted. It is so hard to suss out what is real and what is not about our friends on the internet, so hard to see the person cloaked in persona. I think my fellow millennials crave an authentic role model in both writing and friend-having, someone who can simultaneously admit, respect, and inhabit her own uncertainty. That’s why I buy my own friends Mary Ruefle’s books, and why every couple of years I write Mary a letter; why, if I pass by an unlocked and otherwise empty church, I’ll sit down in a pew and read a poem or two, watching unreal dogs chasing each other in agnostic praise around the altar.

Despite our intermittent correspondence, our quick conversation at a recent reading in Bennington, and the fact that all my copies of her books are stained with the marks of my hands, smeared with marginalia, and dogeared to the point of disrepair—I know better than to think of Mary Ruefle as my friend (“After all, she didn’t respond to my letter “Dear Known Friend,” but rather “Dear Known One”). Rather, I think of her as my guide into adulthood and old age, preparing me to be the friend the people around me will need: patient, attentive, generous, able to laugh and make laughter, and never burdened by certainty, or by grasping after it.

—

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Book (September 2023) along with 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.

Tyler Barton is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande Books) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip). His short fiction has appeared The Iowa Review, DIAGRAM, NANO Fiction, Subtropics, Wigleaf, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and many others. Stories from Eternal Night have been awarded prizes and honors from Kenyon Review, Phoebe Journal, The Chicago Review of Books, The Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfictions, and have twice been named “Distinguished” by Best American Short Stories. His visual poetry project, Gutters has been featured in The Adroit Journal, Northwest Review, december, The Pinch, and elsewhere.