Land of not enough poetry
Tara Atkinson Gunyon - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 2/27/08 Section: Arts
If you were to call Mary Ruefle around 7 p.m. on a Monday (as I did last Monday), you might interrupt her dinner of salmon, spinach salad, vanilla ice cream, and wine. She might tell you that what she loves about Iowa City is that everywhere you look there are bumper stickers and signs that say "It's great to be a Hawkeye."
"But when you think about it, it's terrifying," said Ruefle, a visiting faculty member in the Nonfiction Writing Program. "Nothing could be more terrifying for a human being than to be a hawk eye. I doubt that very few of us would make it past noon."
If you were to call Ruefle at 7 p.m. today, she won't be home - you would be interrupting her poetry and prose reading at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.
But calling her at any time is not easy. She does not use e-mail, much less computers at all, if she can help it; I had to get her phone number from a friend who took her workshop last semester. Contrary to rumors, she is not a Luddite (a member of a movement that began in 1811 with the breaking of textile machinery by British textile artisans in protest of the Industrial Revolution). Luddites reject all technology.
"I'm not a Luddite," Ruefle said. "I just don't own a computer."
Knowing this information, I forwent e-mail and chose to slip a handwritten note under her door asking her to call me. A likely explanation for why she did not: The office houses the computer she does not like to use. She writes by hand and types the manuscript once completed.
Ruefle writes essays and prose as well as poetry, but she identifies herself as a poet. In 2006, she taught as a visiting poet in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
On the distinction between poetry and prose, she said that before she writes a piece, "I hear it in my ear, and the sound I hear in my ear decides whether it is prose or poetry. Pieces of writing [prose] have very distinct spirits. That is why I give them right-flush margins. But they do not come from a different place.
"There is not enough poetry in my life. That is why I continue to write. I have very limited subject matter in my poetry. It is all based on the following three tenets: I hated childhood. I hate adulthood. And I love being alive. Whatever poetry I write is a variation on those three tenets."
The title of her latest book, Indeed I Was Pleased with the World, evokes all three. It is her 10th book, and, considering the fellowships she has been awarded - from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others - it appears that many hope Ruefle, even at 10 books, never has enough poetry in her life. Or essays. Or prose.
E-mail DI reporter Tara Atkinson Gunyon at:
tara-atkinson@uiowa.edu
"But when you think about it, it's terrifying," said Ruefle, a visiting faculty member in the Nonfiction Writing Program. "Nothing could be more terrifying for a human being than to be a hawk eye. I doubt that very few of us would make it past noon."
If you were to call Ruefle at 7 p.m. today, she won't be home - you would be interrupting her poetry and prose reading at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.
But calling her at any time is not easy. She does not use e-mail, much less computers at all, if she can help it; I had to get her phone number from a friend who took her workshop last semester. Contrary to rumors, she is not a Luddite (a member of a movement that began in 1811 with the breaking of textile machinery by British textile artisans in protest of the Industrial Revolution). Luddites reject all technology.
"I'm not a Luddite," Ruefle said. "I just don't own a computer."
Knowing this information, I forwent e-mail and chose to slip a handwritten note under her door asking her to call me. A likely explanation for why she did not: The office houses the computer she does not like to use. She writes by hand and types the manuscript once completed.
Ruefle writes essays and prose as well as poetry, but she identifies herself as a poet. In 2006, she taught as a visiting poet in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
On the distinction between poetry and prose, she said that before she writes a piece, "I hear it in my ear, and the sound I hear in my ear decides whether it is prose or poetry. Pieces of writing [prose] have very distinct spirits. That is why I give them right-flush margins. But they do not come from a different place.
"There is not enough poetry in my life. That is why I continue to write. I have very limited subject matter in my poetry. It is all based on the following three tenets: I hated childhood. I hate adulthood. And I love being alive. Whatever poetry I write is a variation on those three tenets."
The title of her latest book, Indeed I Was Pleased with the World, evokes all three. It is her 10th book, and, considering the fellowships she has been awarded - from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others - it appears that many hope Ruefle, even at 10 books, never has enough poetry in her life. Or essays. Or prose.
E-mail DI reporter Tara Atkinson Gunyon at:
tara-atkinson@uiowa.edu
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