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Thinking about fruit this morning: Valéry says the opening line of a poem "is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet's task is to create a tree from which such a fruit would fall."

from Ruefle's Madness Rack & Honey

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I remember driving by the hospital where I was born and glancing at it—I was in a car going sixty miles an hour—and feeling a fleeting twinge of specialness after which I had no choice but to let it go and get over it, at sixty miles an hour.

Mary Ruefle, Excerpt from I Remember, I Remember

#mary ruefle #ruefle #poetry

Mary Ruefle, from her book of lectures Madness, Rack & Honey: “You might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart”

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From Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack and Honey.

#poetry #berryman #ruefle #johnberryman #maryruefle #athens #dublin

Fragments are the husk of a secret.

Mary Ruefle, from ‘On Secrets’ from ‘Madness, Rack, & Honey’

Ordinary people don’t see a fly on the wall and want to talk to it

Rail: I love the poem “Cul-de-sac.” The ending is pretty heartbreaking: “Brother, I have been unable to attain a balance / between important and unimportant things.” Ruefle: That question at the end of “Cul-de-sac” brings us right back to the imagination. When is it important and when is it unimportant? Rail: Do you think that balance is something one can strike or are we always out of balance trying to find balance? Ruefle: I think we’re always out of balance trying to find balance. Artists tend to be pretty lopsided people. I don’t think there’s anything balanced about us. We have passions and obsessions and predilections. We overreact to the world. Let’s face it! Ordinary people don’t see a fly on the wall and want to talk to it or write a poem about it or think about its existence or its lifespan or draw it. We do. We like the little things. Or we pay attention to language: we see a sign on the side of the highway and it makes us laugh out loud when no one else is laughing. We take the literal figuratively and the figurative literally: it works both ways. We’re lopsided. Balance, balance—I don’t know. I don’t think people who are truly balanced need recourse to artistic expression.