During Mary Ruefle’s visit to the Poetry Center for her reading on September 26, I had the privilege to walk through the exhibit Mary Ruefle: Erasures with her as she saw it for the first time. Ruefle’s erasures provide a window into her creative practice; they’re playful, intriguing, and quite frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Here are five tidbits from Ruefle’s commentary on the exhibit, plus two favorite items of my own.
1. Mary Ruefle’s erasures are dotted with cut-out images from books and postcards. Often, she explained, she incorporates whatever she has nearest to hand at her kitchen table, where she frequently works. But she also pulls from images she’s saved and organized into files such as Disasters, Birds’ Wings, Kittens, Dust.
2. Working on erasures is part of Ruefle’s regular artistic practice, which has resulted in a large body of erasures completed over the years—to the extent that she (understandably) doesn’t remember every page. She exclaimed, “did I make this?” while looking at these gorgeous pages that include dried flowers and leaves that have been dyed or colored a bright green.
3. Very infrequently, text from the erasures will later make its way into a poem by Ruefle. While looking through the exhibit, she noted two places where erasure text had become poem text (including the text pictured here), although she wasn’t sure quite where they had ended up.
4. I asked Ruefle about the curious, striking contents of Shall We Meet Again? Had she collected them over time or found them all at once? Neither, was her reply: a friend had saved and given them to her, knowing her delight in dried out insect exoskeletons.
5. “Those are Brussels sprouts!” Ruefle gestured towards the little faces on the right-hand page. I had chosen that page for the resonance between those weird little faces and the text “A MIND THAT FOUND ITSELF.” But being able to see them as the minds of Brussels sprouts made them perfect: endearingly creepy.
6. Ruefle’s Whitman Sampler is a wooden box containing glass slides on which she has written out lines from poems by Walt Whitman, indexed by poem title inside the box’s lid. Mark Wunderlich, co-curator of the exhibit, relayed this story about the Whitman’s Sampler box of chocolates also on display: he sent it to Ruefle at Christmas some years prior, as Ruefle’s parents had for many years. Ruefle seems to have eaten two of the chocolates and left the rest to live on (albeit in somewhat desiccated form) as part of her Whitman Sampler.
7. In honor of this exhibit, Ruefle created an erasure especially for the Poetry Center using a document by our founder, Ruth Stephan. In 1973, Stephan wrote “Notes on establishing and maintaining a poetry collection,” an nine-page overview of her thinking in founding the Poetry Center. In Ruefle’s skilled hands, this statement emerged: “Experience should consist of poetry, the Cumulative Eye of existence.” I created the digital collage by layering scans of Mary’s typewriter-typed text, her annotations on a copy of Stephan’s document, and a photo of the original Poetry Center cottage on Highland Avenue from the 1960s.
Mary Ruefle: Erasures is on display at the Poetry Center through February 8. If you’re in Tucson, come by to enjoy the full show!