Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, & Honey.
Wave Books, 2012. Paperback, 352 pp, $25.
The poet-critic: that vital hybrid, the one who persists in existing despite endless deliberation about her place on the scholarly chain of being. To turn critic, the poet must temporarily give up being the mouse and become, at least for a time, the trap.
Typically the literary world accepts and endorses critical writing by working poets only when it’s packed with canonical references, and composed in a style or with a subject matter far removed from the poet’s own messy experience (pace Eliot). Beginning with mid-century American poets, however, what we now call “craft writing” began to appear—essays that deal with poetics as hands-on facture. Seen through this lens of craft, such writing also often debates the varieties of reading or experience that might feed into the making of poems. I think, for example, of the abecedarium of forty some-odd poets collected by Donald Hall in Claims for Poetry: heterogeneous, squabbling, technically disparate, holding in common only their refusal to be anything but mosaic.
In Madness, Rack, & Honey, Mary Ruefle has managed to capture that same distinctly American mongrel complexity in fourteen lectures, given over the years to her graduate students and here printed for the first time. The result is a volume so wise and wily it could and probably will rightfully take its place in any poetics course alongside, say, The Necessary Angel or The Triggering Town. This is Ruefle’s entire life as a poet, compressed here in three hundred pages of generous prose—prose that fights and makes peace with the fragmentary, the gradient, the dissatisfied. For all her accomplishment, Ruefle’s intelligence remains ravenous, and her curiosity unsated, in exploratory essays with titles such as “On Fear,” “On Secrets,” “On Sentimentality,” and, perhaps my favorite, “Lectures I Will Never Give.”
In the title essay, for example, Ruefle writes that the words “madness, rack, and honey” came to her in a dream. She works backward to unpack the phrase, or adorn it: beginning with honey, vis-à-vis an anonymous Farsi verse about the sweetness of poetry; puzzling her way along that one until she reaches a statement by Stanley Kunitz about how the longer one writes, the more difficult it becomes (the rack part of her phrase); and then fetching up at the end with a protracted meditation on distraction and boredom (“We are drifting into the madness of it now”) during which she gathers and broods over sentences from, among others, an anonymous Japanese soldier, Paul Celan, Mi?osz, Yves Bonnefoy, Pascal, and microbiologist Carl Woese. She finally states, “As practitioners of poetry you are practitioners of madness, rack, and honey,” and demonstrates this by closing with a quotation from Charles Darwin, without comment: “But the more I think the more bewildered I become....” She offers no solution, no resolution—only a pitiless commitment to seeing clearly while still making the beautiful shine visible.
“Lectures, for me, are bad dreams,” Ruefle admits. Despite her fear of writing them, these are adroit, polysemic essays that frequently wrong-foot the reader: just when one thinks the writer has gone too far out, is wandering lost amidst her quotations and references, she turns suddenly canny and pulls the connections together in one swift movement. Ruefle likes to play dumb and then turn on a dime to reveal an intelligence almost cruel in its precision. Hers are neither formal essays nor craft writing (though there is no doubt that the exercise of poetic craft is their fuel); they are learned, thoughtful pieces, with thick references to Coleridge and Keats, Bataille and Barthes, Cy Twombly keeping good company with John Crowe Ransom. Ruefle casually draws into close company such disparate elements as Wittgenstein and the Epcot Center, and makes other strange arrangements, with results that are fruitful where in the hands of a lesser writer they might have been anachronistically painful.
There is droll humor frequently underlying her voice, and passages of an amusing Steinian plainness and repetition that as suddenly give way to sharp insight, as in “On Secrets”:
...and later still I was born, and by some miracle I cannot figure out, it was given to me to hear these voices, and all these examples of a human life were speaking, and when I listened carefully I could hear that they were speaking about speaking, and when I listened carefully to them speaking about speaking I could hear they were singing about listening. And that has been a long journey for me, of listening. I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.
In the elliptical, spare, strange piece “My Emily Dickinson” [italics Ruefle’s], she wrests Emily of Amherst back from Susan Howe by earmarking Dickinson’s overlaps with Emily Brontë—and, even more unexpectedly, with Anne Frank. All three, she concludes, “had no experience of the world....They were magnificently prepared for nothing.” This would be a more provocative statement than it already sounds—inflammatory, even—were it not for the forty meticulous pages which precede it, drawing these three writers into a closeness and intimacy they may never have known before in literature. And ultimately the essay sheds a new light on Dickinson, even through its odd repeated collocations of objects (“A piece of coal, a candle stub, a chrysanthemum”—“A thimble, an acorn, a quarter, and many, many daffodils”), the mysterious provenance of which is not revealed until the essay’s very end.
As befits a sometime erasure artist, there are ellipses and elisions in these essays, a fundamental commitment to the fragmentary and the unsayable whose result is pure magic. Madness, Rack & Honey will inevitably be compared to Anne Carson’s work, particularly “Twenty-Two Short Lectures,” reminiscent of Carson’s “Short Talks,” if only for its title and their ruthless crisp precision. And Ruefle does write with a hint of Carson’s laconic Attic severity; in Ruefle’s case, however, the aphoristic crispness is tempered with a peculiar lyric sensitivity which is entirely her own. Having read “I Remember, I Remember” (which many of us did when it first appeared on the Poetry Foundation’s website), it is impossible to forget some of its utterances, which are timed with Pythagorean precision, the anaphoristic sentences methodic, rhythmic, like the chanting of a rhapsode with a lyre: “I remember I never did like to save things much. // I remember saving everything.” Or: “I remember thinking, If W.S. Merwin could do it, why couldn’t I? // I remember thinking, Because he is a god and I am a handmaiden with a broken urn.” Ruefle’s urn may be broken, but it still holds deep clear water, and she uses it to carry the most important things to us, nonetheless.
