MARY RUEFLE in conversation with MARK WUNDERLICH
On August 18, 2021 via Facebook Live, poet Mark Wunderlich interviewed Vermont Poet Laureate Mary Ruefle about Mary Ruefle: Erasures, the first solo exhibition of her erasures, treated books, postcard collages, and various three-dimensional objects, curated by Mark Wunderlich and museum director Erin McKenny, at the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont. The following is an edited excerpt.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Mary, what does it feel like to see several decades of your work on display here?
MARY RUEFLE
Well, I was blown away when I came and saw the show. You guys set it up. When I say blown away, I meant I don’t think I had anything to do with it. I just gave you the work, and you and Erin arranged everything. When I walked in the room, I thought it was perfect. I could not have imagined a better display of the books, to see them like that in one room.
That said, one thing I wanted to talk about was the difficulty of displaying books in a museum. There’s a huge difference between reading the Bible and seeing the Gutenberg Bible open to one page, because books are meant to be read, but when they’re in a museum, they become visual objects.
I have never been to a museum where you can read a book, so they’re turned into visual objects. These books are under plexiglass, beautifully displayed, and there’s a chosen page. They’re open to two facing pages, every book. I brought a friend here, and he said, “Mary, do you ever think about doing the whole book?” I couldn’t believe it, because, yes, every book is complete. I realized that someone just seeing the two facing pages might not realize that.
In this show, you’re seeing a book which is open and you’re looking at two facing pages, but every single page in that book is treated in a similar manner and the books are ideally meant to be read as a complete reading experience, from page one to the last page. Because that’s so difficult in a museum, I had a complete book, which I had finished after I handed over work to Erin and Mark, and we have it in a box behind the desk so that anyone who comes to the show, if they’re that interested—they probably won’t be, but if they are—they can simply check it out from the desk and come in this room and sit on a sofa and read the whole thing.
MARK WUNDERLICH
You are pointing to a dilemma, which is that a book is a dynamic object. It’s meant to be handled, pages turned. Its whole design is about its manipulation, and you’re right. These are stilled objects that you then look at as something that is, in a way, frozen.
MARY RUEFLE
It’s turned into a visual artifact. I’m a writer, and then suddenly I’m an artist when I see it displayed like this, which I really don’t think of myself as: a visual artist. I obviously think of myself as an artist because a writer is an artist, but at the same time I have always been a frustrated visual artist because it’s a path I could have taken and didn’t.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Except you did.
MARY RUEFLE
Well, except I did. When I started doing erasure books in 1998, very quickly I realized this was a way for me to make something with my hands, because it’s very hands-on and I’m juxtaposing text and image and I’m using various mediums to erase the text and I want the pages to be visually interesting (the pages that have images; they don’t all, sometimes it’s a bit much, and I want the simplicity). In A Little White Shadow, which was published some years ago, I was not juxtaposing images. I believe there are two little stickers in the book somewhere, but it’s basically just white. So, I love making things physically with my hands.
MARK WUNDERLICH
How did you first come to make an erasure text? Were there antecedents that you had in mind, or were you interested in collage? I’m wondering about the first object that you ended up making in this way.
MARY RUEFLE
Well, the first object is very crude, because I used a black rollerball. I like old books, small, old, beautiful books, and I found a small, soft—there used to be books bound in very soft Moroccan leather—book, and I wanted to give it as a gift to a friend of mine. I used a rollerball, so it’s just black scribbled out. I would never do that now. I gave an interview not that long ago and I said, “When I made the first book, I’d never heard of Tom Phillips,” and then later I thought, “Wait, that can’t be true.”
I no longer remember if I was aware of the British artist Tom Phillips, whose treatment of a Victorian novel A Human Document abbreviated its title to A Humument, which I first discovered reading a copy of Artforum. What was I doing reading a copy of Artforum? I don’t have time to read art magazines. The question being asked was, “What do you consider the greatest artwork of the twentieth century?” What a question. It was asked of various people. They asked William Gass and he said, “Tom Phillips’s Humument.”
I did my first erasure in ’98. I no longer remember if I had already seen erasure or not. Very soon after, I looked at Tom Phillips. He’s a consummate famous visual artist, but he has said, “I was always a frustrated poet,” and that doing the novel was a way for him to be a poet. It was funny because I say, “Well, I’m a poet, but I’m a frustrated visual artist.” This was a way for me too.
MARK WUNDERLICH
After you made this first, as you say, early attempt, just scribbling out, the work began to evolve. How was it that you select the foundation texts, the books that you begin to alter?
MARY RUEFLE
Entirely intuitive. I’m in an antique store or an antiquarian bookstore, a used bookstore, a thrift store, the Goodwill, tag sale, estate sale. I always look at the really old small books and I see if they’re suitable.
MARK WUNDERLICH
What is suitability?
MARY RUEFLE
Oh, suitability. Well, I look at the text. I’ve done several biographies of artists, but these are old nineteenth-century books. I did Hokusai. Suitability? I work so intuitively… I want nouns. I want equal part nouns and abstraction. And I’m a sucker for children’s didactic religious books because the word “God” or “death” is on every three pages. I just love that, because that’s going to come in handy. I want nouns and concrete objects. I want flowers and trees, but I also want abstraction because I have to make sentences. I have to parse together segments for a statement or a fragment.
I like beautiful old books. Ones with stamped gold covers, soft leather ones, ones with pictures on the front, but some of them are quite dull. For the front, I will take something, say a piece of embossed nineteenth-century Japanese leather and glue it on the cover to make the cover more interesting. And then once and once only, I did a book, and the book is falling apart, it is ragged, there are threads. The spine, it’s falling apart, and it’s called Nellie Walters. I had so much fun doing that because I turned it into the journal of a severely depressed woman, really depressed, who continually falls apart in the book, and the book is falling apart.
There was this university that was interested in buying a book. I sent them that because I was so proud of it, and they were horrified and immediately returned it and said, “We can’t pay good money. This book is trash,” but that was the whole point! That’s the only book in really bad condition that I’ve ever used. It starts out with a kind of white to beige to brown to black and gets more desperate as the book falls apart.
MARK WUNDERLICH
As you begin the process of composition, to select language and compose, there is this relationship with the foundation text, the original object that you’re using, the book, and I’ve noticed that, in all of these, there’s an attended humor. There’s almost always a note of melancholy and there’s occasional archness, but there’s a real wit that’s at play here. I would like to hear you talk a little bit about the difference between your erasures and a work of original composition where it’s just your own words. What is the relationship to the kind of selection that you’re making as you begin the process of erasure? Are these similar or are they completely different?
MARY RUEFLE
Well, I don’t think of them as the same in terms of composition, but everything you’re saying makes perfect sense, because that is my sensibility. My sensibility is very humorous and very melancholy and very deadpan. That’s who I am. Life is long and life is hard. The best way to endure and survive life is to have a terrific sense of humor. I don’t understand how anyone could go through life without it, but they’re out there, these people.
My sense of humor is very highly developed. I’m well aware of that. It’s also very peculiar. There are things I think are funny that other people don’t get. I bring all of that to everything I do. Poems are poems and these books… the difference to me, it’s like a form. My poems are all free verse, but this is a form. The rules of the form are, you can only use the words on this page. You cannot use any other words. To me, that’s a restriction and a form is a restriction. It’s a rule, and I follow it. Then sometimes I break it. Sometimes I’m so desperate for a word that I’ll cut it out of another book and glue it in the book I’m working on.
So for me, it’s a form. I do not consider any of the pages to be a poem. I just don’t. If you do, that’s great, but I don’t. What I think is that the entire book read from start to finish is a poetic experience. The books, when they’re read as a whole, I want them to be a poetic experience. I do not consider any particular page or even facing pages to be a poem. I just don’t.
MARK WUNDERLICH
I certainly think it’s a poetic experience to read the whole thing. I’m wondering, do you find yourself drawing out a character or a particular kind of voice? Do you see that happening? You found a narrative in the story about poor Nellie and her diary.
MARY RUEFLE
Yes. Poor Nellie. She dies at the end, but then on her death bed, she rises back up to complain more. Some of the books are continuous narrative, but very, very few. The majority are not. The Hokusai biography, which had reproductions of his work, that’s a narrative. I can think of maybe, out of 114, probably five or six have a narrative. The rest are just changes from page to page, but one thing that I learned, or came to realize over time, was that you can never escape the original book. You just can’t. Any particular book, even when it’s erased, it’s not only going to have my sensibility in it, but it is going to have a certain sensibility and tone of the original text. There is no way to completely eradicate the tone of the original author. I find that interesting, but it might be I’m the only person that notices that because I spend so much time with them.
I don’t read the books. I’ve read maybe four because I thought they were so good. I don’t waste my time reading the books. I’ve described it before, the words hover a little up off the page like flowers in the field, so the words are what’s growing in a field. And I just pick and put together that way. I don’t read the two pages. My eye is scanning words, and obviously I’ll fall in love with a phrase.
MARK WUNDERLICH
It’s interesting you just described this process in a very visual way, the words being like flowers in a field that you’re selecting. When I asked Douglas Culhane, an artist friend, what he would ask you, he said he was interested in knowing about the idea of language as a visual representation of speech, like typography and letters on the page. He said, “We don’t write in pictographs. We write in this representation of something phonetic.” Do you think of words as objects? Do you see them as visual things? Has erasure changed your sense of the visual power of words?
MARY RUEFLE
Oh, yes. I think of words as physical objects, because I’m so obsessed with words. In fact, anytime the word “word” appears on a page, I’ll go, “Right,” so I want to use it. I work on them in the morning, and this morning there was the word “words.” Of course, I could take away the S if I wanted it to be singular. If I find the word “word” on a page, I’m going to have the word do something, I’m going to have the word, the words, say something. They’re characters, they’re living beings. The word, when I use it, it’s anthropomorphic. I give it life like a living thing. The words are always chattering and complaining.
MARK WUNDERLICH
When you’re creating erasure texts, sometimes in these texts you’re interposing images. You’re collaging images. I wonder about that process of selecting those images. Is this very intuitive?
MARY RUEFLE
It takes the most time. I am a writer, so I can do the text rather quickly, you don’t want to know how quickly. But then, it’s like, what image? I have boxes full of labeled envelopes. I’ve spent hours cutting out images, so there’ll be an envelope, there’ll be obviously birds, eyes, hands, then there’ll be disaster, then there’ll be Flaubert and it would be like this old novel cut up. There would be mushrooms, feet.
I have hundreds of these envelopes, and to see what they’re labeled is really funny. And then I have a library of about three hundred fodder books. These are books that, if you open them up, they’re just cut-up things. If I want a picture of a tattoo, I go to the tattoo book. If I want a picture of glassware, I go to British glassware. Astronomy textbooks are wonderful places for pictures of good comets and moons. I have a whole library, and then I have the images in envelopes, and then the desk I work at is just piled with images.
MARK WUNDERLICH
I love the phrase fodder books.
MARY RUEFLE
Yes. They are books to be destroyed. My fodder books. And that takes time and is very frustrating. Sometimes I know the image I want, and I say, “I want the picture of that dead mouse. Where is it?” I go, and it’s not with the mice. Then I go, “Is it with the animals, or is it with dead things, or did I use it?” Finding the images, I can spend hours doing it. It’s frustrating, and sometimes I’m sitting on the floor going through these envelopes, saying, “This is insane. This is insane.”
MARK WUNDERLICH
How many of these do you have? What does the hoard of your envelopes with images look like?
MARY RUEFLE
The envelopes? Oh, I have a box full of envelopes, and then another box, and then piles on the desk, and then the library. When I get a new book for the fodder library, what I’ve started to do is sit down. I didn’t use to do this, but I don’t have any more room for the fodder books. I sit down, I go through an old book, I cut out every image I want and recycle the book. And then I have piles of images. Just like the books are old, I prefer old images. Sometimes I’ll use a mid-century. A nice bright pop of mid-century color, but I like the old etching. The lithographs in books. The antique dealers will tear them out, frame them and sell them, but they don’t touch them when they’re full of—is it foxing? Is that the word?
MARK WUNDERLICH
Foxing.
MARY RUEFLE
They are full of stains and little golden speckles. I love that, and I have a huge envelope of “stains.” The stained envelope is just pages with words blotted out with brown shadows, things like that. I love stains. It’s one of my favorite envelopes.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Do you feel any obligation to the original text, to representing it?
MARY RUEFLE
None. I wipe out the name of the author and can’t tell you who wrote it, except for Laura Richards, who I’ve mentioned, who’s an author, a turn-of-the-century American Young Adult author. I have erased more books by Laura Richards than by anyone else. She is someone I’m obsessed with. I don’t think I’ve erased more than one book by the same author, except for her.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Do you think about other visual artists who’ve worked in collage? Is that something that’s part of your consciousness as you’re doing this? I’m thinking of wonderful collage artists like Hannah Höch, or Joseph Cornell’s boxes, for instance.
MARY RUEFLE
Well, I’m a huge Cornell freak, of course, that makes sense. Most poets are.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Also, I’m thinking of a number of writers in the New York School. John Ashbery did beautiful collages. Joe Brainard.
MARY RUEFLE
I love Ashbery’s cards, yes, and Joe Brainard’s. Everyone brings their own sensibility. But when you’re an artist, you pray yours is different. Young artists hearing this—pay attention! Don’t copy, be yourself.
MARK WUNDERLICH
I’m glad you mentioned the cards because I want to ask about another aspect of the show. We have over twenty postcards that have text collaged on them. I wanted to ask about your relationship with the postcard as a medium of exchange, as a “wish you were here” from a tourist site. What draws you to the postcard as a form?
MARY RUEFLE
I’ve been drawn to postcards for a long, long time. I don’t know when it started. You know that they’re on the way out. I’ve gone in a store looking for postcards in Bennington, Vermont, of Robert Frost’s grave. They used to be in all the drugstores for tourists to buy, and now they can’t get them. They can’t get postcards because now when you travel, you hold your phone up, you take a picture of where you are and you immediately send it to your friend.
I’m a great devotee of postcards. Tom Phillips has a huge book of the postcards he’s collected. You can teach a class in history through just looking at postcards. My friend Larry Sutin has an extraordinary book called A Postcard Memoir, where antique postcards are reproduced, and he tells the story of his life, or the story of a portion of his life, by looking at these cards, and these cards are not of his relatives, but they might remind him of a relative or of a place or of an event.
He’s my friend, and he is a serious collector. I don’t have a collection. I have more than the average person, I’m sure. I have over a hundred, but Larry has twenty thousand. He has twenty thousand postcards in his filing cabinets. We started to correspond, and he would send me a bunch, and I would label them and send them back. I think about half the cards in the show Larry actually sent to me. He sent them, I labeled them, I sent them back, he sent them back here so they could be in the show, and he basically said, “I don’t want them back.”
So that’s what started it, and now I label cards and mail them to friends… I label postcards, I caption postcards, because it’s so much fun. In the middle of a busy day, if I can steal away, nothing makes me happier than to just sit at my desk with a bunch of postcards and a bunch of text, which is all cut out of the fodder library. You can get great text if you get an old romantic novel—or anything. I not only cut images, but I cut snippets of text, and then I have to match the text to the postcard. Sometimes I take it off, it’s not good enough. It’s just an addiction. I think art is an addiction. I don’t know. It’s fun.
MARK WUNDERLICH
What is your relationship to the postal mail and to sending and receiving letters? Is that something that you do? Are you a regular correspondent with people?
MARY RUEFLE
Oh, it takes over my life. I correspond regularly with about twelve people. It’s getting to be a bit much. These are typewritten letters. Writing letters is my favorite genre. I have in the backseat of my car The Letters of John Cheever and Kafka’s Letters to Felice. I love reading letters of authors that I love, and I love writing letters. Stamps, envelopes, I love all that stuff very, very deeply, very, very much.
MARK WUNDERLICH
How is it that you came—
MARY RUEFLE
I grew up in a time when that’s what you did.
MARK WUNDERLICH
As Vermont Poet Laureate, shortly after you were appointed, you announced a project that you wanted to undertake—to mail one thousand poems to one thousand Vermonters. Could you talk a bit about the conception and execution of that project?
MARY RUEFLE
Well, I had to come up with a project that suited me and also would keep me at home because I didn’t want to run around doing workshops and stuff like that, and I didn’t want anything to do with technology. I knew what would suit me just fine, which was envelopes, poems, and paper. They’re not my own poems. I think I’m at 580. I will xerox a poem I love by, it could be Tranströmer, Etheridge Knight, it could be Neruda, it could be Jack Gilbert, it could be Ashbery, just like an entire gamut all over the world.
I fold them and put them in an envelope with a stamp. There’s no return address. They have no idea where it’s coming from. Then I have phone books for every county in the state, and I open the phone book, and I randomly pick names and address them. Then I have a separate list of zip codes because there are no zip codes in the phone book. That was a frustration, and sometimes I have to look the zip codes up online, and I address them.
It was simply a project. I guess for some people, that’s work, but I didn’t want to work. I didn’t want a job. It turned into a job, but it turned into a job that suited me. My point of pride about that is that I was told by the Academy of American Poets that mine was the only project that did not have to be altered because of COVID because all of the other projects involved poets running around in some way. Mine, COVID didn’t affect it at all because I was just mailing stuff, and I knew the people were home. I chose some poems that I thought were COVID-centric.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Everything happens anonymously. Is that correct?
MARY RUEFLE
It’s totally anonymous. The Burlington Free Press had a little article, and they said, “If you receive something, we’d love to know your feedback. Please let us know,” and they’ve received nothing. Absolutely nothing.
MARK WUNDERLICH
I’m reminded a little of elementary school, when we’d let helium balloons go with a message on them that would say, “Please write back if you find this envelope.” No one ever wrote back. What is it you imagine someone’s experience might be? How are you thinking about it?
MARY RUEFLE
I imagine that eighty percent of them are immediately thrown in the trash, or the recycle bin, depending on the household.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Are the envelopes addressed by hand?
MARY RUEFLE
Yes, the envelopes are by hand, but the poems are xeroxed. I also have great faith that a poem has reached the right person on the right day at the right time of their life, and that something magical happened. It’s a random act of poetry. I know that that has happened, but I also know that most of the time, they end up in the trash, which is fine, but I do have faith that just a few have found the right home.
MARK WUNDERLICH
There’s something in your work that has to do with the found and the random, with certain restrictions applying. A postcard only has so much room. You can only select words from the one page of text. You’re randomly choosing names out of the phone book. It’s a little bit like a Dada text, this idea of the chance in the random. I’m wondering, does that resonate for you?
MARY RUEFLE
Yes, chance is an enormous part of how I work. Even when I’m writing a traditional poem, chance plays a part in it. It’s not as if I follow any given chance procedures. It’s that I’m thinking of one thing, and I look and I see something else, and I realize that’s what it needs, not this. Artists understand this immediately. You get so focused on whatever, and then you walk away and you’re walking down the street and you see something lying on the street and you go, “That’s it. That’s what I need, not what I’ve been trying to create. I need that.” And I bend down and I pick up that shopping list, and I know that’s what I need, that’s the image I need. I need a shopping list on that erasure page, or I need a shopping list in the poem I’m writing. I trust the world because there’s fodder, there’s art, all around you. There’s so much of it that we have to try to stop ourselves from stumbling over it. It’s everywhere, if you become aware of it, which is why I don’t believe in prompts and exercises. Oh, for the mail project, I use postcards to send haiku.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Can you say more about that?
MARY RUEFLE
Well, because they’re so short, I type them. I’ll type a haiku by Issa on a postcard and mail it as part of the project. I’m thinking of one by Yves Bonnefoy… and there’s also a Pawnee chant:
Let us see, is this real,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
You, Gods, who dwell everywhere,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
Anything that’s four lines or less goes on a postcard, but I don’t use postcards with images. At the post office, you can buy totally blank postcards with gorgeous, bright, deep, purple flowers for the stamp. They’re really pretty. I bought a hundred of those to use in the project. Some people get postcards. I sent some out during the depths of COVID. What was the Issa I sent out? “Napped half the day; no one punished me!”
MARK WUNDERLICH
For one of the erasures for the show, you erased text we have on a large wall here in the Robert Frost museum of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In some ways, that’s different from a typical text on which you might perform an erasure.
MARY RUEFLE
That was hard. I don’t erase famous poets. My books are obscure unread texts. But the first time that Erin McKenny brought me to the museum, I remember very clearly we walked into the room, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was written in this house, and it’s painted on the wall of the room. The minute I saw it, I said, “Erin, can I erase that?” because I had erasure on my mind and I saw there was no way I was going to leave that text on the wall without erasing it.
That was work, because I did a couple, and I wasn’t happy with them. It’s very, very hard. It’s impossible to erase a good poem. You just can’t. There are no superfluous words in a good poem! And then I remembered, I once did erase a Frost poem because I found at the dumpster a poem of his on beautiful, big paper. I took it, and I did erase that, but that’s me and Frost. I have run into him many, many, many, many times in my life. So, we erased it, we whited out on the wall, and I think it’s either a broken heart poem or COVID poem, depending on how you see it.
MARK WUNDERLICH
That’s really how I think it reads. What’s so interesting to me is that you drew a poem out of that poem, which is one that is so well known and it’s one that we’re so steeped in here in this corner of Southern Vermont in so many ways. There’s a way in which one might react against this idea of erasing Robert Frost’s poem, but what I keep thinking is, that poem isn’t going anywhere, that poem remains intact forever.
MARY RUEFLE
I’m not erasing it, I can tell you that. Frost’s poem remains in the world, the erasure of it is erased.
MARK WUNDERLICH
We’re here in Vermont, in the Robert Frost House. You attended Bennington College. Now you live in Bennington. You are Poet Laureate of Vermont. Vermont seems very much to be part of who you are and how you’ve shaped your life. How did studying at Bennington College shape you as a writer? Did you have a conception of yourself as a writer at that point in your life? Were you thinking about that? Was there a moment where you began to see yourself that way?
MARY RUEFLE
I’ve always loved writing, since I was seven, elementary school. I was always happiest writing in my journal or poems for class or the literary magazine in high school. I arrived in college knowing that I was going to write, though I thought it would be fiction, prose.
MARK WUNDERLICH
That didn’t happen.
MARY RUEFLE
No, that didn’t happen, and then much later in life, of course, I started writing prose again, which was of interest to me, but I became a poet. When I was at Bennington, of course, one of the things I loved about being there was you could study whatever you wanted. My time there, I took only visual art and writing and literature. I didn’t take many workshops, I think two workshops, but fiction. Not poetry. I took painting and silkscreen, and I took visual art stuff because I really loved it. I don’t think I was very good at it, but I loved it and I wanted to go that route. Writing, you just need paper and pen. In those days, the art world was mainly painting, and that’s so expensive. I didn’t have the money to buy paint and canvas. It was always writing, who am I kidding? Always, always. Who am I kidding?
MARK WUNDERLICH
When did you first start thinking about publishing poems? Thinking that poetry was going to become a kind of vocation?
MARY RUEFLE
The summer after I graduated from college, I sent a short story to a magazine. It was right after graduation and it came back, “Dear Ms. Ruefle, we regret to inform you we don’t publish poetry.” It was a story. Rather than get depressed, I said, “Okay, I’ll show you, people.” I put it in another envelope and addressed it to a poetry magazine, and it was accepted. It was my first publication and it’s in my first book. It’s called “Six Arguments with Kafka.” Of course, I look at it now and it’s not a story. They were absolutely right to reject it. It’s a poem. That did it, that was it. That was like, “Okay, I’m a poet.”
MARK WUNDERLICH
That opened the pathway for you, and you never looked back.
MARY RUEFLE
I never looked back. It was like, “If I submitted stuff as fiction, it was rejected. If I submitted it as poetry, it was accepted.” I went with the flow. Go with the flow.
MARK WUNDERLICH
In terms of your daily practice, are you always working on an erasure text?
MARY RUEFLE
Yes.
MARK WUNDERLICH
Are you also always working on poems? Is that something that you attend to regularly, or is that more sporadic?
MARY RUEFLE
I’m not always working on poems, I don’t write every day. Poems are sporadic, especially at this point. I mean, I've written more than enough. They’re sporadic. I work on erasure when I’m home, every morning when I wake up. If for any reason I can’t do it, then the next day I have to do double the amount. I do two facing pages a day. I did two this morning. If I had skipped this morning, tomorrow I would have to do a double set of facing pages.
It’s very meditative. It’s a habit. It’s a magical part of the day because I’m doing something that’s fun, that I love to do, and the rest of the day is all downhill after that. So yeah, I work on erasures every day. And yet, in a way, they’re less important than the written work, which is sporadic. I might write a letter during the day—that’s writing to me, it’s all writing. The only working habit I have is the erasures.
MARK WUNDERLICH
What do you hope viewers of your erasures will take away from the work? What is it you imagine they might see? What do you hope?
MARY RUEFLE
I have only one goal with the erasures, and that is to make someone smile. If someone looks at a page—it’s not going to happen with every page—if someone finds a page and a smile comes to their face, or looks at one of the postcards and smiles, then my job’s done. All I ask for is to make someone smile. That sounds sentimental, but I don’t care. I don’t have any other goals.
MARY RUEFLE is the author of over a dozen books, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and A Little White Shadow (2006), a book of erasures. A full-color facsimile of her erasure An Incarnation of the Now was published in a limited edition by See Double Press. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.
MARK WUNDERLICH is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, including God of Nothingness (Graywolf, 2021) and The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and received the 2015 Rilke Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Slate, and in more than thirty anthologies. He lives in Catskill, New York, and is Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
