“It’s really sad that nowadays nobody shows any interest in the art of head-shrinking,” writes American poet Mary Ruefle, who turns 70 in April. You have to think about it for a moment. The piece of prose that begins so regretfully is called “My Private Property.” It’s about a girl who falls in love with a shrunken head in a colonial museum while she’s supposed to be at school. It seems to be about the basic freedom and comfort that twelve heads lying “like freshly laid eggs in a box” shrunk according to all the rules of the art can convey.
Another reflection by Mary Ruefle, this time from the prose miniature “Snow”: “I’d like to be in the classroom – I’m a teacher – would close my book, stand up, say ‘It’s snowing, I have to go now to have sex, goodbye’ and leave the room.” “Schnee” was translated by Esther Kinsky like the Suhrkamp volume “Mein Privatbesitz” named after the text quoted above, but is in Norbert Wehrs exercise book.
Not a few prominent admirers of their art have something in common that one could perhaps call joyful reverence
No. 97 of the Essen literary magazine recently devoted a focus to Ruefle and presented her for the first time in German. As usual for that exercise book a compact impression is conveyed through discussions with the author and a cross-sectional selection of her work. In Ruefle’s case: poems, short prose, excerpts from her Erasure books, of which there are said to be 99, and her very short short lectures. Interpretive comments from people like Clemens J. Setz expand the picture.
The Suhrkamp volume, on the other hand, does not provide any sorting texts. That corresponds to Ruefle, how to get out of one of the exercise book-Conversations can know. She tells how she stood in front of the shelves of a bookstore and noticed that there were far more books about poetry than volumes of poetry. “I stood and stared at the shelves. They demonstrated something that dismayed me.” So no friend of the paratext and secondary literature. She is also tired of the “genre wars”.
Mary Ruefle: My private collection. Translated from English by Esther Kinsky. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 127 pages, 18 euros.
Nonetheless, a cursory reading of “My Private Collection” and without the knowledge that one could exercise book through his editorial panorama art, the misunderstanding arises that Ruefle is just a whimsical person. A poet who lives stubbornly in a small town in the state of Vermont and from here sends her small texts, which are still written by hand, like fireflies into the world, but where they do not arrive, because fireflies develop slowly and only shine for a short time. Especially nothing for long distances across the Atlantic to Central Europe.
That exercise book revises this impression through the chorus of voices that Norbert Wehr organizes around Ruefle’s texts: in addition to Esther Kinsky, Ruefle is translated here by other protagonists of the local poetry scene: Norbert Lange, Anja Utler, Sonja vom Brocke. Between the lines of their work one seems to notice a mutual intimacy in all of them. Not far from the deep understanding that connects Mary Ruefle with her shrunken heads.
If you look at videos of her performances on the Internet, you will also notice the joyful reverence with which the poet is greeted all over the USA. Is it because Ruefle is so curious about “what keeps any surface buried deep beneath it”? And that this curiosity is already so rare in itself and even more rarely finds such an irritating linguistic expression in terms of choice of words and logical structures? Is Ruefle admired because she searches, digs, plunders and discovers, as it says in “Schnee”, acting just as mercilessly as she does fearlessly, with a completely unsentimental attitude towards beings and things? “I hated being a child / I hate being an adult / And I love being alive” ends the poem “Origin”. Doesn’t that say (almost) everything?
Clemens J. Setz admires her “never-ending amazement at creation”
Clemens J. Setz writes: “What touches me so deeply in Mary Ruefle’s work (…) is her never-ending amazement at creation, pervaded by a poetry of obvious facts.” The language can be used to show what that means. Esther Kinsky worked it out in German: A small tree wants to make its “Sterbchen” (as if it were just a burp), maltreated by the voracious “four-legged” (in which the “greed” is). “Earth-moving machines” and not “heavy equipment” dig up the ground in which Ruefle observes with her anthropological interest how the dead are treated in the same way as garbage, packed in “burial boxes” and not in “coffins”. Nothing but small but meaningful shifts in perception due to linguistic deviations. And only the particles, conjunctions and adverbs: How definitive an “and” sounds in Ruefle’s translation of Kinsky when it ends the round of contradictory conjunctions “yet” in the prose piece “Lucky”: “yet that didn’t happen (…) and when I woke up I was naked as a baby and alone and scared.”
The astonishment that Clemens J. Setz mentions should by no means be imagined as childish. It has other facets. On the one hand, a deep lack of understanding towards the insensitive. In an interview with Daniel Levin Becker, Ruefle talks about the art industry’s marketing ploys: “I regard a Frida Kahlo wallet as a mockery. The people who design everyday objects – a cup, a pillowcase – and depict a person’s face on them, who has suffered like Kahlo: What else can you think of but money?”
On the other hand, in many texts the anger resonates that “real feeling” and the real truth are met with disinterest, out of sheer laziness. The essay “The Pause” offers a nice increase in this respect. When it comes to menopause, she doesn’t want to talk about hot flashes like others do, Ruefle writes: “Like a woman, the most undepressed, optimistic, confident woman I know, woke up one morning and went straight to the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife ( she’s an excellent cook) to put it in your heart. That was menopause.” As a survivor of this period in a woman’s life, Ruefle can tell of the gift for the years “that are still to come”: the gift of invisibility, i.e. the freedom to be yourself. To the younger ones she says, “You’re just a girl playing life.”
Mary Ruefle tends towards definitions, formulates principles and clearly states why: “Whoever sleeps through a truth will only wake up to the bitter end.” But she learned what it was all about from that shrunken head in the museum. It was then that she realized what the school didn’t teach, that everything in that museum “was acquired by a wickedness so vile and unspeakable that our heads cannot grasp it and have not a single word for it.” Endless “corridors of words” have to be strived for “in our hopeless search for an innermost chamber of understanding that doesn’t exist”. And so one could continue to quote, more and more enthusiastic about these sentences, so inconspicuous at first, which describe what is. And in a way you haven’t read before.