I wrote about Mary Ruefle in early October—and now, on this last day of November, I’m writing about her again. Tomorrow my workshop will discuss “Lectures I Will Never Give,” the final essay (or lecture, or brain scan) in Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. Maybe I’ll ask my students to come up with some “Poems I Will Never Write.” Maybe we’ll read aloud Giacomo Leopardi’s “To Himself,” which Ruefle calls “The World’s Bleakest Poem.” (Sample lines: “Bitterness and boredom is life, / nothing else ever, and mud is the world.”) Maybe we’ll speculate about the lecture “in which Omar Khayyam meets Duran Duran.”
With Ruefle, you never know. And that’s been the chief joy of teaching her lectures this semester: not knowing where the lectures are headed, and not knowing what we’ll seize on in discussion. (Two not-knowings. One joy.) She gives us license to laugh (“But honestly, do you want me to talk about pantyhose and stockings for forty minutes?”) and to loaf (“as artists we understand the vital necessity of wasting time, of loafing and doing nothing”). She also reminds us of the imaginative possibilities open to poets:
[W]hen I write, I take into consideration not another body but space, abyss, time, pulse, and this encounter constitutes the other great struggle in life—that of the mind in consideration of mindlessness.
I feel like I could spend the rest of my day/week/life contemplating the implications of that statement. But then my students would go untaught and my children would go unfed and my friends would go unloved. (The first great struggle in life, by the way, has to do with how we treat each other: “the failures and successes of mutual consideration.” “Therein,” Ruefle writes, “lie many tragedies and comedies.”)
In my earlier post on Ruefle, I mentioned two topics—sentimentality and metaphor—that I’d like to keep thinking about. Let’s save sentimentality for another day. About metaphor, Ruefle writes:
Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event. A poem must rival a physical experience and metaphor is, simply, an exchange of energy between two things. If you believe that metaphor is an event, and not just a literary term denoting comparison, then you must conclude that a certain philosophy arises: the philosophy that everything in the world is connected. I’ll go slowly here: if metaphor is not idle comparison, but an exchange of energy, an event, then it unites the world by its very premise—that things connect and exchange energy.
If you’re taking the time to read a blog post about poetry, you probably understand what Ruefle means. I’ve been collecting metaphors over the past couple of months—from poems, of course, but also from sports. Here’s the great Kansas City Monarchs pitcher Satchel Paige, after losing a race for the Missouri Legislature by a 9-1 margin: “I’ve got as much right in politics as a mule has in a garage.” And here’s Kevin Bumgarner, father of Madison, after his son shut down the Kansas City Royals in Game 7 of this year’s World Series: “I didn’t know if he had enough left tonight. But I did know that boy would try to steal a steak off the devil’s plate.”
Such energy! Such connections! You feel them as they hit you. There’s nothing ornamental, nothing after-the-fact, about them. Ruefle offers one of her own favorite metaphors in “Lectures I Will Never Give”: Hamlet’s claim that he “could live in a nutshell and count himself the king of infinite space (were it not for the fact that he had bad dreams).” Again, it’s a physical event: we’re with Hamlet (for a second, anyway) in that nutshell.*
Metaphor shows us, and makes us feel, the world in flux. This is Lucretius’s world, Shakespeare’s world, our world. Ruefle celebrates this world in “Short Lecture on the Nature of Things,” which I’ll offer in full:
(Turn vase into a hat and wear it)
You think the vase has become a hat; it has not.
My body has become an upside-down flower.
***
* My two favorite sentences in Madness, Rack, and Honey come from Ruefle’s “Short Lecture on Shakespeare”: “Yet there is one hard cold clear fact about him, a fact that freezes the mind that dares to contemplate it: in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn’t even speak.”