Trances of the Blast

by Mary Ruefle

"One of the wisest books I've read in years, and it would be a shame to think that only poets will read it."—David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review , on Madness, Rack, and Honey "What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle . . . any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence."—Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America, William Carlos Williams Award citation Trances of the Blast is a major new collection from recent National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Mary Ruefle. Full of Ruefle's particular wisdom and wit, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts—its paradoxes, failures, and loss—and help us better appreciate its redeeming strangeness. If only I'd understood that loneliness
was just loneliness, only loneliness
and nothing more.

But I was blind.
Little did I know.
If only I'd invented salt.
I might have died happy.
I wish I loved you,
but you can't have everything. Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey , was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.

Genres: Poetry, American, Nonfiction, Adult, Female Authors, The United States Of America

136 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.

Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world was designed and built
to overwhelm and astonish.
Which makes it hard to like.

Mary Ruefle has been a favorite of mine for some time now, yet I’ve constantly failed to put my appreciation into words. Her poetry is near ineffable beauty. Selected Poems left me stunned into speechlessness, and I’ve always been unable to review it. Reading Ruefle is like a being a newborn child picked up from the crying in a crib by it’s mother; the child cannot focus vision enough to really see her, has no sense of language to describe the effect, just knows that this is something warm and welcoming and safe to engulf you in it’s love, something that you need deep down. Trances of the Blast by the decorated and loved Vermont College MFA professor poet is likely the best work she has penned. Full of her typical charm, wit, insight and humour—for poems permeated with themes of loneliness and mortality, Ruefle is laugh-out-loud hilarious at many moments—Trances has a unique intellectual sensuality from the lighter touch to her poems and a joyful sense of playfulness and surrealistic probings into the mortal condition.

The Bunny Gives Us a Lesson in Eternity
We are a sad people, without hats.
The history of our nation is tragically benign.
We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard.
We are fond of the little bunny with the bent ear
who stands alone in the moonlight
reading what little text there is on the graves.
He looks quite desirable like that.
He looks like the center of the universe.
Look how his mouth moves mouthing the words
while the others are busy making more of him.
Soon the more will ask of him to write their love
letters and he will oblige, using the language
of our ancestors, those poor clouds in the ground,
beloved by us who have been standing here for hours,
a proud people after all.

'Explain yourself or vanish,' writes Ruefle, and Trances evoked such passion within me that I must insult the ineffable with meek pillars of words simply to celebrate her beauty. Ruefle hits all the right notes yet they are difficult to pin down, elusive and weightless as the wind across a wonderous sunset. She clearly has a dexterous working knowledge of poetic theory (consult Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures for her lectures of poetry), yet she keeps the seams and clockwork under a polished exterior that seems to grow up from the ground plain and pure and perfect or like a stunningly played round of beginners luck as if nothing could be more natural and true. Her poems are like those seemingly impossible architectural structures. There is certainly an extensive study into architectural engineering in the design and framework skeleton hidden inside, but from outside it looks like a miracle.

Broken Spoke
You grow old
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by a wheel.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.

Ruefle is a beacon of hope and light in a world where we are born to die, growing in the soils of pain, friendships, failure, joy and loneliness until we inevitably wilt. Through her, we can watch the absurdity of it all and laugh, comforted in the arms of her words. This is the junk of everyday life, she says, transforming our basic moments into visions of sprawling brilliance. Ruefle has the ability to find the hidden in the plain, or to reconstruct reality into something more fitting (see her white-out poetry in A Little White Shadow for her ingenuity in finding the brightest spark in a starry night). She walks us through fields of death, from loved ones to historic ones, as well as acceptance of her own impending death:

will you take me home
and hold me in the palm of your hand,
posthumously, anonymously,
and when the time is right
blow me away?¹

She looks back at the bewilderment of childhood, and how this reaction to reality penetrates our lives upward through our years, and prances about loneliness with flair and frivolity without washing out the dark undertones and weight.

My life.
Is a passing September
no one will recall.

Mary Ruefle is poetry's sweetheart, and this collection blew my heart about like rickety shutters in gale force winds. While she is difficult to pin down, this collection moves with such fluid grace and skill that it is impossible not to respond and discover a smile blossoming on your lips. A fragment from the poem White Buttons can be applied to my reaction to this collection:

Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet
(Mother do not worry
letters are not flesh
though there’s meaning in them…

Ruefle has a wealth of theory to tap into, but doesn’t let the theory theory of her brain overpower the creative parts and manages to avoid any self-conscious flinches in the text. Ruefle writes with crystal clear confidence and the poetry patriotism reverberates deep in the reader. There are multiple levels of artistic intellect functioning at all times, yet the the poetry reads as from the heart and not from the head. Roll these words up with your eyes, lick it sealed with your soul and inhale deep, Ruefle will get you to that sweet, comfortable headspace high.
5/5

¹ This, of course, speaking of both her as a posthumous, but of her poetry as well. The greatest gift of literature is that words on paper outlive the efforts of flesh. The self-referential nods to her poetry also associate with the epigraph for this collection, taken from the book of Revelations:

Go, and take the little book which is open in the hand. Take it, and eat it up; and it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey, but it shall make thy belly bitter.-Revelations X

This passage is a battlecry for poetry, especially in the case of Ruefle where her words seduce yet plunge you into expositions on dark and bitter human truths. ‘Honey’ and ‘bitter’ await the reader in many of the poems, nestled in the words like a children’s Search-and-Find activity book, and Ruefle delivers her own variation of the warning of words in the belly within the poem Abdication:

You can feel the poetry rotting
in your stomach.
You know with absolute certainty
reality is the thing turned towards you.

This erudite playfulness is the ace up the sleeve for Ruefle and she plays it at the just the right moments.

A Penny for Your Thoughts
How are we to find eight short English words
that actually stand for autumn?
One peculiar way to die of loneliness
is to try. Pretend November has
a sliver of ice in her throat.
Pretend it is nice, pretend the sliver
of ice is nice, and beckons you.
Talk for half an hour about the little churchyard
full of the graves of people who have died
eating nachos. Go on until you can go no further brown.
Let the river flow. It is written in stone.
Let the sparrows take your only coin
and fly with it, twittering over some main event.
What color ribbon will you wear in your hair?
Now the clouds look burnt. But first they burned.
To you I must tell all or lie.

Provenance
In the fifth grade
I made a horse of papier-mache
and painted it white
and named it Aurora

We were all going to the hospital
each one with his little animal
to give to the girl who was
lying on her deathbed there
whose name I can’t recall

A classmate with freckles perhaps
or such small feet her footsteps
never mattered much

I did not want to give her anything
It seemed unfair she got to ride Aurora
whom I made with my own two hands
and took aside at birth and said go
while I had to walk
perhaps for a very long time

I thought perhaps the animals
would all come back
together and on one day
but they never did

And so I have had to deal with wild
intractable people all my days
and have been led astray in a world
of shattered moonlight and beasts and trees
where no one ever even curtsies anymore
or has an understudy

So I have gone up to the little room
in my face, I am making something
out of a jar of freckles
and a jar of glue

I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive

[Sienna · Rating 5 out of 5]

On that April afternoon, I quietly chose a seat in the middle of the auditorium at City Gallery Wellington and waited. I'm a fiddler, alternating between the Kindle app on my iPod and half-hearted attempts to find an open wireless network, a leg-twitcher, a cautious observer. One of my favorite writers sat down beside me with her husband; other book-jacket-familiar faces appeared, smiling at one another and filling up the room.

To be honest, I had only read a few of Mary Ruefle's poems before deciding to make the trek into town for her Writers on Mondays session. Best decision of the year? She's as engaging a reader as she is a writer, wry, funny, full of conviction and secrets she gives you the sense she's revealed just for you, the audience so swiftly won over. Yep, that was me: googling "Saga" as soon as I got home. It was the first piece she read, the first piece I fell for. And, with Trances of the Blast, it's finally in print:

Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging — crushed
and sparkling — in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.
In particular there is a rift through everything.
There is a rift running the length of Iceland
and so a rift runs through every family
and between families a feud.
It's called a saga. Rifts and sagas
fill the air, and beautiful old women
sing of them, so the air is filled with
music and the smell of berries and apples
and shouting when a gun goes off
and crying in closed rooms.
Faces, who needs them?
Eating the blood of oranges
I in my alcove could use one.
Abbas and ammas!
come out of your huts, travel
halfway around the world,
inspect my secret bank account of joy!
My face is a jar of honey
you can look through,
you can see everything
is muted, so terribly muted,
who could ever speak of it,
sealed and held up for all?

This is how Ruefle opens her newest collection: confessional and conversational, elliptic without being cryptic, wise and elemental. These trances read a bit like a far-flung jigsaw of a map piecing together the author's exploded memory palace and surrounding gardens and caves. (We all have caves, yeah? Ha ha, "Platonic.") I love that I can time travel back to April and hear her voice when I read "Goodnight Irene" and "Provenance." The watchwords here are time, loneliness, happiness, the themes memories of childhood and family, the relationships between writing and language, writer and audience. The effect is utterly charming and compelling, scratching that sweet readerly spot where head and heart meet.

The first half strikes me as stronger. Ruefle gives us "Spikenard" and "Are We Alone? Is It Safe to Speak?" She dreams of Wilhelm Müller, "Receiving News of the Devastation of My Mind" and her "Favorite Song." She delights and appeases with "Apologia," and "One World at a Time" brings to mind the opening of Rose Macaulay's wonderful The Towers of Trebizond. Mostly she shares little bits of perfection, as in this unexpectedly Brautigan-esque snippet:

Argot

The moon passes her twentieth night.
Month after month, she dies so young.
What are the trout thinking?
At dawn on the thirteenth
I am lost in the great expanse
of tiny thoughts.
When I say trout I mean you.

But the second half is no slouch, either. "Poem Written Before I Was Born" is performance art waiting to happen at a future reading. I can't even talk about the wistful wonder of "Pipkins of the Mimulus." I'm flipping through the pages again and getting caught up in patterns I missed the first time around, at once happy and, well, lonely, or simply satisfied with solitude as I lose myself in Ruefle's words. See, here's the conclusion of "Jumping Ahead," with its double-dog-daring, heart-stopping speculation and confrontation:

If only I'd invented salt.
I might have died happy.
I wish I loved you,
but you can't have everything.
I ought to have had bizarre erroneous beliefs.
If only I'd had gigantic forelegs attached to my legs
I'd have leapt off the edge
every time I came to the edge of you.

(And comfort. I find this one weirdly reassuring. Ditto for "Broken Spoke.")

This review is hopelessly biased, this book one of my favorites of the year. The part of me that remembers and believes that "there are things more important / than life or death" wants time to pass quickly so that I can look forward to reading it from a new perspective, and to read more new poems from Ruefle. A little bit mad, a lot true, like "Picking Up Pinecones":

I light a few candles, so
the moon is no longer alone.
My secret heart wakes
inside its draped cage
and cracks a song.
After a life of imagining,
I notice the ceiling.
It is painted blue
with a border of pinecones.
I've spent my life in a forest.
Picking up new things,
will it never end?

Ye gods, I hope not.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

This slim hard handsome volume is packed with Ruefle delights. I haven't enjoyed the turns of a poem this much since I first read Kay Ryan. The boldfaced titles alone are worth the price of the book.

I could tell you more, but why? Read it. These poems make you lucky.

[Kelli Trapnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, relatable, surprising, weird. Lyric. Everything I want in poetry.

[rachel selene · Rating 3 out of 5]

”I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive”

in my library copy, a reader who came before me has circled this verse and penciled in two words: me too.

[tee · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe this isn’t the best mary ruefle work to start with or it is wise beyond my comprehension, because i just couldn’t love this book even though i really wanted to. it took me a couple months to get through for there weren't a lot of poems i liked, and the ones that i did didn’t stick with me. still going to read her other books though!

from ‘argot,’ “the moon passes her twentieth night.
month after month, she dies so young.
what are the trout thinking?
at dawn on the thirteenth
i am lost in the great expanse
of tiny thoughts.
when i say trout i mean you”

[Momo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I light a few candles, so / the moon is no longer alone," says the speaker in "Picking Up Pinecones," the last poem in this lovely and keen melancholy-happy-funny-sad volume. Each poem here is like a candle lit to show us that we (reader and writer) are not alone--words that ward off or contend with or acknowledge or even celebrate the lurking dark.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And if by chance that makes you happy / Explain yourself or vanish."

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow wow wowow. these poems really soared! i instantly clicked with her style—perhaps because i love e.e. cummings and i find their frankness and humor quite similar, as well as how ruefle manipulates syntax. i love when poets are unafraid to be playful! ruefle easily has the most original voice i’ve read in a long time and she possesses such duality. i did not love everything in this collection but the sheer unexpectedness of each poem makes up for that. so many times i lifted my head and turned as if to speak to someone next to me because i wanted to say look at this!!! look how clever she is!!! dead bees are described as two lions who fooled around in spring!! and

Time kissed me goodbye
and moved into a car without wheels
abandoned in a field.
I guess the little things
just ate him

and

and found herself one day in hell,
where she went causally and without
purpose, having read every poem
ever written, and finding not a single one
even remotely sad enough.


i do think the first half is better than the second but the last poem is truly stellar and i had so many favorites throughout. it was simply joyous. her ideas are endless and fresh and surprising and make me excited about language

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cheston Knapp (Managing editor of Tin House): I really hate it how some folks talk about poetry as though it were that flavor of jelly belly you carefully pick around, like buttered popcorn or jelly or, if they don’t have the gene (the Pleasure Gene), licorice. How they act like poetry is some course you can skip. As though it were not an entire fucking meal. So I’ve been dining out on some poetry. Read Mary Ruefle’s new collection, Trances of the Blast, which was like a hearty salad with fruit and foreign cheese in it, arugula and mixed berries with some semi-firm sheep’s feta. I want to take the menu home with me. Seriously, though, can’t recommend this book enough. Do your tummy a solid.

[Dan Butterfass · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not done with the book yet, as I giddily jumped around after unwrapping it from the publisher--end, middle, and beginning, my own sneak previews, but now I have again started at the beginning--and am only on page 17, up through the poem "Middle School," the funniest serious poem I have read among thousands in a long time. I've read it five times now, each time it's funnier, funnier yet with more wine....

Mary Ruefle and August Kleinzahler are doing more to inform and advance contemporary poetry than any other poets still on the oxygenated side of earth....thank you and goodnight!

[Terresa Wellborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deserts, Walt Whitman, a game of solitaire, herons, a condition of the eye. As Ruefle writes, who does she become? All of these things: some loveliness, loneliness, dark earth, and a face like a jar of honey.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites: "Paris by Moonlight," "Happy," "Pipkins of the Mimulus," "Saga," "Are We Alone? Is It Safe to Speak?," "Provenance," "Apologia," "Hold That Thought," "Women in Labor," "The Bunny Gives Us a Lesson in Eternity," "Broken Spoke," "Narrow Road to the North," and "Sudden Additional Energy"

[Nicole Testa LaLiberty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm always impressed when I read Mary Ruefle's poetry, by her disregard of convention. She uses words I forget exist (or am just learning the existence of), and phrasing that I hardly ever see used in contemporary poetry. Refreshing and soul-squishing.

[Dan Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruefle is hilarious. It might be because I'm also a fan of serious poems tinged with humor, but I highly enjoyed this. Some poems will definitely leave you confused, but even within those, there's usually at least one line you can grab onto.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly excellent, packed with incredible moments of insight, wisdom, music. Can't wait to reread again, more slowly.

[erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

can't stop thinking about "provenance". "I thought perhaps the animals / would all come back / together and on one day / but they never did". and then some. I love it.

[Arielle Lipset · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read.

[Jessica Wiggins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hated this poetry collection. At one point, reading it on my porch, I had the impulse to toss it in the street, walk inside, and abandon it to the elements. My brain could not arrange maybe 75% of the poems into anything approaching meaning. I tried various things. I have read pretty widely; surely something would work. I let the words wash over me like a Beat stream of consciousness piece. I focused intently on each line, dissecting it like a classically-influenced, cerebral Hart Crane poem. I tried to find some kind of music or joy, some thread of luminosity. Nothing worked, and that 75% remains just as opaque.

This is frustrating in part because the other 25% contains treasures from the deep-down. Two poems, Provenance and Midsummer at Jefferson Slough, are among the most special I’ve read. I realized partway through that this collection is fucking dark. It’s difficult to see among Ruefle’s twisty language, but things started clicking when I saw that this collection is a cairn at a cliff’s edge, eroding away into a big black hole.

The poem College ends with the lines:

modeling myself after a woman
who could only say one thing at a time
and found herself one day in hell,
where she went casually and without
purpose, having read every poem
ever written, and finding not a single one
even remotely sad enough.

And yeah. Accurate. But some of these poems gripped me in a way I can’t quite describe and shook my brain a little loose. I would read again for that.

[hope h. · Rating 5 out of 5]

first foray into mary ruefle's poetry after loving her nonfiction prose, and this might even be better? she has such a magical way with words, i would recommend anyone read this.

the art of happiness

i am too weak to speak,
that is why i am writing this-
will you please bring me some water?
i cannot make the few feet to the sink,
the art of happiness prevents me.
when you bring me the water
make sure it is held in a glass.
water would rather be held by a glass
than be in a stream on its way to the ocean.
that is the art of happiness.
alas it will one day leave the glass
but water would rather be held by the body
than be in a stream on its way to the ocean.
alas it will one day leave the body
but not to worry now.
that is the art of happiness.
when water enters us it becomes
delirious, it gets to push things out of its way,
it gets to form an opinion and then express it,
it gets to see what no one else has seen.
as you can see i am dying of happiness.
please ask the surgeon to come
and remove this day-
i don't want to die of happiness.
what's a glass of water to you?
what's a phone call or two?

[also: yeah. just the entire book.]

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completely original and characteristically Ruefle as always ("I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / and I love being alive"). But at times I felt like the poet got too comfortable with her own genius. There were poems that were almost too neat, too "ah-of course", not one mole left standing in a cartoon whack-a-mole. I can see why Ruefle has lately turned more towards flash prose/flash-essay/genreless work, which I think succeeds more in capturing that same sublime, untranslatable je ne sais quackery I felt in her earlier works like the Adamant etc.

[Sarah Rinehart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I increasingly think poetry isn’t for me. Mary Ruefle’s writing in particular is semi-absurd riddles. I can get the often ironical tone, and certain lines make me laugh out loud or scoff, but I think I’ll stick to her lectures and prose.

Images/words/ideas she loves: time (and its warping or transition with memory and imagined situations), happiness (as a question, ironic statement), glass as a reflection of the ocean, words as paper birds, honey, shoe soles; rain as a device; repetition of lines and phrasings to achieve slightly altered meanings; deconstruction of the phrase "I love you"

[l · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just don't care for her.

[Lida]

I’m glad you know me well.
When I fall asleep, curling up
in a little ball, will you take me home
and hold me in the palm of your hand,
posthumously, anonymously,
and when the time is right
blow me away?

[Sien Van de Wouwer · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5

[Briana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect

[Nouk G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, he said, nothing remains of anybody, everything is aimless here. We wanted to follow a flying squirrel to the home of time, but everything exploded into fuzz.

[shelby]

"You can feel the poetry rotting
in your stomach.
You know with absolute certainty
reality is the thing turned toward you.
Day after day
you know what's for lunch:
another lamb."

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great little poems that are very personal and feel coarse, unrefined and at the same time beautiful. This is the first set of poems that I've read by Ruefle and as such I'm comparing them to other poets I've read rather than against her earlier work.

Her language and structure are not at all difficult to read and seem to build upon the small viscera of everyday life. There are some that are a bit more abstract or even surreal but on the whole they play with images and ideas more so (or at least more so on the surface) than purely with words divorced from the image.

It's funny that her poems seem similar to ones that I've written or imagine I might write, though they are "better" for the most part. That said, the similarity in style and their apparent simplicity do make me want to take up my own pen more. I can imagine this set having a similar effect on others - maybe a good book to give to budding poets/students? I can only speak for myself but I think this is definitely an easy volume to recommend to others, even those largely unversed (ha!) with contemporary poetry.

[Queer · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When we never went snorkeling / but nonetheless sensed people / are more capable of floating by / than any other creature"

You may not linger on every word Mary Ruefle writes, but you will remember them. They will float and glide by you as you go about your day and question the relationship between fife and rifle and strife and life. This is my first exposure to the poet. It will not be my last.