Mary Ruefle

:) Emoticon automates affect

I start writing this lecture after class. I’m following what the poet Mary Ruefle writes in her book Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) about how, upon being required to deliver standing lectures to graduate students, she opted to write them out instead of providing spontaneous, informal talks. She writes, “I preferred to write my lectures because I am a writer and writing is my natural act, more natural than speaking.” I am following this impulse to write into the questions and materials at hand. 

I start writing this lecture after class. I’m following what the poet Mary Ruefle writes in her book Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) about how, upon being required to deliver standing lectures to graduate students, she opted to write them out instead of providing spontaneous, informal talks.

A short interview with Marilyn Irwin

Marilyn Irwin : photo credit: John W. MacDonald
Marilyn Irwin : photo credit: John W. MacDonald

Marilyn Irwin’s poetry has been published by above/ground pressArc Poetry Magazine and Bywords and has or will appear in ottawaterThe Peter F. Yacht ClubNew American Writing, and Matrix Magazine, as well as the anthology Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013). The winner of the 2013 Diana Brebner Prize, her fourth and most recent chapbook is tiny (In/Words Press). A fifth chapbook is imminent. She lives with her two cats in Ottawa.

Defaced/refaced books

The erasure practices of Jen Bervin and Mary Ruefle

At the 2013 Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Boston, I wandered among rows of bright, strange, and intriguing books piled high on independent poetry press tables. Hand-stamped, letter-pressed, spray-painted, ripped, sewn, and covered in tinfoil; poems shaped like boxes, poems printed on records, poems made into pop-ups or puzzles, or rolled as cigarettes — I even spotted a tiny book hidden inside a plastic egg.

Syndicate content