{"id":105726,"date":"2016-12-12T12:51:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T17:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105726"},"modified":"2018-12-13T11:42:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T16:42:39","slug":"becoming-invisible-an-interview-with-mary-ruefle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/12\/becoming-invisible-an-interview-with-mary-ruefle\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming Invisible: An Interview with Mary Ruefle"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"I<\/a>

Mary Ruefle in 2011. (photo \u00a9 Matt Valentine.)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I spoke with Mary Ruefle on the phone\u00a0recently, she\u2019d just moved into a new house and had spent the morning putting screws into the back of a mirror.\u00a0\u201cI had my toolbox out and one of the screws was deficient,\u201d she told me, \u201cso I had to find another and it was just endless \u2026\u00a0<\/em>You need two people for this sort of thing, but I did it myself.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a statement akin to many in her new collection,\u00a0<\/em>My Private Property<\/a>, a m\u00e9lange of essays, stories, and prose poems, in which small objects often become vehicles for profound reflection. Ruefle, best known for her poetry, begins much of her work this way\u2014she muses on ordinary things like keys or clouds, yellow scarves or golf pencils, until those descriptions unfurl and beget larger, existential meditations on sadness and boredom, on language and lullabies and autonomy in old age. Our conversation was like that, too, always unraveling toward some arresting observation.<\/em><\/p>\n

To work with Ruefle is to enjoy the pleasures of another age; she rarely uses a computer. I mailed her the transcript of our interview, and she returned it with scrawls of red ink and typewriter marks. The last page had been touched by a lit cigarette, leaving a small orbicular burn in the right margin with a stale, nimbus-like ring around it\u2014punctuating, with great finality, the end of our conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In your poem \u201cA Half-Sketched Head,\u201d you wrote, \u201cIf we were thermometers, no one would want to be thirty; everyone would want to be seventy-eight.\u201d My Private Property<\/em> returns to this theme of getting older and embracing old age. Take \u201cPause,\u201d your essay on menopause. You write about a feeling most women experience as they age, the feeling of becoming invisible, of becoming more and more like a ghost because we\u2019re no longer noticed in the same way we once were. But you settle on this, that \u201cbeing invisible is the biggest secret on earth, the most wondrous gift that anyone could ever have given you.\u201d What do you mean?<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Well, thematically, aging and death become one in the same for writers, and very often you lose young readership because you\u2019re no longer interested in the things young people are interested in. The time for exuberance, energy, endless curiosity, endless activity within a body of work, that drops away and everything becomes bittersweet. But this becoming invisible\u2014all women talk about it. There\u2019s a period of transition that\u2019s so disorienting that you\u2019re confused and horrified by it, you can\u2019t get a grip on it, but it does<\/em> pass. You endure it, and you are patient, and it falls away. And then you come into a new kind of autonomy that you simply didn\u2019t have when you were young. You didn\u2019t have it when your parents were alive, you didn\u2019t have it back when you were once a woman to be seen. It\u2019s total autonomy and freedom, and you become a much stronger person. You\u2019re not answerable to anyone anymore. For me, it was a journey of shedding the sense of needing to please someone\u2014parents, children, partners.<\/p>\n

Men don\u2019t become invisible in the same way. There\u2019s a difference in power between men and women, and I know I\u2019m using an archaic formula but I do belong to another century. For the longest time, male power was posited in the accumulation of wealth or experience, and experience was something every man could have. And a woman\u2019s power was always posited on physical attractiveness, the ability to have children. So as a man ages, he gains power, and as a woman ages, she loses it, or feels as though she does. If you go back to this paradox, which I understand people may find antiquated, you find there are still shards and shreds of it everywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Has this \u201cinvisibility\u201d affected your writing?<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s always a certain amount of invisibility when you write. You\u2019re alone in a room, no one is looking over your shoulder. When I was young, writing was the one invisible space I had, and it made me very happy because I could become invisible while writing<\/em>. I still feel this way, except there\u2019s much less of a difference between my inner, creative life and my outer life than when I was young. And that\u2019s a joyful thing!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been a poet for more than thirty years. Have you been writing prose all this time, too?<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Yes, I\u2019ve always been writing these pieces, but they\u2019d been edited out of books because they didn\u2019t fit. Today no one would blink, but my first book of poems was published in 1982 and the prose just didn\u2019t \u201cwork,\u201d so I saved them. When my first collection of prose came out, The Most of It<\/em>, in 2008, there were pieces in it that were written in 2005, 2006, 2007, but the earliest one is from 1975. It\u2019s not a big book, so it\u2019s not as if I was writing them furiously, but as they arose, they got put in the prose folder. One of the pieces in that book, \u201cBeautiful Day,\u201d I found in a folder on the floor. It was handwritten, because I handwrite everything initially, and I said, What\u2019s this? When did I write this? How\u2019d it get here? I had no memory of it. I started to read it and sort of liked it, so I typed it up. And if I couldn\u2019t read my handwriting, I just put new sentences in. I remember it had made me very happy because I thought, This is fun, I don\u2019t have to write anything. It\u2019s here in a folder and it\u2019s done!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

My Private Property<\/em> is only your second collection of prose. Do you find the writing process to be much different than writing poetry?<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s always different. I don\u2019t have any ideas when I write a poem, and the poems don\u2019t really have an intent\u2014should I say such a thing? It would take me sixty pages to explain what I mean \u2026 But for the prose pieces, I have folders with subjects, ideas, and experiences that I want to write about. I don\u2019t know where the piece will go, but they can be based on things. The prose pieces all have a different rhythm, and I envision them with a right-flush margin. It\u2019s different because prose is a public language and poetry is a private language, and every person on the planet who is fortunate enough to be able to speak, speaks in sentences\u2014fragments, too, but often full sentences. The standards for public discourse are very different from poetry.<\/p>\n

Poems are my inner life, take it or leave it. I don\u2019t particularly care what the reader thinks because I\u2019m just not invested in other people\u2019s responses to my inner life. With discourse, with prose, it\u2019s much scarier. There\u2019s something built into its very nature\u2014it\u2019s more open and external, and it\u2019s in exchange with another. I\u2019m a nervous wreck when I write prose, and I\u2019m not in the least when I write poems. If I\u2019m writing a poem, it never occurs to me that somebody is going to read it. It\u2019s taken me an entire lifetime to get over the fact that there are people out there who read my poems. In the beginning I was like, How did you see it? Where did you read it? I was forgetting that it was in a magazine somewhere. It\u2019s like it doesn\u2019t exist anymore, once I\u2019ve written it. It always shocks me that people read poetry, even though I read it and love it and it\u2019s my life. But it doesn\u2019t shock me that people read prose. So I have the expectation of a reader, of a listener<\/em>, when writing prose that I simply don\u2019t have when I write a poem. When I write a poem, I\u2019m writing for myself, the dead, and God\u2014none of whom exist!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

We published two pieces from My Private Property<\/em> in our Spring issue<\/a> as poems\u2014\u201cMilk Shake\u201d and \u201cThe Woman Who Couldn\u2019t Describe a Thing if She Could.\u201d But when we went over edits, you told me you didn\u2019t think of them as poems.<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Oh, I don\u2019t care what people call them. In the new book, in my mind, there are essays, stories and prose poems. An example of an essay would be \u201cMy Private Property,\u201d the title piece. An example of a prose poem would be \u201cLucky,\u201d and an example of a story would be \u201cThe Gift.\u201d But you know, who cares!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Some writers care quite a bit.<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Oh, you\u2019re absolutely right. People care desperately. Some take entire classes on What Is a Prose Poem? But honestly, I\u2019m not interested. My interest in drawing lines between genres and coming up with very clear definitions for these things is very \u2026 well, if I\u2019m being frank, I just don\u2019t have enough time left on this earth to spend doing that. So for me, if I write something and it\u2019s lineated, it\u2019s poetry. If it\u2019s not lineated, it\u2019s prose. I read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and I love them all. I can\u2019t sluice them anymore than I can sluice my love of open fields and deep woods.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The title essay, \u201cMy Private Property,\u201d is about a girl who skips school over and over to stand in front of a shrunken head at the Congo Museum, one she has admittedly fallen in love with. This girl is you?<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Oh yes, every word is true! I fell in love with an object at a museum, this small head, and I went back again and again and again, and this was the object I wanted to stand in front of, the way someone might fall in love with a painting. My memories are so strong, but what amazes me is that I forgot about this one, I never wrote about it until now, and I don\u2019t remember how it came back to me. It\u2019s a source of never-ending wonder, how that moment in the Congo Museum when I was sixteen resurfaced at sixty-four, when I was writing. It took that long for the experience to incubate. I love that about writing, how past experiences can incubate for decades and then suddenly appear. It can be a memory, an image, an experience, an idea\u2014they come back! This experience was so powerful that I should\u2019ve known, I was too young to know, but I should\u2019ve known it was going to come back. Anything that powerful will incubate and come back. And there are countless examples in poems, in things that were dormant but erupted later. The shrunken head is a perfect example of this, and it grew up into this essay.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Along with this little head, you\u2019ve written, in My Private Property<\/em> and elsewhere, about dolls, and you\u2019ve written about Clarice Lispector\u2019s story \u201cThe Smallest Woman in the World\u201d and the epigraph to this book is taken from Walter de la Mare\u2019s Memoirs of a Midget<\/em>. Is it fair to assume that you admire the miniature?<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

I love dolls\u2014the idea of dolls, Rilke\u2019s writing on dolls. They\u2019re little, fake human beings. I\u2019ve seen a picture of the earliest human form made of clay in the British Isles, but I\u2019m thinking now of when they first began as something one gives to a child. They\u2019re essential. They\u2019re there when you\u2019re learning how to relate to one another at a very young age. And when you\u2019re playing, a profoundly important psychological interchange is going on. What\u2019s important\u2014and I write about this in Madness, Rack, and Honey<\/em>\u2014is not when the child first speaks to the doll but when the doll first speaks back. That\u2019s an enormous leap, when the doll has a voice that answers, when it enters into conversation with the child, and they often do. That\u2019s the great moment. So yes, I love the miniature. I\u2019m not immune to the pleasures of small things and a shrunken world. Now, I\u2019m in the process of moving into a new house, and I\u2019m unpacking, and there are a lot of very, very big things I have to do. I have to put curtains up, I have to hang things, I have to construct shelves\u2014I have to do all of that! And the whole time I\u2019m doing it, what I really want to be doing is opening the boxes with all the tiny, tiny things, putting them out, and spending hours arranging them. That\u2019s my dessert.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Many of these pieces begin rather simply, considering small things\u2014like a string of Christmas-tree lights or the ground or crumbs\u2014but they unspool into grander, existential meditations, and each one seems to knead at some ineffable truth. There\u2019s a closeness I feel toward you, as I read this book, as if you\u2019re telling me the secrets of the world, or at least of yours.<\/p>\n

RUEFLE<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s interesting because I don\u2019t divulge secrets! But I do understand what you mean, now that I take a moment to think about it. I\u2019m a deeply private person, otherwise I wouldn\u2019t write poems. So maybe it\u2019s the private person using the public language that you\u2019re responding to. But you won\u2019t find much of my personal life in my work. You won\u2019t find it in the poems or the prose, but you will find my inner life. And that\u2019s our deepest life, our secret<\/em> life\u2014our invisible<\/em> life. And there we go, back to invisibility. When you become invisible, you become your inner life\u2014that\u2019s wonderful<\/em>\u2014because your outer, physical life is gone, and you\u2019ve been waiting your whole life for that to happen. To be alive without a body\u2014isn\u2019t that the afterlife everyone dreams of?<\/p>\n

I remember reading, when I was young, an account of the Goncourt brothers and how they talked, later in life, in caf\u00e9s, of nothing but physical ailments, and I rolled my eyes. Now I understand. The body becomes the subject of subjects. The unspooling of the body leads to rather grand contemplations at the same time it leads to the quotidian, the daily aches. It is the most beautiful and heartbreaking of paradoxes. It\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Caitlin Youngquist is an associate editor at\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAll women talk about it. 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