The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Five): Mary Ruefle [by Angela Ball]

Müller and Me

Wilhelm Müller, 1794-1827

I am an ordinary fauna, one
who can’t remember if a fife
is a rifle or a flute.
After all, there’s strife
and fight in it,
but on the other hand
it’s a short sweet word
that rhymes with life.
The way the cemetery looks made of books
and the library is a graveyard.
When love frees itself from pain
the angels cut off their wings
and throw them down to earth
(throw in your scarf
to cover my eyes
so your shadow won’t wake me).
I’d like to teach
a young starling to speak,
but clearly and distinctly
so his words wouldn’t be
like human ones.
I really believed my pain
was not that small,
but how heavy is my happiness
that no sound on earth
can encompass it?
I’m on a fifer’s ride
My steed is black and steady
I say goodnight to everyone
To everyone goodmorn

--Mary Ruefle

"Müller and Me" from Trances of the Blast. Copyright 2013. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley 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. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate.

Photo credit: Libby Lewis Photography

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Five): Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle’s “Müller and Me” is an imagined collaboration with William Müller, the great German poet whose best-known works are Die shöne Müllerin and Winterreise, transformed by Franz Shubert into song cycles.

It begins with the surprise announcement, “I am an ordinary fauna. . .”—word coined in 1771, normally plural in usage—and moves to the word “fife,” embedding it in childlike, jokey play:

     After all, there’s strife

     and fight in it,

     but on the other hand

     it’s a short sweet word

     that rhymes with life.

We think, perhaps, of the well-known Archibald Willard painting, The Spirit of 1776, featuring three musicians marching into battle, one of them a bandaged fife player. The fife is most often found in the fife and drum corps of an army—as anomalous, in its ornamental lightness, as a lyric poem in a world of wars. Müller fought against Napoleon as part of the Prussian army.

“The way” provides a short-stemmed transition to a graveyard, perhaps an 18^th or 19^th-century one, in which stones are upright, leaning books; their titles, lives. In characteristic reversal, the metaphor turns on its heel: “and the library is a graveyard.”

Transitions in Ruefle’s poems follow a logic whose mainspring is play—the opposite of that referred to in Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto”: “Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.” Müller’s poems, as Shubert translates them to song, are pain-drenched, Winterreise in particular. As sung by Thomas Quastoff, a German bass-baritone whose artistry belies severe thalidomide-induced deformities, its winter journey is surpassingly sad. Müller worked on Winterreise as he was dying of syphilis.

“Müller and Me” daydreams a war with pain—pain that in these three lines recalls William Blake’s Tyger, beast so fierce he makes the stars “throw down their spears”

     When love frees itself from pain

     the angels cut off their wings

     and throw them down to earth

and we are invited to discrete participation in art’s mission, with the light weapon of word-music, to overthrow pain:

     (throw in your scarf

     to cover my eyes

     so your shadow won’t wake me).

The poem’s “I” would “like to teach / a young starling to speak, / but clearly and distinctly /so his words wouldn’t be / like human ones.” “I really believed,” she says, “my pain was not that small.” These two attempts at articulation—one projected, one owned—dramatize the difficulty of uniting words with experience, difficulty that can convert to paradoxical joy:

     but how heavy is my happiness

     that no sound on earth

     can encompass it?

Mary Ruefle’s ludic and majestic collaboration with Müller ends with an expression of poetic mission not unlike Kenneth Koch’s first childhood poem: “I have a little pony / I ride him up and down . . . .”  Her pocket artist’s statement formally and tonally echoes both the cosmic reach of William Blake and the wholesale friendliness of Frank O’Hara:

     I’m on a fifer’s ride

     My steed is black and steady

     I say goodnight to everyone

    To everyone goodmorn

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Denise Duhamel]

Terrific post, Angela! Mary's poem here sparkles and your elucidation makes "Müller and Me" 3-D!

[Angela Ball]

Denise, I love your comment. Thank you!

[Collin Callahan]

I love the Koch bit..

It reminds me of the opening of Elegy on Toy Piano by dean young (which was written in memory of Koch):
You don’t need a pony / to connect you to the unseeable / or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

[Angela Ball]

Collin, that's a great association--thank you!

[Emily Fragos]

As a lover of music, I would like to add two additional artists to great performances of Schubert's "pain-drenched" Winterreise: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Ian Bostridge. Both singers -- and the magnificent Thomas Quasthoff -- give legendary renditions of the masterpiece. Thank you.

[J. Guaner]

The vowel of ai creates a rippling rhythm from line to line, as cited by Angela.

[Bill Hayward]

Extraordinary....thank you, thank you...