Hi.
I write poetry and short fiction. I’m on twitter as @harpertext, my email is: harpertext [at] outlook [.] com
I don’t blog as much as I used to.
Thanks for stopping by.
Rail: Before I turned on the tape for this interview, you were talking about your personal library and how you are at a stage in your life where your desire to re-read certain texts means you will not have time to read new things. I think of the final two lines of “Thirteen”: “I read three thousand books, / and then I died.”
Ruefle: I recently unpacked 17 boxes of books that I haven’t seen in 22 years. Many of the books were texts I first read in college. I thought I would easily be able to get rid of them. I found myself extremely attached to them. An example would be my old Penguin edition of Ulysses. I know I will never read it again because I don’t have time but I couldn’t part from it. I realized that my wanting to re-read so many of these books again was actually a desire to live my life all over again.
— Mary Ruefle, interview in The Brooklyn Rail, July 2014
Delighted to say that The Interpreter’s House issue 68 is out, the final issue edited by Martin Malone and assistant Charles Lauder Jnr. I’m delighted my poem ‘The Cooler’ is included, my second appearance in TIH after two of my poems appeared in issue 58. Thanks to Martin and Charles.
It’s a great journal, 130 pages of always interesting poetry and reviews, and I look forward to seeing the next issues from editor Georgi Gill and assistant Andrew Wells.
Eye to the Telescope Issue 27 has gone live today, on the theme of Arthuriana. My Gawain poem ‘Ask’ is included, alongside an interesting and inventive range of Arthurian poems.
Many thanks to editor Adele Gardner!
The Summer 2017 issue of fantasy zine Mirror Dance has gone live, with a theme of masks and disguises.
As well as fiction, it contains poems by Jeana Jorgensen, Mary Soon Lee, Todd Dillard and Robert Beveridge.
Delighted that it also includes my long poem ‘Sheer‘, a fairy tale retelling, or perhaps a fairy tale slice-of-life.
Thanks to Megan Arkenberg!
The most we can do is to write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.
— Oliver Sacks, quoted in Bill Hayes, My Life with Oliver Sacks, The Observer, 26 March 2017
The eleventh issue of Liminality has gone live today.
I’m very pleased that my poem ‘The Well‘ is included, my fourth appearance in the journal.
Thanks to Shira Lipkin and Mattie Joiner!
In 1958, in July, [Wright] wrote me a letter (I’m sure similar letters went to others) in which he announced that he was through writing poems. […] The first issue of Robert Bly’s magazine, The Fifties, which he read at this crucial point, arrived like a reproach. (He did not yet know Bly.) He told me: “So I quit. I have been betraying whatever was true and courageous […] in myself and in everyone else for so long, that I am still fairly convinced that I have killed it. So I quit.” In the letter he called himself “a literary operator (and one of the slickest, cleverest, most ‘charming’ concoctors of the do-it-yourself New Yorker verse among all current failures) […]”
A day later he wrote again, admitting that “I can’t quit and go straight. I’m too deep in debt to the Olympian syndicate. They’d rub me out.” (This is Roethke talk, who during mania often alluded to The Mob.)
— from Donald Hall, introduction to James Wright, Above the River (1992), p. 29-30
Through the Gate (in its current form) is “a weekly of fantastical poetry”. I’m delighted my poem ‘The Dig‘ is this week’s poem.
Thanks to editor Mitchell Hart!
Penelope’s situation (in Homer, of course, it’s a death shroud she’s weaving) seems to me an interesting figure for the predicament of the writer or artist: making something, ripping it up, making something, ripping it up, all the while vaguely hoping for one’s ship to come in, whatever that would mean, with nobody in the immediate vicinity paying much attention.
–Joseph Harrison, note on ‘The Cretonnes of Penelope’ in The Best American Poetry 1998, ed. John Hollander and David Lehman, p.302
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient;I hope not.
I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato’s downwards, have deeply distrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbours start talking.
— W. H. Auden (1938) quoted in James Fenton, Auden at Home, The New York Review of Books, April 27 2000
Edited to add: I don’t share Auden’s certainty that poetry “makes us more difficult to deceive”. It’s an interesting assertion, though, and I’m wondering how one might test it…
