Madness, rack, and honey Collected lectures

Mary Ruefle, 1952-

Book - 2012

"Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading A Book Is A Sign Of Order In The World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion."--Publisher description.

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Subjects
Published
Seattle : [St. Paul, Minn.] : Wave Books ; Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution ©2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Mary Ruefle, 1952- (author)
Edition
1st ed
Item Description
"[Also] available in limited edition hardcover directly from publisher"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
viii, 326 pages, [1] leaf of plates : illustrations ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-324).
ISBN
9781933517575
  • Introduction
  • On Beginnings
  • Poetry and the Moon
  • On Sentimentality
  • On Theme
  • On Secrets: Eight Beginnings, Two Ends
  • On Fear
  • Madness, Rack, and Honey
  • My Family Dickinson
  • Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World
  • Remarks on Letters
  • Kangaroo Beach
  • I Remember, I Remember
  • Twenty-Two Short Lectures
  • Lectures I Will Never Give
  • Acknowledgments
  • Selected Bibliography
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Profound, unpredictable, charming, and outright funny, this collection of unconventional prose about poetry might secure an audience far larger than the one that already exists for Ruefle's own poems. Known for her post-Surrealist lyric and for erasures, Ruefle (The Most of It) began to write prose under protest when her teaching program required lectures. Those protests survive in the lectures' inventive forms: they stop short, ramble, tell jokes, bring in sad moments from the author's own history of reading and rereading, and end up with seriously useful advice for writers, strange and memorable claims about poems and poetry. One lecture asks why poetry seems less like the sun than the moon; another chapter insists that "Poets are dead people talking about being alive." A lecture on Emily Dickinson brings new light to that poet by juxtaposing her with Emily Bronte, and both women with Anne Frank. These informal talks have far more staying power and verve than most of their kind. Readers may come away dazzled, as well as amused, feeling (as Ruefle says about her bookish childhood) that "this was the secret labyrinth of reading, and there was a secret tunnel connecting it to my life." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved