Mary Ruefle (born April 16,1952[1]) is an American poet,essayist,and professor. She has published many collections of poetry,the most recent of which,Dunce (Wave Books,2019),was long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.[2] Ruefle has also published prose,with her debut collection,The Most Of It,releasing in 2008. A book of her collected lectures,Madness,Rack,and Honey,released in 2012,and she published her most recent prose work,The Book in 2023.[3] In addition,Ruefle is known for experimenting with erasure poetry,[4] and published an erasure book,A Little White Shadow, in 2006.[5] From 2019 to 2024,Ruefle served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.[6]
Ruefle's work,from poetry to essays,has been widely published in magazines and journals including The American Poetry Review,[7]Harper's Magazine,[8]The Kenyon Review,[9]The New York Times,[10] and The Paris Review,[11] and in such anthologies as Best American Poetry,Great American Prose Poems (2003),American Alphabets:25 Contemporary Poets (2006),The Next American Essay (2002),[1] and Poetry Magazine.[12]
Personal life
In 1952,Ruefle was born in McKeesport,Pennsylvania,[1] to a military family. This led to a childhood of moving between and around the continents of North America and Europe.[13]
Ruefle mentioned in an interview that,at eight years old,she began writing poems and created her first metaphor by translating an image of the ground into a map. She was writing and reading of her own volition by the time she was 10. Since her childhood involved continuous relocating,she didn't see her extended family often,but maintained her hobby of writing wherever she went.[14] Ruefle recalled in another interview that she dealt with the loneliness that came from constant movement by consuming literature.[15]
Ruefle lives in Bennington,Vermont.
As a result of her childhood,Ruefle doesn't enjoy moving around. She lives in Bennington,Vermont,where she has remained since she put down roots in 1971,and claims to be a homebody. She has said being alone doesn't bother her,[15] and that she likes to maintain her privacy.[16] Ruefle prefers a life less saturated with technology and screens,[17] leading her to avoid the use of a computer.[14][15]
Education and teaching career
Ruefle spent much of her professorial career at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Ruefle attended and graduated from Bennington College in 1974[1] with a literature degree. She started teaching at her alma mater in 1979,and continued to teach there until she left in 1988.[4] She also spent 23 years teaching at Vermont College of Fine Arts[15] and returned as a guest poet in the summer of 2018.[18] The University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program hired her as their Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2011.[4] In the spring of 2022,Ruefle served as Bennington College's Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Faculty member.[19]
In 2019,Mary Ruefle became the poet laureate of the state of Vermont,succeeding Chard deNiord.[22] She marked this honor by starting a project to send random poems from a wide range of poets,including former Vermont poet laureates Robert Frost and Louise Glück,and Etheridge Knight,in the mail to Vermonters across the state.[23] She was aiming to mail 1000 poems in total.[24] She selected the poem recipients from the phone book,and chose poems based on their relevancy to current events such as the Covid-19 Pandemic and the death of George Floyd,or based on the names of the recipients or street names.[23]
In 2020,Ruefle was honored with a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets' Laureate Fellowship program,which included a grant that she said she would use to finish her mailing poems project.[24]
Ruefle was Vermont's poet laureate until 2024,when the role was handed over to Bianca Stone.[6]
Erasure poetry
Ruefle has been participating in the practice of erasure poetry since 1998,[25] erasing works from the 1800s and 1900s that she buys used.[26] She uses different mediums of erasing,including markers,pictures,[4] and white-out,to create her work.[14] She published one set of erasure poems,A Little White Shadow,in 2006.[5] Ruefle's book is an erasure of Emily Malbone Morgan's book also titled A Little White Shadow.[27] See Double Press released an exclusive batch of 270 of another of Ruefle's erasure books,An Incarnation of the Now, in 2015.[28]
Multiple poetry centers and museums have also displayed her erasure work,including at the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in 2021,[29] the St. Louis Poetry Center in 2022,[25] at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in 2024,[30] and most recently,in 2025 at the Poets House.[26] The Robert Frost Stone House Museum display contained an erasure Ruefle did of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods" called "Stopping."[29] Her website features some of her erasure works as well.[5]
Ruefle discussed her erasure process in a 2019 interview with The White Review,where she recounted how erasing poetry is a regular part of her schedule,calling the act "meditative."[14] Her intuition helps her choose which books to erase. Her preferred genres include "nineteenth-century morally instructive books for children," "biographies of artists," and "anything by Laura Richards," as she noted in a 2016 interview with the Washington Square Review.[31] Obscure or unscholarly texts are Ruefle's ideal erasure materials.[32]
The Paris Review reported that Ruefle's number of erasure works totaled over 125 as of September 2025. The tones in Ruefle's erasure work vary—they have been called "slapstick," "absurd," "lyrical," and "melancholy."[26] She told The Kenyon Review that an element she enjoys about her erasure work is that it's personal:"no one is going to see them!"[32]
Style and methodology
Critics and scholars have assessed and identified signature elements across Ruefle's work,and Ruefle has discussed her procedures and choices in interviews.
Themes
Ruefle's pieces,from prose to poetry,explore a variety of themes,many of which appear across multiple of her works. Her themes often revolve around shared human experiences like loving and emotions like the feeling of being lonely. Death is one such consistent theme,[13] which has appeared recently in the relation to the passing of Ruefle's mother as exhibited in Dunce and Ruefle's essay "I Remember,I Remember."[33] A related theme is that of the process of growing old and individual as well as societal perceptions of aging.[34][16] This theme is not inherently negative,as Ruefle sees the joys in getting older,noting,"It’s total autonomy and freedom,and you become a much stronger person. You’re not answerable to anyone anymore." But she does tackle the challenges of aging,particularly for women,[16] through discussions of menopause[35] and the idea of increasing invisibility as people—women especially—age.[16] On the reverse end of themes,the theme of adolescence crops up throughout her works,and many of her poems exhibit a youthful perspective that,as Emily Berry of the London Review says,creates a "particular combination of delight and melancholy."[35]
Language itself tends to be a theme of Ruefle's work.[13] She is personally consumed by how the subject of literature is not a universal study,which has lead many of her pieces to take on the subjects of the act of reading,as well as writing.[35] The difference,or conflict,between personal and public life is another theme Ruefle embeds into her work.[36]
Andrew David King of the Kenyon Review,in an interview with Ruefle,highlighted the presence of religion throughout Ruefle's work. Ruefle responded by saying that she has a curiosity in the characteristics of religions,even though she's "not religious in the traditional sense of the word."[32]
While critics have traced a variety of themes throughout her work,many of which Ruefle has discussed herself,Ruefle did note in an interview that political themes are not something she explicitly covers in her poetry.[37]
Form
Various critics and scholars have assessed Ruefle's work,characterizing Ruefle's pieces as humorous,[38] alluding,[34] and experimental in terms of the use of language.[35]
A key characteristic of Ruefle's style is her tendency to focus on,and often start poems by discussing,simple objects.[16] As critic Emily Berry puts it,"the miniature looms large" in Ruefle's poetry and "everyday objects are sources of fascination."[35] Ruefle has discussed her personal interest and focus the small things,saying,"I love the miniature" and revealing her specific love of dolls,[16] pins,and paperclips.[37] As The Paris Review's Caitlin Youngquist highlights,Ruefle then uses those simple subjects as springboards for her themes and "larger,existential meditations on sadness and boredom,on language and lullabies and autonomy in old age."[16]
Ruefle experiments and toys with the different facets of language itself in her work,specifically in her poetry where critic Emily Berry notes,"language is,above all,a plaything."[35] Her poetry plays with auditory and visual elements within word choice and line structure.[13] It is not uncommon for Ruefle's poetry to contain dialogue[39] or feature flawed or unusual narrators that reach out to the audience with questions or opinions.[13][35] Poet David Rivard said of Ruefle,“Even at her most outlandishly playful—and who is more outlandish than Ruefle?—she speaks with an unbelievably sly wisdom.”[13] Her work has whimsy and can be viewed as riddles[35] or jokes. Critic Victoria Chang notes that Ruefle tends to be unconventional as a contemporary poet due to her use of humor,which often comes in the form of comic relief when discussing dark topics. Her work tends to bring about multiple emotions at once,and Chang calls Ruefle's work unique:"No one today is writing like Ruefle:her body of work in poetry and prose pricks like a needle that slightly catches the muscle—both painful and immensely delightfully awakening."[38]
Ruefle's writing reflects her personality,as both she and her work are full of "mischief and seriousness" and participate in "irreverent reverence" as poet Alina Ștefănescu calls it.[35] Ruefle's prose,as described by critic Donna Vatnick,tends to be "simple"[34] and can be considered akin to prose poetry.[35] Similarly,critic Albert Mobilio has pointed out how Ruefle's poetry lacks "sense-breaking imagery or lineation."[36] Her poetry often features an adventurer's spirit [35] and Mobilio calls Ruefle's poems "plainly discursive" and notes that first-person narration is a frequent feature.[36]
Another key element of Ruefle's style,as addressed by multiple reviewers,is her implementation of allusion or reference to other authors in both her prose and poetry,including but not limited to William Carlos Williams,Ikkyu,[34]Cesare Pavese,and John Keats.[35] Moreover,as critic Christina Davis points out,Ruefle sometimes directly incorporates others' works in her own. In poems featured in her collection Trances of the Blast,one poem alludes to Leo Tolstoy and another features a Bashō haiku.[40]
Davis also points out Ruefle's use of tercets and how Ruefle tends to manipulate the element of time in her poetry.[40]
Process
Ruefle's creative process is driven by intuition,and doesn't generally involve a concrete strategy.[31]
She approaches the writing of prose and poetry differently,as she discussed in a 2016 interview with The Paris Review. Ruefle collects topics she wants to write about for her prose pieces,but she approaches poetry with no specific plan in mind. This is due to her contrasting views of the two forms,as Ruefle notes,"It’s different because prose is a public language and poetry is a private language." Ruefle writes poems with the mindset that she has no audience,while her prose is written with the awareness that it will be read.[16]
When she was a new writer,Ruefle wrote all her pieces by hand,[14] and as an adult,Ruefle's writing process still starts with handwriting her first drafts.[16] She has said that handwriting is pleasurable due to the physicality of the action,comparing it to the movement of drawing. On rare occasions,Ruefle does what she calls "fake-handwriting," which is where she engages with the movement of handwriting by "write[ing] continuously without actually forming real words."[14]
Notable works
Dunce (2019)
Ruefle's collection of poems titled Dunce was published in 2019 and went on to be nominated for several awards,including as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry,[2] The National Book Critics Circle Awards,[41] and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.[42] It was long-listed for the National Book Award for poetry.[43]
Dunce primarily covers the topic of dying,reflecting on death as an inevitable fate everyone faces and how people come to terms with the fact that they're going to die. The death of Ruefle's mother is a pervasive theme in the work,[33] and as she navigates through her grief in her poems,she also broadens the scope of the theme of grief to reflect on how others handle loss,ultimately recognizing that pain is a shared experience.[44] The poems in Dunce also focus on the topics of poems and poets and their disruptive power over time and people,readers and writers alike.[45] Ruefle specifically discusses the idea of authority in relation to the readers,asserting the power of interpretation is in their hands. Additionally,the collection is filled with memories and thoughts on the experience of being a child.[44]
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