The Most of It Paperback – June 1, 2008

Vintage Ruefle; a whole book of insights and clues to inspiration. A fair number of pieces that focus on middle distance, often overlooked by those who only like the very biggest, loudest, most visible and those who only like the ultra-local, smallest and most obscure. Right up there with On Imagination and Madness, Rack & Honey.

These very short pieces are strange and compelling. I'm glad to have read this book and will be including a few of the pieces in a course I'm teaching on extra-short works of literature.

Mary Ruefle is a wonderful writer: brilliant prose, unique ideas, funny. Read anything she writes.

Mary Ruefle was called "the best poet in America today," by Jack Meyers, then-poet laureate of Texas. I believe it, and this book will make you believe it, too.

Mary Ruefle's The Most of It is full of the portent of ordinary things, the imaginary life of inanimate objects, ethical obligations to inconsequential objects, and a joyful extravagance. These prose poems meditate on ordinary scenarios, such as an encounter with a neighbor at a post office, watching birds at a birdfeeder, buying a bench with one's partner, and waking up to the sound of a street sweeper. Yet these ordinary moments become portals to deeper reflections, doors opening to doors, or mirrors held up to each other to create reflections to eternity. They show that everything in the world has a story, and everything is connected to everything else in a strange web of causality. Nothing is simply what it seems. They teach us that we too might look deeper and make the most of what we have been given.The prose poems are all one paragraph, ranging from a few lines to several pages. They suggest that each one is a single thought. But that single thought attracts other thoughts to it like a magnet so that by the end of the poem it feels filled to the brim with portent. The poems themselves gesture towards an excessiveness. In the title poem, "The Most It," the speaker tells of a petite aunt who works at sewing in a window all day whose handwriting is so big that a child could curl up inside the letters. When her mother received a letter from the aunt, it had to be unrolled in the street and the whole neighborhood got on their roofs to read it, a joyful occasion for everyone. The poems in this collection themselves seem like the aunt, modest pieces about modest objects and events that belie their actual largeness and abundance, even excessiveness. In "Snow," the ordinary event of snow falling is experienced by the author as "an ultimatum of joy," so that when it snows she puts down whatever she is doing to have sex. The act of sex itself is conceived as a natural disaster, an event that shakes up the room and causes all the furniture to slide to one side.Many of the poems are about the mysterious in the everyday. In "Beautiful Day," the poet runs into a neighbor she was a little acquainted with at the post office. He stops to say hello. She says hello. Yet in that brief and insignificant exchange the poet was "was stunned with the power of communication between two souls who have heretofore labored so intently to keep their human capacity for passion latent." She realizes at that moment that "it is a beautiful day." In "Hard Boiled Detective," the poet ponders the mystery of how there are so many people in the world despite there being so few pregnant people and so few sexual encounters that actually lead to pregnancy. She calls this "the greatest mystery." In "A Half Sketched Head," An anchorite tells the author that his faith comes from having realized that " he had never--not once--filled his salt and pepper shakers, which he had used profusely for over twenty years." These seemingly insignificant events are the cause of great wonder for the speaker, indeed a source of religious reverie. There is a sense in these poems that the world is so full of stories and meaning that the poet cannot contain it. "Occasionally I feel I am being born," she says, "At such moments of birth I am seized by a feeling of frightening abundance."The feeling of "frightening abundance" in everything leads to some dilemmas for the poet that are quite funny. For example, in "A Glass of Water," the poet gets up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water from the refrigerator. But she is so afraid of the light inside the refrigerator that she becomes more occupied with trying to open the refrigerator without turning on the light that she she forgets to drink water, driven by "hydration and fear into deeper and deeper crisis." In another instance, the poet and her husband try to buy a bench. The poet wants a five foot bench because she likes the idea of all that a five foot bench can contain, but her husband thinks that a four foot bench is all they need to sit on. The poet counters that a four foot bench would be worse than having no bench since the four foot bench would limit her ability to imagine a more amplified bench. They argue and the benches multiply until it seems to them that the size of the bench really doesn't matter in the end. In another instance, the poet goes out with the intention to gather some lichen for an art project, but she becomes paralyzed about whether it would hurt the lichen less if she took some old lichen or new lichen, or maybe it would be better to take dead lichen, but she couldn't tell dead lichen from live lichen. She concludes maybe it would be easier to collect bears. These strange and funny dilemmas feel inevitable when one views everything in the world as sentient and as having a mysterious life of its own.One may think that a poet so obsessed with the life of everyday objects would have a hard time dealing with emptiness. In "A Minor Personal Matter" the poet tries to come to terms with the idea of emptiness. She decides that since poetry is the thing most central to her identity, she would give up writing poems for a while. "Could I like myself if I no longer engaged in an activity I openly declared was the reason I was put on the planet in the first place?" she asks, "Would I find another reason to be on the planet, or could I remain on the planet, with nothing to do and non one to like me, liking myself? I decided to try. I was on the planet with nothing to do and no one to like me. And as soon as I found myself there, I realized I had created the circumstances in which I had begun to write poems in the first place, to the extent I now wander the earth, a ghost, with no intent to write, but carrying a spark in my fingertips, which keeps me in a state of constant fibrillation, neither dead nor alive, a will-o'the'wisp of stress, art, and the hours."In the end, fullness and emptiness may be the same thing. In the last poem, she meditates, ""there are only two tombs: the tomb of Jesus and the tomb of tut. Roll away one stone and you will be given everything: food, clothing, shelter, gems, cloth, seeds and oil, a replica of the world in pure gold. Roll away the other stone and there's nothing." The tomb of king tut contained a world. The tomb of Jesus, which had nothing, also contained a world. Is there such a thing as emptiness then? Or maybe precisely because everything is empty, that everything is full.

Amazon got me! The review of Madness, Rack, and Honey in the Poetry Foundation's monthly mag compelled its purchase and then Amazon suggested other titles one of which was "The Most of It". When I read the first piece about a desired fantasy to have sex when it snows, I was delighted with my add-on purchase. Ruefle's prose has spaces and meditations that carryover or maybe start with creations as a poet. Perhaps there are times when step by step rational thought disciplined by logic has utility, but insight like metaphor brings a wider and deeper grasp of whatever is under consideration. And that is why I recommend "The Most Of It." Ruefle works for insight using reflection and meditation as her tools and the reader is rewarded with an understanding that comes about just the same way it does in the best poems.

I had never heard of Mary Ruefle before I picked up my copy of The Most of It at Women and Children First during my recent visit to Chicago. I was struck by the lovely complexity of simple activities. I think Ruefle's prose lets you in on the way a poet lives and thrives. She essentially rambles, stream of consciousness style. It was amusing and heart warming.