In a little literary fantasy, the writer Clemens J. Setz imagined the Nobel Prize ceremony in 2027.

The Stockholm doors open, the secretary of the Swedish Academy comes out and reads out the name of the awardee: Mary Ruefle.

But instead of the usual ten-second explanation, there now follows a ten-hour lecture: "That would be a wonderful, highly subversive action."

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

Mary Ruefle is certainly not an actionist author who storms institutions, but she is familiar with the wonderful and thus also the subversive: Everything that is exists in order to be questioned.

Her lyrics deal with the astonishing, the unexpected, which is subversive simply because it runs counter to all expectations.

Like many poets, she writes synaesthetically, i.e. with several senses at the same time, but what is most important are her secondary, ulterior and paradoxical meanings.

The world, as the eccentric thinker Mary Ruefle perceives it and rearranges it in her texts, has not been researched, mapped and disenchanted for a long time, it is not even fully understood.

Mary Ruefle confronts us with our own narrow-mindedness, and because this experience takes place in her fascinating lyrics, she gives us the illusion

Clemens J. Setz owes the idea of ​​making the justification for the Nobel Prize last ten hours instead of ten seconds to reading Ruefle's "Short Lectures", a collection of "poetic essays" that take the genre of the lecture seriously without conforming in the least to its conventions to want.

Rarely longer than half a page, Ruefle's prose miniatures on the voice, the brain, living alone, and prayer are sometimes as short as a sentence or two, including idiosyncratic definitions like this one from the Lectures on the Dead: “Poets are people who have died and talk about being alive".

The two interviews with Mary Ruefle, which Norbert Wehr published together with various texts by the author last year in an issue of the “Skript” also revolve around poetry.

It was only afterwards, this spring, that the volume Mein Privatbesitz, a collection of short prose texts translated by Esther Kinsky, appeared in the Suhrkamp library.

It is indeed Mary Ruefle's first German-language publication, although she has been publishing poetry for more than thirty years.

So there is still a lot to discover for German readers: Ruefle's calligraphic "fake handwriting", her "erasure books", which work like sculpting with a paintbrush, her short lectures and prose miniatures, her radical changes in perspective, which open up insights, but also simple words of consolation for those

who are used to clarity and find it difficult to break their habit: "Don't keep trying to understand the poem and remember: If you enjoy it, then you have understood it".

Seventy years ago this Saturday, Mary Ruefle was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.