Erasures

ARTIST STATMENT

Beginning in 1998 and continuing as part of her ongoing work, Vermont State  Poet Laureate Mary Ruefle has produced a series of altered books from which  she creates poetic texts in a process called “erasure,” which Ruefle has defined  as an act of “creating a new text by disappearing the old text that surrounds  it.” Using correction fluid, markers, and gouache, and often incorporating  collaged found images, the original texts are partially covered over to reveal  new and surprising voices, phrases, narratives, and fragmented poems.  

Extending the Modernist project that includes the collage artists Hannah Hoch,  Joseph Cornell, and Alexander Rodchenko, Ruefle’s postcard collages, altered  books, and erasures blend images and text, creating new poetic artifacts that  establish a counterpoint between verbal and visual syntax. Publishers Weekly, in a  starred review, described her book of erasures, A Little White Shadow, as containing,  “haiku-like mini-fables, sideways aphorisms, and hauntingly perplexing koans.” 

Widely recognized as a major figure in American poetry, this is  Mary Ruefle’s first solo exhibition of her visual work.

ARTIST BIO

Poet, writer, essayist, and visual artist, Mary Ruefle is the  author of over a dozen books of poems, essays, and short  fiction, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for  the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2020  Pulitzer Prize, My Private Property (2016), Indeed I Was  Pleased with the World (2007), and The Adamant (1989),  which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author  of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012),  the work of fiction The Most of It (2008), and A Little  White Shadow (2006), a book of erasures. A full-color  facsimile of her erasure An Incarnation of the Now was  published in a limited edition by See Double Press. 

A graduate of Bennington College, where she studied literature, and a resident of Bennington,  Vermont, Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the  American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the  Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Since her appointment as Vermont State Poet Laureate,  Mary Ruefle has undertaken a project to mail one thousand poems to one thousand Vermonters  in “random acts of poetry.” Sent anonymously and with no explanation, the poems are meant  to surprise, possibly to delight, and to create, “a moment of attention in a day which otherwise  might be lost to ceaseless activity,” as Ruefle said in an interview with Vermont Public Radio.  

In an interview with The Paris Review, Ruefle is quoted as saying, “I think there’s always a certain  amount of invisibility when you write. You’re alone in a room, no one is looking over your shoulder.  When I was young, writing was the one invisible space I had, and it made me very happy because  I could become invisible while writing. I still feel this way, except there’s much less of a difference  between my inner, creative life and my outer life than when I was young. And that’s a joyful thing!”