Mary Ruefle Discusses Erasure, Her New Book, Dunce, and More, at Neon Pajamas

For his site Neon Pajamas, Benjamin Niespodziany interviews Mary Ruefle, whose newest book, Dunce, is just out from Wave Books. From their conversation:

Along with poetry and prose, you're also an erasure artist. In an interview with Scottish Poetry Library, you had finished 56 erasure books. In a David Naimon interview, it's 78. In a Divedapper interview, it's 92. Are you still keeping count? Is it still a daily/weekly meditation?

It's 105. I erased this morning. Oh, what a funny thing to say! Anyway, I do two facing pages a day. A book, on average, takes three months.

And if you work on two pages a day, when you start the next day, do you go back and see what you created?

No, no, no, I don't, but when the book is finished, I have to go back to page one and revise it. You can erase erasure, so I go back and then page by page I go through the whole book again and if something is frustrating or I don't like it, then I will change it. I'll flag certain pages that need an image added or the text totally changed. It won't happen with every page, but maybe six facing pages in the book I would feel compelled to re-erase.

Is it too early to ask what you're currently working on?

I just write poems. I don't really know what to say when people ask, “What are you working on?” It's not a question that I can answer in any interesting way. I write poems. I don't have projects for my poems, does that make sense? What am I currently working on? I have a poem on my desk with tons and tons of lines crossed out. And things written in the margin. That's a poem. I mean, some day, if I'm lucky, it will be. I just write poems. I'm working on an erasure book. I'm writing poems. And then I'm working on a kind of fake journal. My line was always, I don't have time to keep a real journal so I'll keep a fake one.

Read it all at Neon Pajamas.