Mary Ruefle's On Imagination & My Private Property Reviewed at Kenyon Review

At the Kenyon Review blog, Nathan Goldman looks at two books by poet and essayist Mary Ruefle, My Private Property (Wave, 2016), and On Imagination (Sarabande Books, 2017). The latter, Ruefle's newest, is a "book-length essay transformed from a beautifully bizarre lecture into a chapbook with striking facing-page illustrations." More:

In On Imagination, Ruefle begins by thinking about unity. She opens with a recitation—and then a transformation—of a stanza from Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

A man and a woman are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.
A man and a woman and a jug of maple syrup and an old tennis shoe and a Roman statue are one.
A woman and her imagination are one.

What does it mean to think about the relationship of a woman to her imagination as comparable to the relationship between a man, a woman, and three disparate objects? The lines hint at the possibility of a human-object relation that transcends the flattening of property ownership. Later in the essay, Ruefle writes that “it is the imagination that kicks in every morning when you wake and every night when you go to sleep and tells you that you are safe and all your loved ones are safe and all your belongings really do belong to you.” For Ruefle, the imagination mediates these relationships: between me and myself, me and my loved ones, me and my possessions. Could writing that proceeds from the writer’s imagination and addresses the reader’s re-mediate—and thus reimagine—the human-object relation? How would we then understand the imagination and its creative power?

Please read on, dear reader, right here.