What Kind of Book Is This?
Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack, and Honey — published by Wave Books in 2012 and still in print — collects twenty lectures the poet delivered over two decades of teaching. Calling them "lectures" is technically accurate but misleading. They are more like extended lyric essays that happen to be about poetry. Or perhaps meditations that happen to contain literary criticism. Or maybe they are just their own thing, which is precisely what makes them valuable.
Ruefle herself resists the impulse to define. In her preface she writes: "I want to say something about beginnings, or the idea of a beginning, the myth of a first thought, first word, which is something poets think about all the time." This is representative. The book is full of sentences that begin in one place and arrive somewhere you could not have predicted, sentences that teach you something about poetry by enacting the thing they describe.
What Ruefle Is Doing
The lectures are loosely organized around themes — on beginnings, on erasure, on fear, on sentimentality, on imagination — but none of them proceed in a straightforward expository manner. Ruefle associates freely, draws on philosophy, neuroscience, art history, mythology, and her own reading life with equal ease, and makes connections that feel both surprising and inevitable. This is the quality of mind that the best poetry criticism requires: the ability to approach a question obliquely and illuminate it more fully for the indirectness.
One of the strongest lectures, "On Beginnings," meditates on what it means for a poem to begin — not just formally, with its first line, but in the psychic and experiential sense. Ruefle writes about the relationship between starting a poem and the experience of being alive to perception. She is not delivering a craft lesson; she is thinking aloud about something fundamental, and you think along with her.
On Fear and Sentimentality
Two lectures stand out as essential reading for any writer: "On Fear" and "On Sentimentality." In "On Fear," Ruefle argues that fear — not inspiration, not craft mastery — is the central condition of the writing life, and she explores what it means to write toward the things that frighten you rather than away from them. It is honest in a way that most books about writing avoid being.
"On Sentimentality" is one of the best examinations of that much-abused critical term I have encountered anywhere. Ruefle makes careful distinctions between genuine emotion and the manipulation of emotion, between earned feeling and cheap sentiment, in a way that is both practically useful and philosophically serious. Any writer who has been told their work is "too sentimental" — or who has used that charge against someone else's — will benefit from sitting with this lecture.
Limitations Worth Noting
This is not a book for everyone. Readers looking for practical, actionable craft advice — rules about line breaks, strategies for revision, guidance on submitting work — will not find it here. Ruefle is not interested in that kind of instruction. Her concern is with the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of poetry-making, and she approaches them with an obliqueness that can feel evasive if you are not in the right mood for it. Some lectures are stronger than others; a few feel genuinely hermetic, as though they were delivered to an audience that shared a great deal of context that the page cannot supply.
The Verdict
Madness, Rack, and Honey belongs on the shelf alongside Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and Anne Carson's prose — books about writing that are also acts of writing, that model in their form what they advocate in their content. It will not make you a better writer in the way a workshop handout might. But it may remind you why you wanted to write in the first place, and that turns out to be more valuable.
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Author | Mary Ruefle |
| Publisher | Wave Books |
| First published | 2012 |
| Format | Essays / Lectures on Poetry |
| Best for | Poets, serious readers of poetry criticism |