WOODTANGLE
I remember the king passed massive amounts
of inarticulate feeling into law.
I envied all the beautiful things.
Sometimes I called my own name.
I have cursed myself why do I have
so many strange questions. I tried to cram myself
with the gentler things so as to release
some suppressed inclination. My name is
Woodtangle. I remember my mother
when she wore yellow was beautiful
like a finch and then she died. I remember
thinking my father was mean but knowing he
was kind. I remember thinking my father was
kind but knowing he was mean. I remember thinking
all things are made of themselves examples of the
same thing. And Everyman the next day would follow.
I remember thinking the world ended a long time ago
but no one noticed. I remember every dinner
at Vespaio with Tomaz and the Saturday night
the antique cars paraded by for an hour
and I couldn’t breathe for the fumes and I was happy.
I remember thinking the sexual signficance of
everything seemed absurd because we are made of
time and air (who cares) and then I remembered
the day the king passed massive amounts of inarticulate
feeling into law he threw a cherry bomb into the crowd
and I thought it was fruit and I ate it.
This mind-boggling stud of a poem was first published in 2013 (in American Poetry Review, I think). I love how it breaks so many workshop rules—it defies so many parameters of how we are taught to write poetry.
I want to read it closely, prick by prick.
- The poem’s title names the speaker, “Woodtangle,” and sets the scene for a confessional neo-fairy tale. I can’t find a Woodtangle fairy tale, so I’m assuming Ruefle created this portmanteau word from wood and tangle, and then realized a speaker existed.. The proper noun sometimes grows from playing with words.
- The poem feels like it borrowed fragments or an impulse from Ruefle’s “I Remember, I Remember,” which, in turn, borrowed a scaffold from Joel Brianerd. It begins with this “I remember” that will return as anaphora mid-poem.
- Ruefle violates the injunction against using vague, abstract words like happy and beautiful—and she does this in a way that actually loads those words, making them shimmer, making them feel dangerous somehow. I think the word happy is actually very dangerous, and I can’t help thinking Ruefle is playing with this as a theme—especially since she repeats beautiful.
- Repetition is the sacrum and the scandal of this poem’s structure. One stanza that moves by repeating, returing, and the speaker thinking aloud.
- Inserting a line break after an “of” is a big no-no. One reads this poem and wonders why. Or why we ever listened to no-no’s in the first place.
- The rhyme inside the parentheses—(who cares)—that could be speaking of the air, or addressing the reader directly—is extraordinary to me. The air cares. The reader doesn’t care. No one cares. Caring is part of the story Woodtangle tells herself about herself. And then, somehow, back to forth line: Sometimes I called my own name.
- Sixth line, where the ear wants to hear calm but the eye reads cram. And so I tried to cram myself evokes the box, the name, the space the speaker tries to fit inside—and isn’t it funny how “calm down” often suggests a girl should step back from the hysterical precipice of the social construction of socially-constructed overwrought femme?
- I remember my mother / when she wore yellow was beautiful—and then the line break. To stop here for a second with the mother who is remembered by what she wore, by what color made her look beautiful, and the past tense of beauty glowing like a caution light before the next line completes the sentence—like a finch and then she died. A wicked and haunting image.
- The soft nudges in the reference to Everyman the next day would follow. The allusion to a seminal American Christian text, Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the hero seeks god as part of a quest. Those who have read this book know it has no place for girls.
- And then she died. In this poem too: life goes on after the mother dies mid-poem. The mother is always dead. The father passes his emotions and needs into "law" and then feeds the daughter with them. His emotions turn out to be bombs. Ruefle is playing with fire by holding the live wire in her hands, passing it back and forth, seeding the soft patriarchal purr.
- If one isn’t sure what Ruefle is doing, I think it becomes hard to ignore given the way the poem ends by allowing the speaker to eat her own tail—I remember thinking the sexual significance of / everything seemed absurd—this juxtaposition of absurdity among the heartfelt thoughts, among the thinking-ness, is characteristic and uniquely Mary Ruefle. The reverent irreverence she brings to the line, the poem, the page.