A Little White Shadow

by Mary Ruefle

Selectively painting over much of a forgotten nineteenth-century book, Ruefle’s ninth publication brings new meaning to an old story. What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new. A high-quality replica of the original aged, delicate book in which Ruefle “erased” the text, this book will appeal to fans of poetry as well as visual art.

Mary Ruefle is the author of Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism (Wave Books, 2012), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and include the publication of A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). 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. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

Genres: Poetry, Art, Female Authors

56 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2006

About the author

Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist. The daughter of a military officer, Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh in 1952, but spent her early life traveling around the U.S. and Europe. She graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in Literature.

Ruefle's work has been widely published in literary journals. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ruefle currently lives in New England. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and is visiting faculty with the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/50-...

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and beautifully presented book of erasure poetry. A major work. Amazing that she found the words/phrases inside another text and made them her own. The book itself is also a work of art.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful and surprising and often very funny. I adored this book. When I received the book and saw how slim and small it was, I was like, what? I paid $16 for this? But by the end I was ready to surrender much more than that. It brought me so much pleasure.

Found poetry is an acquired taste so I realize this book and others like it aren’t for everyone. I recently told a poet acquaintance over dinner that I was writing found poetry and she could not disguise her distaste. Not that she tried. Smile. Oh well. Five years ago, it seemed an odd pursuit to me, too.

Anyway, Mary Ruefle takes a 41-page pamphlet from 1889 and whites out most of the text to find a short poem on each page, some as short as six words. It’s as if the constraint has freed her. The results seem reckless and weird and are often very funny. The reader is still looking at the original pamphlet but it has been smeared with white-out fluid, somewhat sloppily to be honest, but I found that part of the charm.

One of my favorites, without its ‘format,’ goes:

seven centuries of sobbing
gathered in the twilight
and had their pages
wandered through

Another is the short:

It
was my duty to keep
the piano filled with roses.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

very simply,
"It's always noon with me.
pale, and
deformed but very interesting,


sorrows of
a little Quietist,

*

[Kevin Shlosberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

Erasure poetry can be difficult: you're likely erasing as you're working yr way through a work. It takes a bit of faith because as you start whiting-out those lines, saving words or phrases here and there, you don't know where you're going. You're as likely to paint yrself into a corner than come up with a(n intuitively) cohesive product.

Ruefle has some successes here ("the flapping white/dresses of the fish/rising sharply against the sky" and "It was my duty to keep/the/piano/filled with roses" stand out as two 'proper' surrealist triumphs). But on the whole, the piece is suffused with the banality of refrigerator magnetic poetry.

It's an interesting exercise; but, as another reviewer mentioned, it's not something that has to be published. Does Ruefle get away with it solely because she's been the recipient of fellowships?

[Nate D]

As someone who has occupied myself carefully exacto-ing words out of old books until only a strange residue remains, I can immediately appreciate this weird little book, created from redacting content from a short preexisting story of the same name until only a dizzy, unfamiliar poetry remains, sometimes funny, sometimes wise, often surreal. Not sure if this actually qualifies as Oulipo, but I found it in the Proteus Gowans Oulipo bookstore, which is good enough for me. Right next to Nets, a similar book created by bolding scattered bits of Shakespearean sonnets.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love these. They are delicate. They are modest. They are like little treasures you find in other people's desk drawers, or the bits and pieces that collect on the edge of tidal pools.

Timing is everything, of course. When I picked up this book, I had just finished reading The Children's Book (a novel of the Victorian era by A.S. Byatt), and wasn't ready to leave that world yet. The pamphlet Ruefle draws her "erasures" from - written by Emily Malbone Morgan - was published in 1889, so boom! I'm smack back in the wonder of the age.

I love the whole idea of "erasures" - whittling away the bulk of an existing text until what's left is your own. It reminds me of wood-cut printing, where all the work we do is on the part we don't see, carving out the negative space. There are strange and beautiful possibilities lurking in the yellowed pages of public domain books. I love the spatial elements introduced into the poems by this process of erasure, so that which is whited out still has presence and weight.

Here is a link to some of her erasures, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archi...

This was my first introduction to Mary Ruefle's work. These poems are like an amuse-bouche - a perfect little bite to excite the taste buds. I will definitely seek out her other books.

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The erasure lends to revisiting just as much if not more so, than a typical poetry text. Re-looked at this after reading an essay-poem of hers about her erasure technique. The words chosen and the technique itself are haunting. The shadow is like a ghost, but a shadow. The white is the white-out that removes much of the original text.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful little book of erasure poems. Ruefle is a master at this form. This book is pocket-sized and has the feel of an art book.

[Karla]

Buena idea. Poemas bonitos (¿poema?), aunque me gustaría leer otra cosa de la autora, algo más "ella" y menos... esto. No sabría cuántas estrellitas darle así que lo dejo en blanco.

[Moon Captain · Rating 4 out of 5]

for me to review this would do it a disservice. it silenced me and intrigued me. I came back the next day, to read it again.

[Niall Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suggested Reading Time: In the back office of the town’s only post office after closing time

[meggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

invalid reading (i am unwell)

[matthew w · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty little book picked up from the lib on a dime. fun to read a whole book of whiteout poetry even if it was only 40 or so pages lol. some cracker lines in there, would be more interesting if i’d read the source first maybe? maybe i’ll reread. more of a 3.5 coasting to 4 on novelty.
edit: i changed my mind back to 3

[Sylvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Ruefle's little book is aptly named, or has an aptly borrowed title. I was enchanted at first by the size, the layout, the fact that each page looks as though it has been scanned right from the original, white out mess and all. Beyond the design however, I felt a little let down at first. Each poem was such a small snippet, almost a little forced into the text that was there, or forced into sounding too "pretty" with the options given. Also, I kept wanting the poems to continue from page to page, but each one felt very separate, making my first experience a little unnerving until I got used to it. Another thing I found dissatisfying? That I couldn't find any information about the original book that Ruefle covered over... However, the more I looked at the book and the more I read through it the more I came to terms with it, and began to enjoy Ruefle's style. Many of the pieces are beautiful snapshots, tiny frozen images that seem as though they are pulled out of and preserved from the larger text. At some points Ruefle even shows a nice sense of humor which is welcome in an object that seems to take itself rather seriously otherwise. The sparse distinct images create a lonely almost melancholic atmosphere, as though they are all that is left, faded and falling apart, in a photo album from all that ago. All in all I enjoyed the read and rereads, and the very idea of erasure and borrowing a text is an attractive one that I hadn't considered much until now. I know debate will rage on how much of her own work was put into simply whiting out another book, but for me it took creative energy to come up with the idea and to choose the appropriate words. This little book is elegant and intriguing.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm assuming, since the original Little White Shadow was copyrighted in 1889, that Ruefle didn't run into any copyright issues with what she chose to do. Honestly, my first reaction to the book was one of visceral horror that someone would deface a book in that manner. Once I got over my shock, I began to admire the idea, and I think it's something I'd like to try myself (perhaps with an obnoxiously famous poem like "The Wasteland"). In order to make sense of the poem, I found myself copying out the non-whited out words, which made an interesting, if occasionally nonsensical, poetic text. There were some beautiful lines: "exhausted with the intensity of hope" and "autumn had no particular talents but genius" were among my favorites. All in all, an interesting and unique reading experience.

[Kelsey Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Little White Shadow by Mary Ruefle

A Little White Shadow by Mary Ruefle has to be the strangest book of poetry I have ever read. The book itself is rather small and when you open it up each page was filled with text, but looks to have white-out covering a majority of the words. This is extremely creative, it makes the few words left stand out and look very important. I believe many times poets use to many words, in my mind poems should be to the point and if you want the poem to be short there should be no extra fluff words, and although unordinary I think Ruefle is brilliant because any words that were not imperative to her poem she just whited-out leaving only the heart of the poem.

[Kassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is honestly one of the best pieces of poetry I have ever read. Its energy is completely original, its style is a mastery of artwork and literature itself. My professor at Truman State, Jamie D'Agostino assigned me this little piece of obliterature I did not expect it to change the way I perceive writing and reading as a conceptual task. Some of Reufle's lines strike me with increasing genius, but others flow with a simplistic grace. Everything fits so perfectly without fitting into any frame at all. This is one of the most special books I have on my shelf.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the small realm of recent books that feature erasures, A LITTLE WHITE SHADOW is memorable for its design and delicacy. The production of Ruefle's redactions by Wave Books is nearly as lyrical as Ruefle's work with the strange and potent 19th century text. I was delighted by Ruefle's poetry--both its originality and the way her sculpted lines riff on and appropriate some of the Gothic conventions of the original novel. A LITTLE WHITE SHADOW (and the book truly is little) is a delight to hold, to leaf through, to read, re-read and share.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Ruefle creates a new work using the white shadow of Wite-Out to obscure text from a mostly-forgotten text, creating poems on each page. Though it took less than one BART commute for me to read, it is quite an incredible work that clearly took a lot longer to create. The printing shows the de-creation process including the white streaks with clear decisions and piecemeal selections on top of the color-aged pages. This was mentioned in an article from the January 2012 issue of The Believer--really glad that I was able to find a copy through inter-library loan!

[Konstantin R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

[rating = A-]
This is an interesting collection with the very contemporary use of Erasure. Mary Ruefle experiments with (re)possession and assertation of a new voice coming through an older one. Although there is some controversy with how she didn't leave the old author's name, this is, haha, overshadowed by the sheer wonder of the performance. The isolation of words really brings out newer meanings and, explores the ways we look at words and how we uses or interpret them alongside others or alone. There are other great works of Erasure poetry, but this one is memorable, I think.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The five stars are for design, not so much Ruefle's content. Is that allowed on GoodReads? I love how the erasure retains the integrity of the original. I was able to get that original (only like two libraries in the states have it!) and read a very different story about nineteenth century Americans holidaying in Italy and a continuous fascination with the way shadows look (magnificently) different in a new country.

[Philip Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything about this little erasure is delicious ��� from the design and attention put to the book as an object, down to the images Ruefle conveys...To say nothing about the fact that Ruefle has taken a helm as the poet I can't seem to get enough of right now.

I find so much to love in this little artifact that was included in my Wave Books subscription box this year. Thanks to Rachel Welty and everyone at Wave Books for making my year!

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little jewel, exquisite and meditative. I wish Wave had published it in hardcover form, but suspect this would have made the price point prohibitive. As a tiny full-color paperback, it's still beautiful — and inspiring. Has anyone managed to read this without wanting to venture into the world of erasure poetry? I failed miserably and couldn't be happier about it.

[Kim Lohse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book always sounds gimmicky to people when I explain "erasure", but it is the best example I have ever seen, It has some killer lines like, "autumn had no qualities, but genius". A great example for teachers trying to shake beginning poetry students out of the dribble they so often write.

[Signe · Rating 2 out of 5]

it is what it is. found poetry such as this seems more like a writing exercise than something to publish.

[Christie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book itself is art and inspires writers to find creativity in the pages of other books.

[Natalee Caple · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect little sweet treat of words.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating, artful, fun...

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever whiting-out of most of the words on pages of a Victorian (1889) prose text to create very very short "poems". Quite enjoyable but rather expensive for what it is.

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this little book because Mary tells a lovely story with elegant syntax that isn't her own.