To commemorate the closing of Erasures: Mary Ruefle, join us for a craft talk on Ruefle’s work from the poet Mark Wunderlich.

Beginning in 1998 and continuing as part of her ongoing work, former Vermont State Poet Laureate Mary Ruefle has produced a series of altered books from which she creates poetic texts in a process called erasure, which Ruefle has defined as an act of “creating a new text by disappearing the old text that surrounds it.” Using correction fluid, markers, and gouache, and often incorporating collaged found images, the original texts are partially covered over to reveal new and surprising voices, phrases, narratives, and fragmented poems.

Readings in the chapbook room with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.

About the Poets:

Poet, writer, essayist, and visual artist, Mary Ruefle is the author of over a dozen books of poems, essays, and short fiction, including most recently The Book (Wave Books, 2023).

A graduate of Bennington College, where she studied literature, and as a resident of Bennington, Vermont, 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. For Dunce (Wave Books, 2019) she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The Adamant (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989) won the Iowa Poetry Prize. From 2019 to 2024, Ruefle served as Vermont State Poet Laureate.

In an interview with The Paris Review, Ruefle is quoted as saying, “I think there’s always a certain amount of invisibility when you write. You’re alone in a room, no one is looking over your shoulder. When I was young, writing was the one invisible space I had, and it made me very happy because I could become invisible while writing. I still feel this way, except there’s much less of a difference between my inner, creative life and my outer life than when I was young. And that’s a joyful thing!”

Widely recognized as a major figure in American poetry, this exhibition showcases Mary Ruefle as a distinctive visual artist as well. Previous iterations of the exhibition were shown at the Robert Frost Stone House Museum, the Saint Louis Poetry Center, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of God of Nothingness (Graywolf Press, 2021); The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press, 2014), winner of the Rilke Prize; Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004); and The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Lowell Trust and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.  His poems, interviews, reviews and translations have appeared in journals such as Slate, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Yale Review, Fence and Tin House, and his poems are widely anthologized.  Wunderlich has taught at Stanford and Barnard College and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Ohio University, San Francisco State University and Sarah Lawrence.  As an arts administrator, he has worked at the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Poets & Writers and the Napa Valley Writers Conference.  He holds a BA in German Literature and English from the University of Wisconsin, and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Wunderlich lives in the Hudson River Valley and has taught at Bennington since 2004. He became the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars in August 2017.