Mary Ruefle, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards  Each volume year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The 1995 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 20 go to:

Mary Ruefle for her poem "Glory" in Winter 1994-95, edited by Don Lee and David Daniel.

Mary Ruefle was born outside of Pittsburgh in 1952. The daughter of a military officer, she spent the first twenty years of her life moving around the U.S. and Europe, and graduated from Bennington College in 1974 with a degree in literature. She attended the writing program at Hollins College, but admits that for many years she was a drifter, holding a variety of jobs in different places. "Nothing led me to writing but reading," says Ruefle, "and since I began to write poems as soon as I could read them, it never occurred to me to take anything else seriously -- which later turned out to be sad."

Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and she is the author of three books, Memling's Veil, Life Without Speaking, and The Adamant, which co-won the 1988 Iowa Poetry Prize. Ruefle has received grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from The Black Warrior Review, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Kenyon Review. She has taught at Bennington College, Colby College, the University of Michigan, and in China. Currently, she lives in Vermont and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Vermont College.

Of her poem "Glory," Ruefle writes: "I don't know what inspires a poem, but 'Glory' was informed by a general self-loathing (and its opposite), a gorgeous autumn, and the bit about the psychic is true. I met a wonderful woman living in one of those awful surfing towns on the Australian coast. She was a psychic and wanted to serve me a kind of candy called Violet Crumble, which I was anxious to try because I believed it was made from real violets. But she couldn't remember where she had hidden it, though she spoke of the events of the next millennium with ease. Later, I found the Violet Crumbles in a drugstore. They were not made out of violets and were regrettable, but that whole glorious afternoon came back to me while I was writing the poem, though not before -- I never know what I am going to write about until I write it. I think there's a certain amount of poetic denial in all my work, in so far as writing poems sometimes appears to be in direct opposition to living, though in fairness I must admit there are times writing poems appears to be intense living indeed. The tension between the two keeps me working hard at both, complicated by a natural laziness."