Mary Ruefle's Empress of All Zeal...

I don’t yet have a good recording set up, but I want to start reading you poems every morning! I want to start now! So, here goes. The poem I’ve read today is Mary Ruefle’s “Empress of All Zeal Everywhere.”

Ruefle’s poems are revelations—a street corner, the back of a cab where the poet says, “I want to have an ecstatic relationship with life,” and the cabbie answers sure, but nothing is free.

I don’t know about you, but this is how I feel daily. I want something beyond the grind, the capitalistic impulse to be productive and make money. Particularly now amidst what feels like a crumbling empire.

I say in the recording that Ruefle has written like forty books of poetry. It’s more like eighteen or nineteen, plus some books of prose.

Please note that Stella sneezed halfway through this. See above about my bad recording set up. ;)