A Mixture of Playfulness and High Seriousness: A Conversation with Mark Rudman

This conversation began in a kind of backwards fashion. Mark had sent me a new and unpublished poem called “The Recognition” and it struck a lot of chords in me. And we began to correspond about it. At some point Mark said that he felt uncomfortable about talking in detail about a poem he’d just written and had no way of gauging its quality. And so our discussion of “The Recognition” became superceded by the conversation that had to precede it. This makes sense for someone who has written –as critics have pointed out — as many if not more brilliant, extended poems of anyone of his generation, poems like “Revolt,” “Joan and Jean,” “Long-Stemmed Rose,” “The Albuquerque Interventions,” “Sundays on the Phone,” “The Motel en Route to Life Out There,” “Scrapings,” “Facts of Life,” in addition to many short poems that hold their own in the same way, and have been appearing in recent issues of the TLS, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and Raritan,, which Mark is enjoying because for ten years he was so single-mindely immersed in the Rider Quintet and he says didn’t think about “circulating” what they call “publishable poems,” which I fear too often means filler. I also believe that his mosaic essays are a form of poetry. And since he was working on a new book called Identification of a Woman and beginning to do a New and Selected Poems the conversation branched out. So it’s a kind of eerie coincidence that the poem “The Recognition” is included in this issue of Salt.

MC: How about a classic question? When do you write? Do you have a schedule?

MR: Can I answer in Madelaine's [Mark’s wife] words: "you're the chaos principle."

(Laughter)

MC: Why? Did she ever try interviewing you? Really, though – do you have a schedule?

MR: I've diligently tried out different schedules, but having to earn a living
is the real Schedulemaker.

MC: Schedulemacher would be a cool word in German: Der Schedulemacher.

MR: Well, at first, I wrote in the middle of the night. I had some great jags doing that and temp work. My greatest jag in this early phase, in my early 20's, was when my upstairs neighbor, Nora Guthrie, yeah, Woody's daughter, had gone away and lent her apartment to a friend who was often not there and who gave me the keys to use "whenever"; so I'd go up to this fresh space on West 4th St in the dead of winter, wearing my salmon colored turtleneck, jeans, boots – there was no heat – and type, and type.

MC: What were you reading around this time?

MR: In addition to everything I had come across this French poet, Denis Roche, editor of Tel Quel and translator of Pound’s Cantos, who'd written a lot of eighteen line associative poems (I learned later that he’d been influenced by John Ashbery, who’s The Double Dream of Spring had recently just come out) whose only other rule was to capitalize each line and so I wrote about three eighteen line associate poems whenever I had the chance to work in Nora's apartment until dawn broke and I stretched and yawned and crawled downstairs to crash. I say crash but I didn't use drugs. Poetry, art, and philosophy were my drugs; in a way they still are.

A few years later I began to work in the morning and often write by hand.

After this I found the form of my poems took that of letters, something I hope never to be corrected of. But now without question my favorite time to write is before, during, and after, day's end. Ideally this "writing" begins after doing something physical – walking, yoga — whatever's possible depending on circumstances. When I’m not writing I’m roaming around, exploring, reading, listening.

MC: Fencing for the elusive image? (from the Change Seminars in the Couple)

MR: Exactly.

MC: The first thing I noted on reading all your poems in sequence were the preeminent images. And the recurrence of sounds that begin with several poems you wrote in 1971 – that time you were just talking about - when you were only twenty one. The image is that of falling. Even in the lovely still poem that opened By Contraries — Flowerpots – one of the ones you said you wrote “as a letter,” the focus remains on falling. Falling, movement, kinesis. And the lucidity combined with the quickness. “I feel myself falling falling / bumped by hard pockets of air / eyes open eyes closed / me falling. And that’s from “Flying,” a vastly more ambitious poem you wrote not much later.

MR: Yes. I think it’s one reasons I had so much resistance to looking back and gathering the poems: I’d be exposed beyond measure.

MC: Overexposed? Like Marsyas in Ovid? Because in the harrowing but wildly varied poems addressed to your father, your dead father (in The Nowhere Steps), there is scarce respite from his real life jump from the 11th floor of his brother-in-law’s terrace in Miami. Or like your Perseus – who had hovered like a hummingbird when he first spotted Andromeda and all of a sudden “courted freefall almost forgetting / that to stay aloft he had to beat his wings.

MR: Being taken out of your body by a powerful erotic moment is to flirt with catastrophe. Especially when you’re in an unfamiliar environment – or, as in Godard’s film Every Man for Himself – just crossing the street.

MC: You were using this kind of imagery at least fifteen years before your father died.

MR: You mean a conflation of my father and myself. My lost and abandoned father and myself. The day before he committed suicide I went to see a psychiatrist I had seen, at his bequest, from the age of 19 to 23, and I said “I feel like a ruin.” He said no Mark, referring to my writing, to the fifteen “happy” years I had been with my wife, and to the recent birth of my son, and concluded “Mark you’re not the ruin, your father is a ruin.”

MC: Is it fair to say that after your father’s suicide that the image of falling became transformed into an image of weightlessness which is what carries the plethora of poems dealing with the idea of the heights?

MR: I hope that’s the case. We know where the other route leads to. But in poems like ‘Aesacus the Diver” Motel in Route to Life out There, The Heights, Above and Below in Mexico, the Shallowness of the Lake – which was written in flight over the great Salt Lake – and in a poem like “Only the Night Before.”

MC: I think that you’ve hit a resonant note.

Here we are on earth, I'm driving my red pickup, and heaven is near.
Nothing can bring me closer. Not in the present which for once

remains itself while everything continues in time.
The blue flames burn underneath the balloons like inspiration.

There is nothing that isn't happening now.
It's a current in the air that binds.

now.

MC: This is kind of a paradox considering the earthiness and visceral nature of your writing. And your most recent book, Sundays on the Phone, begins again in the poem “Back Stairwell” with another image of falling in the wings, only this time it’s your son whose feet are slipping —

“the same boy who, the other night
I watched shuffle and backpedal and nearly fall,

down the escalator, over
the rapids of the raw-toothed

edges of the blades;
his hands, his attention, occupied

by a rabbit samurai Ninja turtle
and Krang, the bodiless brain.

I gauged the dive I would need
to catch him if he fell:

a flat out floating horizontal grab
I couldn't even have managed in my youth.”

MR:  I’m half-wishing that you hadn’t raised these questions. But it’s necessary. Around that time I met with a fine poet — and critic — who had just read The Nowhere Steps. When I alluded to my father’s suicide he said: “I didn’t know that.” The number of people who have commented on my books and
are still stunned when I refer to the suicide say the same thing: “I didn’t know that.” It used to make me angry.

MC: I can see why. Then there’s the suicide of your uncle, the film director Leeds, who you allude to frequently and to whom you dedicated the essay “ Realm of Unknowing" to.

MR: Too angry, as if they were replicating the very issues with my parents that I found both exasperating and exacerbating. Also, I was very close to my maternal grandfather and he talked about his son’s death all the time. As did my mother. Herbert Leeds’ suicide threw a shadow over their image of what they thought the family stood for, or was about.

MC: Strange that his films are just being re-released on DVD now. I can see why Walter Benjamin’s book on mourning as well, of course, on Baudelaire, had such an effect on you: you’re what he would call a traumatophile, dueling sounds.

MR: But let’s keep in mind temperament and most of all, imagination. The pleasure of fencing between imagination and reality.

MC: There’s a painful exactness of your recreations, though. You wrote elsewhere: “people often think I’m making up all the things that are true in fact, though changed through imagination — since autobiography is my springboard not my destination.”

MR: But it amuses me that the ironized poems I write as an exercise in pure lying — again in some cases the details surrounding the incidents may be true — as in “Abilene” and “Provo,” are taken as straight confession.

MC:But you tip the reader off through the uncharacteristic use of traditional capitalization which is so rarely employed, given your populist bent.

MR: But the occurrences in the poems are pure invention unless using our own dreams is not “invention.”

MC: And then someone might say that experience gave me some kind of “special” material which is utterly ridiculous.

MR: I try to include something indelible out of the past.

MC: An art that conceals art or as your mathematician wife says “simple language, hard ideas.” I think of the opening scenes in Rider, the section where you arrive in Chicago Heights and the little girl jumps on the table and says “oh goody, a boy,” and that other kid —

MR: Otto, who was two years older and also a leap year child…

MC: Who barred your entrance to the playing fields unless you paid him.

MR: All true in fact.

MC: But in the section right before that — section 4 — you meet another young boy, Warren, and the two of you become like brothers within a few days — and while I believe what you call “the setting, the situation,” I have to say the incident has the earmark of invention. It’s clear he becomes a double, and that the two of you become interchangeable, but the details have an absurd element that melds aspects of both Dickens and Kafka.

MR: Caught red-handed there. Again, pure invention.

MC: I guess your description of the camp is the tip-off with the “stars pressing too hard against our faces / in the catastrophic silence of the nights…” Then he becomes “The Detective at Seven” scouring “the corners of the rooms of the departed / while his ‘mother,’ slip of the tongue there [because Warren was an orphan], vacuumed.”

(Laughter).

MR: “People always leave something behind.”

MC: It’s not exactly what you’d expect from a 7-year old.

Well, you know, the model, the real boy was just seven. But he didn’t say or do those things. I wanted the feeling of affection and desire for company — a brother, a co-conspirator — and I was working toward the hardness of the jealousy in my stepfather Sidney’s rage at my childish — and provocative comment. “I love Warren more than I love you.”

MC: Later in the same poem your stepfather displays a more disproportionate jealousy

MR: Of which I invented neither the scene nor his response — my affection for Carol was as authentic as it could’ve been between children.

MC: You make that abundantly clear. “I wanted him to say…let’s put on some 45’s [‘Heartbreak Hotel’ had just been released and you were music mad] and dance. / He said: ‘You don’t know what love is.’ / and for the first time slapped me in the face.’”

This brings to mind something characteristic about your work, the combination of intimacy and epic, or simplicity and range.

MR: I was enamored of poems with utterly simple structures and where, once again, the basic tenants of the form, declarative sentences, but what they convey is disarming. Just saying it makes me want to write something again that begins 

“It is…a field where a black rain is falling.” (George Trakl)

Or here’s Rimbaud: 

“There is a clock that never strikes.” 

Litanies, lists: loved ‘em. Maybe it was youth itself; Rimbaud and Trakl were both young when they composed these incomparable poems.

A break with regular rhyme and meter throws poets back on their own resources and organic form, which sounds hokey in conjunction with “organic produce,” but is consummately put forward by Coleridge. To begin to write the way you want to write creates so much anxiety! A lot of Charles Olson’s poetry is testimony to his anxiety about jumping around, using the page, and symbols from the keyboard. These are useful to the poets in the process of composition, but often keep the “experimental” writer from discovering the material that was the source, the impulse, to write THIS poem and not THAT poem. My generation was lucky to have access to Osip Mandelstam’s “Conversation About Dante,” where content is traced back to the original materials themselves which are what give the poem character, color, imagery, pace, narrative. Dante was saturated in his materials and used “a multitude of textile warps.” Sailing, navigation. And walking. I always thought that the origin of prosody lay in something like “the human gait,” something natural, organic and that we do thoughtlessly because it’s as much a part of us as anything else. The only thing “fixed” in Dante is the terza rima and in Italian that allows for multitudinous divagations, shifts, stops, pauses, reversals — and returns — all given tension by the form’s demand that the first unrhymed line find a mate in the next stanza and displace a prior rhyme from its nest to meet and join hands with a new word in the next that throws the burden on the next line to weave a course, just as Dante did, wearing out pair after pair of sandals walking the goat paths of Italy, where the narrowness of the path is made even more difficult to squeeze through due to the vegetation, and Dante’s stanzas often parallel these difficulties so that canto after canto has an element of tension, suspense, fear, always fear, and sighs of relief, often accompanied by sadness at the fate of victims whose punishment seems unjust and, inevitably, absolute horror with regard to the physical punishment accorded those who victimized others while they lived. Whatever it lacks in terms of terminal rhymes English makes up for with its inexhaustible and always expanding plenitude of words whose vowels seek companionship while consonants work hard to keep them apart. This way, reality and imagination are inseparable.

MC: Didn’t Conrad Aiken write: “The language and the landscape are the same.” It’s something that brings to mind the last stanza of the last poem in Sundays on the Phone, “Conversion in Scafa,” both for the unrhymed tercets and the sense of breaking — though you do sneak in a few rhymes like “reenactment” and “scent” that have more power through unfamiliarity.

The dry, ravaged air that molds
every rock and shrub and crevice and grotto,
every white house chiseled into the Appenine range.

Not that there is no secret to the universe,
but that the secret may not be one
we want to hear.

Mutinous, destitute, monotonous
squeaking in the fields.
Every night, a reenactment.

Some pernicious scent.
It must have come this way to the others.
This emptying. This knowing

that nothing after today will ever
be that way again, calling
for a new metamorphosis.

Hour after hour, duration, blankness, ashen distances,
once in a while a cloud crossing the trees
in the emptiness like a visionary haze.

Silence. Dogbark. The occasional tractor.

That afternoon in Chieti, whiteness.

Immeasurable.

As every night I pray for deluge.

MC: The impact of the spacing here brings it to the plane of the apocalyptic.

MR: That’s one way of putting it. In creating difficulties we reduce the distance between reality and art. The beauty of reading Proust is that we’re right inside the laboratory where he makes the discoveries that enable him to write the book we’re reading and, he might argue, certain laws, inherent in art, that only one of his characters, the painter Elstir, understands, and as a result is totally misunderstood by the public and his gallery of empty headed aristocrats and professionals who are celebrities in their own fields and bloody minded idiots when they step outside what they already know. 
 

MC: Could you have written the Rider Quintet without having read Proust all the way through?

MR: N.O.

MC: And yet again your work is so masculine, visceral, tender, but also violent. Although I do remember you once used the phrase “violence of thought.”

MR: There's a problem of how to mediate the bloody. I think a certain degree of irony, though not precisely, and distance, precisely, and humor, are necessary for the bloody to affect us. That's why framing and dramatic context are so crucial. I'm referring to an internal opposition inside the work itself, which frees us from the sense that the writer has a design on us. This is nothing new. The off-stage violence in the Greeks. Brecht's entire aesthetic — to me the key directive in 20th century. Even in an essay I want the reader to put together the different vectors and variables and violences at some point and have a kind of a cathartic experience, of some kind of pain and recognition. It's about getting at something beyond words, always beyond words, as in the impenetrable mystery of Mary Ure's fate that I try to probe in the poem “Fragile Craft” in The Couple.

MC: “Death by Misadventure” seems a riotous shortcut to the core of the mystery.

MR: I don't know if we can still use a word like "mystery," it's more that which is impenetrable, and it's connected to the myths and multiple gods and the placement of being over meaning. I think this year I've been aware that I'm the same age that most of my heroes died, or were dead, and that has awakened me to the dangers. A few of my poet/writer friends have confessed that something terrible happened around the age of 50 (it probably would have been earlier in an earlier time), and although the external circumstances are different in each case, I think that what happened is somewhat the same. To use the simplest common example at hand, what did Dylan produce from 50 until Time Out of Mind. 
 

MC: The weirdest thing in “Conversion in Scafa,” Mark, is your use of sports –that incredible football scrimmage. Why do you do these things to yourselves?

MR: I wanted to participate. Sometimes I got to and sometimes I didn't, and all I could think of was how to protect my head no matter what violence was being done to my ribs or ankles. Even Sam [Mark’s son] is amazed that I took up a friend of my parents on his invitation to a tackle scrimmage with the University of Utah football team, without shoulder pads or any other buffers. And this friend had been an All-American guard at the University of Washington. Well going to play was one thing. But they offered to let me carry the ball and I accepted and tried to run right of the tackle but the defenders converged, knocked my feet out from under me, threw me down, and piled on — not in a malicious way — but as I say in the poem I really thought I’d been broken; I was in so much pain that I wept dry tears. I went back into the huddle, someone probably said "are you ok, kid?" And helped me determine that nothing was broken or separated. Probably. My father wrote me when I was fifteen that “real life was not for fighting windmills.” I resented his interference, his rush to jump to an obvious conclusion based on surface evidence. Reality is clearly more like what Frost says, that “the time was neither wrong nor right.” People treat their conceptions of reality as reality.

As a kid who spent so many solitary hours creating imaginary worlds, I thought it would be dangerous in terms of reality to take that too far. Besides as an only child constantly moving to disorienting places like Kankakee and Salt Lake City after having spent my early years in Manhattan. I never knew stability. I knew I'd have to oppose this dreamy self-sufficiency.

MC: What you’re talking about in terms of physicality reminds me of a phrase that Lionel Trilling used to distinguish the quality of writers: he was in favor of the ones “who set their chisel to the hardest stone.” A last question, did you do any writing this week?

MR: I typed up the prologue I improvised to Sandrine Lareant’s version of Hamlet, which is Hamlet without the character of Hamlet. I discovered in a folder marked “1973” a version of Baudelaire’s “Spleen (III)” which never quite gelled to my satisfaction.

Nothing lifts his sunken spirits:
not Texas Hold’em, not falcon’s flight,
or his subjects withering on the balustrade….
Not even his fool’s most scurrilous songs
can smooth this black hole’s furrowed brow,
and the choruses of waiting women
whose eyes open at the mere whiff
of royalty, don’t show enough skin
to rouse this skeleton.
His gilded bed: a tomb.

I got it this time. Thanks to Texas Hold-em. I revised a poem called “Ghost Whispers” that’s dialogue between the different and the same memories Sandrine and Mark had about his great-grandfather’s farm in Suffern when they were children. But nothing compared to LeBron James’ performance.