Mark Rudman
March 2006

Mark Rudman is the winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award, the Max Hayward Award for his translation of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, the National Endowment on the Arts, and the New York State Council of the Arts. His volumes of poetry include Sundays on the Phone (2005), The Couple (2002), Provoked in Venice (1999), Millennium Hotel (1996), Rider (1994), The Nowhere Steps (1990), and By Contraries (1987). He has also translated Memories of Love: The Selected Poems of Bohdan Boychuk, Square of Angels: The Selected Poems of Bohdan Antonych (with Bohdan Boychuk), Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life (with Bohdan Boychuk), and Euripides’ Daughters of Troy (with Katharine Washburn). His prose works include Realm of Unknowing: Meditations on Art, Suicide, and Other Transformations, Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry, and Diverse Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry.

He is at present working on New and Selected Poems, and two other books of poetry, Identification of a Woman and On the Firing Line.  He is composing a prose work called The Book of Samuel, and Selected Essays: Out of the Loop.  He is the editor of the international literary journal, Pequod, and teaches poetry part time at New York University.  He lives in New York City with his wife and son.


Statement

Dear Mark,

Permit me to address you in this attempt to write what you call a “statement on poetics.”  I’d like to focus on one area: dialogue.  If I had to pick a word to embody my poetics, I think it would have to be “dialogue” or “dialogical.”  I don’t mind the latter term, “dialogical,” particularly in the way that Mikhail Bahktin formulated it in his study of the choral voices in Dostoyevsky’s works.  (Dostoyevsky, by the way, referred to his books as poemas, and clearly they are rapturous compositions even if they fall in the category of fiction.)  But “dialogical” does have a kind of studious air that I would prefer to elide.  The quest of Frost and Eliot and Pound onto Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, that what they needed to have poetry evolve was “to get people talking in a poem,” resonates with me more and more. "If it Had to Be...". It has only two lines of dialogue, but they're the final two lines. The lines register finality and should turn the reader back to the beginning. Desire, I hope, is diffused everywhere. Even in the passion of the suicides? (Get up that early in the morning in sub zero weather merely to kill yourself, when there are so many other things you might have done, like sleeping, making love, and embracing the despair, the ontological terror, that binds us to each other and, I guess, to life.) The dialogue in the poem is with Dante's grove of suicides. I made a point not to reread that Canto while working on the poem. I did reread two of the best poems written in terza rima, which designation already appears to limit the consummate nature of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" but more importantly to me "The Triumph of Life." I am superstitious about writing and reading. It was only out of total despair and a sense of being inarticulate that led me to write "Conversion in Scafa" as a response to Four Quartets. And boy did I get stumped when I tried to track the phrase down.  It was neither Frost nor Eliot nor Pound nor Lowell who used this precise phrase, but, according to Lowell in his Paris Review interview, Delmore Schwartz.  I had long had in mind the freshness of interchange between poetry and prose in Shakespeare’s plays—and where the prose sections are often the highest poetry or, in the case of Falstaff, the richest, most complex, rewarding, and ultimately human speech.  I had also been charmed before I began the Rider quintet by Denis Diderot’s book Rameau’s Nephew in which Diderot has many conversations with the antic nephew of the composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau.  Something gets jarred loose during these conversations.  A dialectical energy which creates a third force of its own whose velocity was so powerful that it gathered Hegel into its wake, and he composed The Phenomenology of Mind and formed the concept of dialectics out of reading Rameau’s Nephew.  I am citing works that have a multiplicity of tones and antic, or madcap, quality.  And in addition to that, I might add that two of the longer poems in my recent book Sundays on the Phone, “The Albuquerque Interventions” and “Conversion in Scafa,” are in their own way dialogues with T. S. Eliot.  I see the “Albuquerque Interventions” as picking up where Eliot left off in his fascinating fragment “Sweeney Agonistes,” and “Conversion in Scafa” as a dialogue, however broken and scalded, with Four Quartets.  The latter had to do with a spiritual crisis during which every afternoon I would reread one of the quartets and meditate.  The meditations had nothing to do with poetic form, but once the poem began to come, I could feel the reverberation.  Surely the ending is indicative of this.

The stars so close to the ground.

The way, the way they appear, one by one.

No vasty, vertiginous blur.

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.

More recently, I have begun to think of dialogue as being even internalized and that poetry is a dialogue with an intimate other, or addressee.   The main problem we have with tone is when the sense of addressee is the wrong scale for the voice. 

I hope this is adequate for your purposes, Mark.

Fondly,

Mark



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