1.
Memory,
the flawed repository of
all that “is no longer
there,” has been the
bread and butter of poets
since the birth of the art
in oral tradition. In
our age, the mnemonic aspect
of poetry has undergone
a metamorphosis: while the
form has long since ceased
to be required to serve
as an aid to memory, the
past, cultural and individual,
is constantly resurfacing. Now
it takes the form of a remnant—a
ghostly messenger that walks
among us in broad daylight,
a half-remembered episode
triggered by the senses,
appearing just beyond the
spectrum of the present
tense. No writer since Proust
has led a more rigorous
and exhaustively inexhaustible
inquiry into the subject
of our conversation with
the past than Mark Rudman. The
publication
of The Couple,
Rudman’s sixth
collection and the
first to follow his
acclaimed trilogy,
(Rider,
recipient
of the National Book
Critic’s Circle
Award, The Millenium
Hotel, and Provoked
in Venice),
should cement
his status as
one of the
finest poets
now at work in
America and in
the English language
globally. Over
the course of his last
three books, Rudman
has developed a distinct
voice that blurs confessional
lyric and narrative
epic with a dialogic
technique that brings
to mind writers as
diverse as Diderot
and Jabes. The
italicized voice of
the “rider”—which
at times belongs to
Rudman’s deceased
stepfather and elsewhere
represents a more amorphous
correspondent—interrogates
the narrator as he
recounts episodes from
his life. The
effect is harrowing
and hilarious by turns,
and the poems—characterized
by sudden leaps and
breathless narrative
detours—are propulsive
and cinematic. Throughout
his career, Rudman
has dealt with a wide
range of material of
both formal andthematic
interest—the
clash of cultures as
sold and touted; the
labyrinth of memory;
the conversational
and the oblique; the
real, the hyper-real,
and the flat-out fake;
the concerns of the
essayist and autobiographer;
prose, poetry, and
the screenplay; the
collapse of the lyric "I," and
the need for a resolution
beyond closure—all
while maintaining
a keen sense of the
language as spoken,
and always with a
critical eye trained
on the nerve center
of our culture's
grim and glitzy fascinations. The
Couple finds
Rudman at the height
of his powers,
fully at home in
the genre-melding
form that
he has pioneered
alongside
more renowned innovators
in the novel.
To
relegate this collection
exclusively to the specialized
readership of poetry is
to do it a disservice; although
it has the range and depth
of the best poetry, it is
eminently readable in the
novelistic sense. The
individual pieces, which
range from meditations on
place (“Provo”)
to adaptations of the Odes
of Horace (“Hidden
Clauses
in the Lottery
You Can
Enter for Free”) to
investigative biography
(“Fragile Craft:
On the Strange
Lives and
Untimely
Deaths of Mary Ure,
Robert Shaw, and
Ricky Nelson”)
are drawn along parallel
lines of inquiry into
a dizzying web of associations
that never resorts
to the easy connective
tissue of coincidence. And
just when
it seem that an idea
has been taken to
its natural conclusion,
there is
always one more spin,
some doubt, a last
flicker of life:
…like
the time you went
to the track in
Denver
{…)
you bet
on a horse
named Saint
Exupery for no
reason at all (god
forbid
you should have consulted
his record!)
except that it was the
only name you recognized
and the odds were something
like 50-1 against him
and he won—
placed—
won
Either way you
came out ahead
on the day.
Chance was the real
victor.
It depends what
you mean by chance.
(“Long-Stemmed
Rose”)
Anecdotes appear
as afterthoughts,
the light at the
end of a sinuous
sentence broken into
rapid-fire lines,
followed by stretches
of prose narrative
that would not feel
out of place in a
fast-paced, nuanced
genre novel. Often
the most dizzying
passages are the
most densely-packed:
Why does
everyone underplay…
The
dangers of living.
When
they could just
not
look down.
And
on ski slopes Easterners
would kill to go down you
had
the distinct sense
that the mountain
was concave
and
that if I went down I’d
hurtle off into whiteness:
one
graceless frantic somersault.
(“The
Shallowness of the Lake”)
The only
thing to rival the
breadth of forms
in The Couple is
its virtuosic use
of the language;
all types of speech
are at home here—Dean
Martin’s caustic
quips in “The
Secretary of Liquor” alongside
the Shakespearean
dialogue of “Long-Stemmed
Rose.” And
the cast of characters—from
the faceless patrons
of the bar in “Provo” where “it’s
against the law/to
serve liquor,” to
ex-lovers who haunt
the poems like unsolved
riddles, to the celebrities
who, like the gods
in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, occasionally
step down from the
silver screen, out
of their legends
and into the lives
of the poet and his
family—makes
for drama of truly
epic scale.
Rudman
may be the poet that Borges
had in mind when he suggested
that, were epic to have
a renaissance, it could
very well come from America. And The
Couple, like the trilogy
which preceded it and of
which it is in many ways
a continuation, is a distinctly
American book. This
is no middle of the road “novel-in-verse.” Its
narrative drive is not hampered
by delicate turns of phrase. There
is no vocal register that
isn’t utilized here
to great effect, no material
deemed unfit—it is
a democratic work, in William
Eggleston’s sense
of the word. We are
notoriously slow to recognize
a genuine new article, especially
when it comes in the guise
of something familiar. Since
the main exposure that poetry
gets comes as a brief diversion
in the pages of The
New Yorker, or through
journals that are understandably
reluctant to publish long
tracts of verse such as
those which comprise The
Couple, there is as
of yet no apparatus in place
for the type of book that
Rudman is writing. And
because, for the same reasons,
these poems do not go well
into anthologies, Rudman’s
recent work has been largely
absent from taste-making
surveys of the art.
2.
“Provo,” as we know from the poem named for this town in the desert outside of Salt Lake City, is “a place where there is no reason to be.” But conversely it is the place that you must pass through “to get anywhere in Utah,” for example to “Zion or Moab.” The cold-shouldered, “parchment-skinned” Mormons who live here act “as if something terrible had happened./Or was about to happen.” Provo is provisional—a transitional stage frozen between poles of being, “a desert stopover with the semblance of a town”; it is also a provocation. That The Couple begins in this no-man’s land, this “nadir” whose only unique feature is “an absence I couldn’t identify” is telling to say the least—landscape here is less a projection of the inner world than something which infringes upon it, the way the lights at the “immense single-pump gas station{…}show up whatever’s wrong with a face;{…} make something wrong when there’s nothing wrong.” And yet Provo has a sort of magnetism. An ineluctable pull. It is joyless, oppressively orthodox, a kind of “dark night of the soul” on terra firma. The landscape only seems an unbroachable subject by virtue of the fact that the traveler who passes through here must spiritually be running on empty. But like a soul in Purgatory, he is only passing through—and Provo forces the issue.
Most importantly, Provo is closed-off—surrounded by “hills like craggy impenetrable fortresses,” inhabited by people with faces hardened against any human exchange. Everywhere we look in The Couple, we seem to meet them in duplicate. In “Long-Stemmed Rose,” the beautiful and elusive Laura, despite her lack of interest in a modeling career, is willing to let herself be photographed nude “in exchange for a portfolio/which she could show to agencies” (the italicized voice quips: “In other words, there was an element of sense”), but remains permanently at one remove when faced with actual intimacy. The family of boy guitar virtuosos in “The Guitar Lesson” play with such practiced fluidity that the young Mark—who will soon go on to perform a naïve, improvised piano assault a la John Cage at his grade-school recital—is terrified: “I have no words for how I felt, nausea and dread made the decision for me. I never went back.” When he later discovers the transgressive music of “Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg,” he “{sighs} with immense, even immeasurable relief.”
I wondered why no one had ever said
suggested hinted or insinuated
that there was another way,
a way to make an art
out of wrong notes.
In the Salt Lake City of “The Shallowness of the Lake,” where “social class defined itself by who/hit the slopes on the weekends,” Mark’s mother is exasperated by his unwillingness to “hit the slopes” with the Silvers—family friends who “lived on skis.”
The Silvers represented the good life
And decency too yes decency.
Like a TV family.
I didn’t say it.
This “good life” is just another species of isolation, entrenchment against the unknowable and the all-too evident.
The film stars, remembered and forgotten, whose lives are interrogated in The Couple—Dean Martin, Mary Ure (who, for a time after her debut in the film of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” had the notoriety of a British Marilyn Monroe), and her husband Robert Shaw—each withdraw into their own self-destructive and excessive defense mechanisms, until at last they vanish altogether. It is this process—this closing
off—that the book is a desperate attempt to come to grips with. The italicized voice, speaking as it does in human terms, nevertheless comes from afar. Dante had Virgil; Rudman has the voice of the “rider.” Reading The Couple is akin to eavesdropping on the conversation between a penitent and a sort of “ghost of Christmas past,” accompanying the poet through memory and the lives of exemplary (or non-exemplary) figures—archetypes of a kind of behavior that has its inevitable end in tragic abnegation.
3. “…(la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, helas! Que le couer d’un mortel)”
--Baudelaire
In the introduction to his book on Robert Lowell, recounting how he once sat next to the poet and his daughter through a double feature of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The Big Sleep, Rudman comments on the link he perceives“between the art of detection and the art of poetry”(p.3). Nowhere is that connection more apparent than in The Couple. Rudman is a double P.I.: an investigator in the public and private spheres. At the end of his inquiry-without-end there lies something more mysterious than any untenable solution, more ambiguous than the cold hard truth, and more precious because less recoverable than any stolen valuable wrested from the hands of international conspirators.
I couldn’t have known it then, but soon
my cousin, his wife, my lover—soon
we would all be lost to each other forever,
not taken by death,
just gone into another kind of dust.
(“Long-Stemmed Rose”)
This dust can perhaps be called the dust of exile. Not the kind that Ovid suffered at the hands of Emperor Augustus over his Amores, although there is a reason why his poetic letters from exile in Tristia resonate with readers nearly 2000 years after having been written. The type of exile meant here is the type that Perseus addresses at “The Change Seminars,” in Rudman’s adaptation, “Perseus and Andromeda,” which is the centerpiece and erotic core of The Couple.
The premise is simple: “Significant mythic figures were required to attend the Change Seminars”—a kind of academic colloquium where the likes of Midas and Orpheus give lectures on topics arising from the changing attitudes of writers over time to the body of myth assembled in the Metamorphoses. When Baudelaire’s poem “Le Cynge” from Fleurs du Mal comes to the attention of Andromeda, she plants the seed of an idea in Perseus’ head:
“{Baudelaire} thinks of Ovid exiled and the pitiful forms so many of his
characters have to assume so that they can’t even recognize themselves, when
he realizes he too is exiled because his memories are lodged in places that have
been torn down.”
“So if he took some friends from out of town on a tour and every site he
pointed out had been replaced they might think he’d gone mad.”
“You’re catching on.”
The Couple, like Rudman’s other books, is built around the motion of returning—rewinding and re-screening events in the collective subconscious and the poet’s memory that refuse to lie down and rest. At the heart of this is the disquieting sense, as in Baudelaire’s poem, of belonging to a vanishing milieu. The passage of time sheds light on some events and casts doubt on others, but regardless it isolates the past in memory. When that memory is in turn isolated from its source, when none of your co-conspirators
remain to corroborate the evidence of recollection, then you have fallen prey to a species of banishment.
Perseus delivers his lecture to the Change Seminars: “Baudelaire and Ovid: Two Forms of Exile,” noting that “{Baudelaire’s} spiritual exile, being internal, is almost/grimmer, because less tangible, than Ovid’s.” The case studies that follow, dealing as they do with celebrities—our era’s equivalent to the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon—who have met untimely ends in or out of the public eye, showcase the forms that this internal exile can take. “Fragile Craft” recounts how Mary Ure, who burst onto the scene in her early twenties only to make a permanent exit in her early forties, died—on the night of the cast party for her highly-acclaimed return to the stage after a 12 year absence—of a not necessarily fatal mixture of alcohol and barbiturates. And in a section entitled “Nakedness Her Shield,” we learn that the actress, armored in a full body mail shield that covers front and back.
Old Times with such fluidity and precision, and made me listen
closely to every line she uttered through her subtle delivery,
was equally chaos incarnate the moment she stepped off-
stage, and had several times been found, during the play’s
short run, walking around naked in front of startled stagehands,
and thirty blocks from the theater on Broadway,
or in Central Park at 3 A.M in the cold of a New York winter
at a time in the city’s history when most people would have wanted
to be armed as well as warmly dressed.
Contrast this with the portrait of Dean Martin that emerges in “The Secretary of Liquor”: a man who, when asked to lunch by a producer in order that they might “get to know one another better,” instantly snaps back: “No one gets to know me.” A man who, when his family entertains, “{disappears}/into his room to watch Westerns on TV, alone”; with
whom “the public was so saturated” that “many conflated the persona with the person.” Somewhere between the erratic, bare-all recklessness of the one and the two-faced, airtight aloofness of the other, there is the dust of exile into which they’ve both disappeared, leaving greater or lesser ripples in their wake.
It is important to recognize that these narrative investigations never fully abandon the first person. No matter how far The Couple may delve into biography, it never strays entirely from autobiography. After all, Rudman himself was in the audience, mesmerized when Mary Ure and Robert Shaw, “both looking vital, fit, and younger than their years,/{played} husband and wife in Pinter’s Old Times.” And when, during a live performance of their act, Martin and Lewis, in a club in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Dino and Jerry “leapt from the stage{…} to chase a slender tall brunette in a white dress/down the aisle, chanting, in imitation moron--/’We know where you’re going, we know where you’re going,” they couldn’t have cared to guess that
…a young
woman who was that well put together
could be as painfully self-conscious
as this anonymous girl, who within a few
years would become my mother.
4.
In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin characterizes Materialistic Historiography as a vision of history that describes the progress of events not as a straight line from cause to effect, but as an erratic motion akin to thought, which moves in fits and starts. “Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.”(254).
This “monad” is the seed that contains the whole of the historical moment, and by extension, the whole of human history. I chose to end the previous section of this essay with the closing lines of one segment of “The Secretary of Liquor” to show how Rudman works the strands of his poetic argument into a “configuration pregnant with tensions.” In this case—since the reference is to the poet’s mother—the “tensions” in question are the ones that will eventually give rise to the poet himself. On every level, the poems in The Couple adapt this model as their creed. Just as the individual pieces often end abruptly when all of the cards have come into play; the book as a whole amounts to a highly-charged, crystalline moment. Peering in, we might recognize, as in Benjamin’s monad, the parallel or contradictory story- lines, the myriad signs of the time, the questions, and their embryonic answers.
After the purgatory of the two biographical poems, The Couple moves toward higher ground. The title poem contemplates a pair of young lovers who, unobtrusively intimate in public, dissolve the boundary between public and private when they kiss: “…with their twin teal backpacks, parkas, and other gear—/ they look like one new creature. A mutation.” But this communion remains grounded in the corporeal, the sexual, and the physicality of existence:
Who invented ecstasy?
What man or woman
first walked around
with its burden?
The burden is the challenge of keeping one’s head above water, remaining “lucid”, as in the epigram from Camus (“What I like to do: Remain lucid in ecstasy”)—a feat which the poem accomplishes deftly through its honed eroticism.
The “Two Horatian Palimpsests,” adaptions of Horace’s Odes which are as much a commentary upon as a recasting of the originals, with their effortless movement between past and present and their implied caveat regarding time’s swift passage, are nothing short of heartrending. “The Return of the Soldier,” strikes a celebratory note in honor of that rare instance when, out of memory’s exile,
…a friend
given up for lost is somehow,
miraculously, washed ashore,
implying that even this “less tangible” form of banishment may not, when all is said and done, be irreversible. “Hidden Clauses in the Lottery You Can Enter for Free” brings the critique of the fortress-like closed persona, (as exemplified by Laura in “Long-Stemmed Rose,” whose “every disclaimer revolved around her ‘full time job’”) to the nation writ large:
The general consensus holds: America is a young
civilization. But why do the young
take this to mean
that never letting go of the net is the door to the future?
Never assume. Quarry fresh ideas from the ancient world
where the workers still have long lunchbreaks
and wine.
Even the poem “Elsewhere,” a New Yorker’s reverie over Los Angeles, points to a place where “dread {ebbs} away,” where the child’s fear of flying vanishes
…because we were flying
to L.A. I liked the people there.
They were happy. They didn’t quarrel so much.
Now those same people may be gone or dead
But that sunny mood must have something to do with the place.
On the far side of The Couple, occupying the spot opposite “Provo,” is its companion piece: a second meditation on place entitled “Volterra.” Once again the locale—“a remote, fortified city in the heights”—is none too inviting: “Stark streets, hard and harsh walls” where
At midday this unsparing, sunless glare,
releases the pain in the basalt, an ancient pain,
preserved in the twisted torsos and anguished expressions
of the Etruscan couple on a sarcophagus lid.
But Volterra, a foil to the “nadir” that is Provo, has a history of more than just pain. This Etruscan city “in the heights,” known for its isolation
…from other Etruscan cities
even before the Romans—the real
barbarians—broke through the gate
and brought the future to Volterra
is home to a people temperamentally alien to the dour inhabitants of Provo. Rudman, like D.H. Lawrence before him, finds much to admire in the character of the Etruscans, who
…couldn’t take the time away
from living life to acquire Roman know-how.
There was always the chance of exuberance,
the dance, and what came after.
The Etruscan way is “An improvisation. Not a system”—a kind of openness at one remove from the vicious cycle. The fortress around the city seems better suited to preserving something precious that is already abundantly present, than to keeping out the “real barbarians” with their “know-how.” At twilight, Rudman and his wife pause to look up at the sculpture—a “tercet of Etruscan heads”—that adorns the gate to the city:
Three heads, triangular, at the top.
Muddy brown. Features effaced by weather.
Twenty-five hundred years of weather.
A millisecond, an hour, a day.
The poet and his wife—the couple—witness the crystallization of so many years, so much history, so much weather, to an instant. And they take heart. For, as the poem asks, “Who is not, deep down, Volterran?”
Sources
John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket, Pantheon, 2001
Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, Harvard, 2000
Baudelaire in English, Carol Clark and Robert Sykes, ed., Penguin, 1997
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Fontana, 1992
Additional Comments on By Contraries
"In The Couple, Mark Rudman has woven an extraordinarily rich and highly original tapestry. It's an impressive achievement."
—Harold Pinter, author of Betrayal
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