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Cloud in a Bottle
Excerpt poem from Sundays on the Phone
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“Nature loves to hide.”
Heraclitus
for Sam, aged fourteen
It’s a blankness I aspire to
in the open. Close-cropped
mountain trails, undulant hills
in the gradual falling away.
The silence unreal.
We don’t want to move,
not while foxes and coyotes
are out wandering too.
In the dusk the hard, carved
clouds appear to hold their shape forever.
My teenage son drops
his cool, opens his arms
and exclaims, wouldn’t it be great
if we could just put them in a bottle.
His joy is so intense
I wish I could lengthen this instant.
To know that the days grow
shorter in August doesn’t
cushion the blow
when the fields
disappear
and we’ve no choice
but to feel our way
back to the car.
For additional Excerpts from Sundays on the Phone, click on Poetry
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Book Review: Lives in Words from The Virginia Quaterly Review
by Francis-Noel Thomas
May 18th 2006
In the recently published Sundays on the Phone, the angel with whom the poet wrestles is the love of a son for his mother. The mother is seen at distinct moments of an unhappy life—as an attractive woman waiting out a divorce in Las Vegas, as a frustrated elderly woman living alone where she doesn’t want to be, bitter about her lack of a college education, bewildered by her unhappy marriages, puzzled by her son. “She had no one with whom to share her experience. No friends who loved the things she loved . . .” |
There are surprises: this unhappy and embittered woman listens carefully to her “small but fine” record collection. Among the best times she spends with her son are those they spend “listening to music in silence.” “She didn’t play these records as background: when she played, she listened; and once in a while we listened together.”
Richard
Howard has said that
no one in the future
will read all of Proust,
just the beginning
and the end of his
long novel. Rudman’s
five volumes of meditation
on his life are not
very much like Proust’s
novel in most respects,
they do not have the
density of detail,
the large cast of characters,
the representation
of incessant societal
and personal change;
taken together they
are not as long as
any one of the seven
major parts of Proust’s
research into lost
time, and they make
no gesture at being “research.” What
Rudman offers are isolated
fragments of experience
that sometimes have
a proustian intensity,
an emotional power
that reverberates through
a life—without a detailed
or consecutive narrative
of the life through
which they reverberate.
And just as all the
eccentricities of Proust’s
characters and all
the lovingly observed
details of time and
place do not obscure
a core of experience
that every reader recognizes
as immediate and pertinent
to his own, so none
of the particularities
of Rudman’s poems prevent
his readers’ from recognizing
in these isolated fragments
of love, resentment,
bitterness, need, failed
conversations, bewilderment
a familiar emotional
landscape.
The poet’s mother is a naïve reader of the best kind. In one of the telephone conversations, the poet reminds her of a letter she wrote after reading Madame Bovary; this section of Sundays on the Phone is called “The ‘Emma’ Letters” because the poet’s mother calls Flaubert’s novel “Emma.” She read the book “because the subject—female trouble—interests her.” She does not read this book because it is a classic work of literature; she reads it as a kind of conversation with its author, whom she thinks shares her interest in her troubled life. She thinks of her troubles as being specifically female: “if my father had done a fraction for me / what he did for ‘the boy,’ Bert, / my life would have been substantially different.” And she believes that Flaubert can speak to them because she thinks of Flaubert as a man with a strong female side. Flaubert, I think, would have been flattered to know he would have such a reader. She has never had this feeling about the poems her son writes: “I think you should write a grand adventure. / Something people want to read.” But she asks him why he has bothered to keep her “Emma letter” along with another one about her husbands’ drinking. The answer takes her by surprise: “They were beautiful.”
So the lives reflected here include the lives of the written word and their intersection with the lives of their readers. These meditations have a deep appreciation for the strange intimacy of readers and writers, real intimacy without the distraction of seeing the writer who speaks—like telephone conversations. Very few poets find large numbers of readers today. This poetry is not esoteric either in form or in subject; often as banal on the surface as those obligatory phone calls to distant parents; often as powerful too. They ask for readers who want to read about subjects that are part of themselves—obligatory memories, obligatory losses—without even noticing that they are reading “poetry.”
Sundays on the Phone
Reviewed
by Cynthia Arrieu-King
Following the tradition
of dialogue poetry, Mark
Rudman’s ninth book of poetry, Sundays on the Phone, delves into a store of actual and personal memories he has of his mother Marjorie. The longing to somehow re-visit, re-enact, rearrange order in what seems a tumultuous and passionate mother son relationship powers the book. Rudman reminds the reader of the novelistic possibilities for poetry, that its scope can reach out to situation, prose that is not the symbol laden prose poetry we’ve
grown so used to but that
recounts parts of a life.
The dramatized anecdote
and its attendant, subtly
transforming texture move
past the reader under the
guise of reality. That unpretentious,
direct delivery allows the
awful emotions that can
radiate only from parents
to encroach and punish the
reader rather than to fall
maudlin. Not easy to pull
off at this late date. (Albert
Goldbarth and David Kirby
in the generous candor and
off-handedness of these
poems.)
A lyric memoir, the jacket
offers, Sundays on the Phone
moves through four sections
of spare and cut dialogue
poetry interspersed with
prose poems and long sectioned
poems of varied lineation.
Voices talking to one another
in the blank silence of
the page, that is what Rudman’s apparent habit of having talked to his mother every Sunday morning at 10:47 AM for years becomes for him in poetry. Starting in “Nowhere Water” Rudman sketches out for us the pattern of his vantage or eye – it travels from the familiar “immense dining room” out into the “desert …vast and empty” so that wide flat, un-peopled landscapes far from Las Vegas (in that particular poem) seem to sketch out open and frighteningly limitless psychological spaces.
The first poem of the first section—titled “Kid’s Stuff”—explores childhood from the vantage of the parent. Rudman goes on to draw airy problematic spaces so they can be later contrasted with the personal as in “Back Stairwell”:
Like a rustle of eternity
Shattered in the vista of receding
Clouds, antennae, water towers…
And I think we are not far from ecstasy
Even in the interior. (3)
This more abstract texture serves as a good backdrop in which Rudman can establish his more mystical and lyrical authority, and which helps him move to his own childhood, to the strange establishment of generic figures of adulthood – Marjorie’s husbands, quickly drawn, grouped, named. Soon the plainest detail from life in its own generic quality equates itself with tenderness, heightening the presence of that ominous mother, Medea in “Cutting Edge Production: Medea” and Marjorie’s potential for rage. Having established that sense of unpredictability in the figure of a mother, Rudman gets back to his large open terrains again, yet these aren’t delineated by the physical world but by the dialogue between himself and his mother, their squabbles in the movie theater (“How Bad Can it Get”), the tedious quibbling about her gourmet cooking and Rudman’s own son’s limited palate “Sole Responsibility”. The nagged and nagging rigmarole of trying to explain something to a stubborn parent is perfectly captured, held on its angry terrain with few moments of peace or transcendence for most of the middle of the book.
Interspersed with these narratives that search for explanations of why this second husband for the mother, why that move back to Salt Lake City is the mother’s voice. Often her uncannily familiar and personal observations, including syncopated Jewish exclamations, are made into a kind of burning lead by being spoken from the beyond:
“You couldn’t control me when I was alive and now that I’m alive
in another way you have even less power over me.
You are sitting in that damned dentist’s chair 37 stories high over
Manhattan and you had to move your tongue while he was drilling –
Don’t interrupt—” (12)
(“Approach of the High Holy Days”)
Anyone who has lost someone close might have a strange and instant mix of relief, lightheartedness – oh yeah, I know that voice, the voice that continues – and feel a deep pang about the life in it. Rudman takes us deeper and deeper into varieties of this kind of conversation; she complains how her bones hurt now that they’re ashes and teases him with her knowledge of the term from his area of expertise, simulacra: “You smile Mark. /The dead read their Baudrillard.” (“The Birthday Call”). These moments all underline the way the poet struggles to process the mother’s dominating presence, ignited by flinty insecurity and fueled with huge indignation, even long after she’s gone. How can one deal with the unresolved conversation, and un-resolvable fallout? The dialogue poem allows us to move from the strange outlying regions of supposition and its atmosphere of rarified bravado into the real, and shocking anger of, say, “Late Lunch”. In it the speaker and son show up almost an hour late for a lunch the mother has cooked and as soon as they’re in the door:
“Oh why don’t you just go fuck yourself.
Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and go back to New York City you shit, you little shit.”
Oh my god. (86).
This poem’s wanderings into bald narrative permit Rudman the kind explicit summation and revelation that earlier landscapes of the book wouldn’t have supported. The result seems purgative. Most of the rest of the book ramps these dialogues into the lyrical and the transcendent without truly detaching from the live report of a human voice. The rarified and the real dissolve and resolve their boundaries, as in “The Albuquerque Interventions” that allow Rudman to hear his mother say:
“I told you.
I knew if I could go
Further than I could go I would know
What lies on
Solitudes’ other side.”
And Rudman replies:
“You may have told me.
(Pause.)
I didn’t know, I don’t know.
But somehow you’ve erased
All the good times.” (119)
A great counterpoint to this almost excruciatingly vivid mother is the usually mute grandson, Rudman’s child Sam. Almost by the strength of his adolescent inscrutability, the child foils or attracts his grandmother’s ire, revealing its selfishness, and his own imperviousness, something the reader almost wishes the raw speaker could embody as well. He’s like a blank rock in a hoodie at times, eating only his steak and noodles to his grandmother’s chagrin, a boy who would like vegetables if only she’d raised him (?). And so he models his own brand of resistance to change, like the mother, and cleverly, one she can’t always get her hooks into, though she does embarrass and anger him at times. Sam becomes the traveling, valued pawn that always turns up in dysfunctional triangulated relationships, the one which provides examples for good or for bad, depending on who’s doing the talking:
She’s back.
“So, no bar mitzvah for you Sam, huh?”
(He smiles.)
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, it’s too bad that your parents didn’t (as if I’m not in the room) give you some religion.”
(Red-faced).
The ambiguity of Rudman’s quasi-stage directions give the dialogues a kind of weaving, ungrounded quality. Is the mother red-faced? Is the boy? The boy, the reader decides. And as one moves through more and more expanses of dialogue, one finds one’s self picking out what part is the mother’s, what part Rudman’s, almost being moved to sketch the names in the margin. This blurring of the identities lets Rudman say why it is so hard to deal with one’s parent: it is hard to deal with someone whose faults are so familiar and, one hates to think, possibly like one’s own. Clearly Marjorie is not always rational, and Rudman maintains a kind of un-cool posture in relation that irrationality.
Rudman takes the poetic focus off style, surface, cleverness, and steeper ravines of syntactic invention to pay tribute to what his mother meant, set as they are in a clear and ingenious set of contexts: dialogue, narrative, prose, not to mention specificity and reflective summation. The ins and outs of story matter here: guilt, the mundane, the burden of caring for children and caring for parents, cities, meals. In “Late Lunch” he seems to reveal what piece of sand has been wearing on him, both causing him to remember and sometimes despise that determined woman. The reader can hear the volume summed up this way:
My mother didn’t manage my life, but she curtailed the satisfaction I took from my life.
Had all this not been so bitter, I could have grieved.
I could have written a lachrymose elegy. (89)
___
I don’t think she has a moment when she isn’t thinking about herself.
I’ve known thousands of people, never anyone like her. (91)
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NEW! Review of Mark Rudman
Reviewed by Daniel Sofaer
March 31th 2006
Readers expecting a mood of ease and hominess, of a quiet Sunday chat on the phone, will soon encounter something more intense. We learn early in the book that Rudman mostly dreaded his mother’s phone calls, which rang shrilly on a green phone at exactly 10:47 AM. In fact, most of the mother-son conversations in the book are face-to-face conversations, and this is all to the good, since Rudman is a kind of lyric dramatist, and his mother’s character impresses us most in person.
Though this book is the last volume in a quintet, it stands on its own quite well. Some of the poems present Marjorie directly, in some we catch glimpses of her, while others are still more remote, but linked to the story of Mark and Marjorie by themes like shock, displacement, the sense of violent attack: “In my mental world, someone is always attacking me.” Rudman also intersperses the poem with lighter pieces about his childhood and youth.
Hovering over the characters of mother and son are the tragic figures and sublime unsteady language of Medea and Hamlet. Rudman spins a metadramatic megafantasy, in which these two greats face off without bothering too much about Gertrude and Jason. Rudman lets in Medea by including a poem inspired by the Abbey Theatre fall 2002 production starring Fiona Shawe, at the climax of which Rudman heard what he renders as a “horripilating electronic screech.” Hamlet comes in a little later, once mother and son get to talking.
What most moves me in the book is a courageous and sometimes desperate effort to find common terms, common ground. Mother and son have come to live in different worlds. They speak very different English. Rudman isn’t afraid to represent himself, the character in the book I’m calling Mark, in a somewhat unattractive light, as a bit of an aesthetic snob. For instance, one feels while reading it matters a little too much to Mark whether his mother has read Jane Austen or the poems of Blake, whether she knows Latin. This self-representation amounts to a self-reckoning, even an atonement. For his mother wins out in the end, and the poet Rudman wins too by rescuing her words from oblivion. Also, in the end, he does find common ground, common language, and proves to all concerned that his mother did authorize him to be a poet, despite never having conferred on him the official title.
One artistic thing Mark learned from his mother was concentration, trance: “When she played [a record], she listened.” And as she later remarks, “I know about trances, why do you think / I did all that painting, gardening, swimming.” When she finds him listening to her copy of Ella in Berlin, she tells him that what he is hearing is called scat. “I adored the name like a key to an earthly heaven.” And Rudman is careful to transcribe: “da da da da dee dee dee deed um dad um dad um da da da da . . .” They could discuss “Walker Evans’ Depression period,” go to museums, and in her letters his mother presented him a calmer, more verbally masterful self. They also share a psychological incisiveness, a hatred of phoniness, and a sort of feminist protest at the stupidity of the men around them, their unfair advantages in life.
When Marjorie gets older, this side of her gradually disappears, and Mark experiences more of her rage and compulsiveness. He is also disappointed by the fact that she takes no interest in his son Sam. It is grim but funny that the only question she ever asks Sam, and only when told to ask him directly, is “Do you eat anything other than steak and noodles?” But the way his mother speaks in her rages is also close to poetry, closer, perhaps, than Mark’s proper diction. There is something ludicrous about Mark’s “She must have intuited that because I was little I would like the diminutive fowl.” Compare the bluntness but also the playful metonymy of one of Marjorie’s mantras: “I married one bottle and then I married another bottle . . . I didn’t know that Rabbis came with bottles.” Elsewhere, Rudman manages to juxtapose the voices of son and mother in a single line: “you unsheathed your spite and penned / a vicious missive about ‘two skuzzballs, human slime . . .’” But my favorite of Marjorie’s dicta has to do with her brother-in-law, Mark’s uncle: “Mark, Jack wasn’t a fake. He didn’t have to play mind games or lay on the charm like Sidney. He wasn’t a talker, he was a doer. It was he who introduced the idea of aptitude testing as a business.” That’s the beautiful humorous note that goes back to Delmore Schwartz’s “America, America.” It doesn’t matter that aptitude testing is now soberly questioned by readers of the Times. Marjorie is talking about the life she has seen and lived. As Schwartz’s story puts it: “She spoke always of her own life or of the lives of her friends; of what had been; what might have been; of fate, character and accident; and especially of the mystery of the family life, as she had known it and reflected upon it.”
> Click here to purchase Sundays on the Phone
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