From Venice: The Return in Winter Excerpt poem from Provoked In Venice 8 Remember, not all of Venice is fake. The essence of Venice is invention, even if every stone is where it is for a reason. The islands and the canals were there before Marco Polo, the India Cafe, Cinemascope, Ruskin and Turner. The Romans called the tribes that lived in Venice the Veniti. The tribes stretched from Trieste to the mouth of the Po. The early settlers confronted a world of mud and marshes stirred by the tides. Deserted shorelines in the dark. Mantua could have remained a marshland were it not for the Jews’ architectural ingenuity. The Veniti were also there before the inscrutable woman, fine cheekbones, only an inch or so of whitened skin shining between the sunglasses and bright orange down hat with ear flaps immersed in the German journal Mercure, before the raft where you wait to catch the vaporetto began to bob rhythmically, and millions of bizzarely curious people began to pour throughout the maze, this labyrinth, this Venice, where we walk through sightless alleys barely wider than my shoulders, and exit on other canals where long branches, unpruned perhaps for centuries, reach out from wild gardens which sprawl below dilapidated palazzos spared restoration..., and a creature, somewhere between a duck and a pigeon, forages in the frigid canal.... When you think of the numerous, not to say numberless, artists and writers, who fled to Italy --I’m surprised that you would not search for less trammeled locations, like Lisbon, or Barcelona, but not... Every trip has been so harried in its own peculiar way, that I left each time feeling fascinated but unsatisfied, as if I had just touched the surface. The total number of days spent in three separate visits amount to no more than a month and a half. All in early summer, when the city, while not being sacked, is still under siege. You can spend half a day in Rome or Venice finding the church with the paintings that you want to see. And on each excursion detours distract you from your ostensible purpose. There is a suffering that exists and can’t be eradicated; blame can’t be placed on one thing or another. I saw more of Venice in a day on a tour than you’ve yet shown me. Scarcely a monument shows up in your pages. Yours is a Venice without a Doge’s Palace, Veronese’s Rape of Europa, the crystal mystery, the jeweled sea, coral, amethyst. I tried to elide that which has already been documented, too often described. But if Hofmanstall, Ruskin, Stokes and Pound, within the last hundred years, didn’t hesitate to call the city crystalline... The azure air and the water blend together and are then transformed into a matter that matters; substances like water, air, and stone intermingle. Short Reviews of Provoked In Venice In these powerfully conceived and understated poems, Mark Rudman asks how culture is created and shared, and how historical events and figures are known through direct experiences of place. The title Provoked in Venice alludes to the structure of the book, wherein a trip to Italy becomes the catalyst for a meditative view of the convergence of imagination, history, and the 20th-century attempt to recover them both. The narrator enters the maze of Venice like a contemporary Dante guided only by the voice of the "rider"-interlocuter. Rich in allusions to literature, film, and the past, this final volume of the trilogy will engage and sustain all mental travelers. "Since Byron, many poets have been 'provoked' into poetry by Venice; and, since Pound, that provocation has proved to be particularly fruitful for American poets. Provoked in Venice makes a rich, and distinctively personal, addition to this tradition. Rudman's Venice becomes a site where meditations on the formings and fadings of old-world cultures mingle with American memories and autobiographical details. The result is, exactly, not ordinary. As he writes: 'Nothing / normalissimo about Venice / Venice is—anti-simile. It isn't like any other / place.' And Rudman's poem isn't like any other poem." – Tony Tanner “This last installment of a trilogy, and Rudman’s fifth collection of poems, is a fast-paced, confident, insistently secular synthesis of autobiography with the chaos of urban life in contemporary Italy…Rudman reserves most of his poetic energy for the book’s dominant theme, Venice, where ‘everything is swirling’ and ‘what cannot be effaced, erased, or reproduced, is experience.’…His own experience allows a boarder perspective on the city-perhaps the next best thing to being there.” – Publishers Weekly > Click here to purchase Provoked in Venice