How did you come up with the title for The Millennium Hotel?

In the middle of the direful winter of 1994, when the trains to Long Island were canceled,  I took my son Sam, aged nine, to the one hotel with a pool in Manhattan that was remotely affordable:  The Millennium.  The real Millenium Hotel is quintessentially modern (even the spelling was changed by the designers to be more pleasing to the eye).  I probably would have used the title even if the millennium wasn’t around the corner.

You’d have to admit that this continues your series of books with titles that have a metaphysical slant--By Contraries, The Nowhere Steps, Realm of Unknowing. But did you really stay “high above it all” in room 1812 “amid deceptive reflections: weightless mirrorings...”?
Some of this play on heights and depths is my way of having a dialogue with poets who had access to real symbolic towers, places whose significance is part of what inspired them.  We no longer have access to the sacred in just that way.   The idea of that which is externally sacred has eroded in the past fifty years.  Not only are there are no more towers, like Yeats’, or Rilke’s at Muzot, but even a poem like Neruda’s, inspired by the then newly rediscovered sacred site, Macchu Piccu, feels as if it were written in a previous century.  But heights and depths have no intention of vanishing.  It’s the perimeters of the physical world, not the metaphysics, that have become problematical.

Are you talking about the way in which the world is becoming more and more of a theme park, or at least a reconstruction of something that was once real in the sense that it took time for its shape to evolve?

Sure.  But the sacred must still be experienced subjectively.  Transcendence is never automatic.  You don’t get that experience by just climbing Macchu Picchu or entering a church.  In our worst moments we have to remind ourselves that in spite of progress science and technology the problems of what it is to be human remain essentially the same for us as they were for the Greeks.

Your way of blending poetry and prose, and of using architecture to stand for the inner life of the builders and dwellers, reminds me a lot of Blake in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “Jerusalem,” where the stones are pity and the bricks are religion and he tries to warn the reader of the limits of technology.  Every globule of his blood opens into eternity “of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow,” and “The Microscope...and the Telescope...alter/The ratio of the Spectator’s Organs but leave the Objects untouched.”

I hadn’t read “Jerusalem” for a long time, but certain works go straight to your unconscious, and apart from Shakespeare, I’ve spent more time with those works of Blake (and “Auguries of Innocence”) than with those of any other English poet.  He was more urban than the later Romantics, and railed against “natural religion”--a point which some of those who claim to admire him seem to forget.  I am drawn to hybrid forms that marry lyric, aphorism, and history.  But I am put off by long poems that urge the reader to reach for the concordance, rather than seek correspondences.

But something draws you to the long poem?

What you’re calling long I’d call intermediate, like “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “The Waste Land,” “The Lost Son,” or “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar.”  These were the kinds of poems I read that made me want to write poetry.  I also noticed that prose writers had often done their most impactful work in their novellas.  You can’t really measure the length of these works by counting the number of lines or pages.

You’re talking about something like “The Marriage of Lyric and Narrative.”

Something in which the contradictory interconnections that made me want to write the poem in the first place could be followed through to the end: exhausted.  I’ve thought a long time about what has affected me most in other works of art.  And it takes a certain amount of time, with delay and frustration, to reach a point of catharsis and exhaustion.

In The Millennium Hotel there’s a kind of dialogue between east and west, mountain and flatland, desert and sea, as well as the urban and the rural.  Do you think this relates to the “dizzying geography” of places you lived in or visited in your childhood, and makes your persona resemble that of a detective?

Living in transition may have alerted me to the symbolic potential of the real.  Recently, driving to a house on the Battenkill River in Vermont, we passed a place called Plattekill, and I began to wonder how many American towns ended in “kill” and what it might mean-- 

Apart from the literal “brook.”  Your question about that suffix brings to mind “Gorge,” the final, and twenty-fourth, section of the poem “The Millennium Hotel,” “Gorge.”  Weather is often in the foreground too.  Did translating Pasternak’s My Sister--Life with its neo-Kantian emphasis on the thing influence you here?

There’s something else I like about the weather: it’s temperamental.  The sky has changed more times in the past two hours--from scathingly bright to bitterly dark--than I would ever attempt to document.   And it’s difficult to see beyond the sky of the moment.  But yes, I was searching for a way to render emotion, and character, obliquely, and Pasternak, with his roots in philosophy, helped me trust in objectification.  It’s a way of making a statement without generalizing.  Poetry makes life bearable insofar as it allows us to be elliptical, abjuring narrative while retaining the skeleton of a story. 

Would you agree that one paradox about the poetry and prose written in this century is the prosaic nature of the former and the poetic nature of the latter?

If you mean that serious poetry has striven toward a hardness (Pound’s dicta/Eliot//Moore/etc) that is normally associated with prose, yes.  The work of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner has a lushness that is more conventionally “poetic.” 

Would it be fair to say that books like Women in Love, To the Lighthouse, and Under the Volcano are poems?

Would it be helpful? 

You can’t deny that poems from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (“His true Penelope was Flaubert”) to “Ellen West” to “Ararat” to “Rider” have the effect of condensed novels. 

Ideally, they do. Contemporary poets have worked to find ways of telescoping narrative--stripping the “story” to the bone. The truth may not change, but the forms in which it chooses to manifest itself do.  When I was first making my way through those modernist novels, I noticed that they had high points, not unlike Wordsworth’s “spots of  time,” and I fantasized about writing poems that could have that kind of impact without the linear development. 

In spite of the playfulness to the hotel theme and attention to a winter storm which paralyzes the city in the title poem of The Millennium Hotel, there’s a horror of a life lived in transit, and of transit camps. I noticed that the title poem is addressed to a woman who, in losing her mother, was also losing her sense of the reality of the camps. Yet you appear to have no qualms about juxtaposing a sardonic reference to Speilberg’s popularized version of the holocaust with a reference to the real Bergen-Belsen.

Is this any more than holding a “mirror up to nature”? Many people’s earliest memories are now bound up with movies, in good part because of what they were going through emotionally at the (impressionable) time they saw them.  I hoped to set up a certain tension in the book by placing “Screen Image” where I did.  All poetry is, loosely speaking, screen imagery.

You mention Freud’s concept of screen images in your notes with regard to your riff on Goethe’s first memory. 

In Dichtung and Warheiht, the four-year-old Goethe reports the thrill of getting everyone’s attention by throwing all the crockery into the street.  Freud says this was a screen for his unresolved jealousy over the birth of a sibling.  Screen images are always approximate, they never expose the root of the problem.  We exaggerate for reasons that remain unknown to us.  My poem “Rain of Arrows at the Dawn of Memory,” based on the idea of an outrageous early memory, certainly isn’t accurate in all of its details, in part because I reimagined them, in part because I couldn’t remember.

What comes through in your work is the violent absence of siblings--the loneliness of a four year old boy shooting rubber arrows across the abyss between buildings.  And persisting, against common sense and experience, that one would stick on the “rebarbative brick.” 

Now that you mention it, I’ve recently done several Horation palimpsests (a term I’ve adopted for the kind of adaptations I’ve been working on) “Against Odds Against,” and “The Desert of  Empire.”

You really do proceed “by contraries.”

Or maybe just, to borrow a favorite phrase of Malcolm Lowry’s, against “existence as sold to us.”

There are heights and heights.  “Flying Into Rome” immediately brings to mind the section from “The Millennium Hotel,” when, shuttling back and forth between parents you  “lived in air,  emptier than emptiness/each breath of wind a wound./...the view... occluded by clouds,” “immersed in a fog of unknowing/mystified.”

You put song lyrics to an interesting use in several of your books.  The allusion to Margo Timmin’s way of singing “A Horse in the Country” fit seamlessly into Rider, the

                        “But”s and “oh yeah”s in the song
                        about the horse out in the country

                        she gets to see “every second Sunday”
                         
The acceptance of the lover’s distance in that song, expressed in the intonation more than the lyrics, is astonishing.  I only became aware of the immense number of allusions to horses and riding in all the arts as I was finishing Rider.   My ignorance saved me from the temptation to layer.

And as if you hadn’t exhausted that subject the “rider” interrupts for the first time from the afterworld to fill in the blanks, clue the reader in to the source of the resonance.  

                        There’s something you forgot.

                        Forgot?  Or left out?

                        Forgot.  That “oh yeah” you like--

                        Yeah.

                        You don’t even know why you like it, but the “Brain” remembers.
                        It’s an echo of a song by that sweet-voice, clean-cut Nelson boy
                        (which I did not attempt to destroy) where there’s a memorable
                        “oh yeah” like that--do you remember ow or do I have to spell
                        it out for you?

                        No.  “Poor little fool..oh yeah...” 

                        So who’s the “fool” now?

And in the poem “The Nowhere Water” in The Nowhere Steps a “searing, apocalyptic” version of  “Cool Water” by The Talking Heads is set against its more soothing precursor your mother sang over and over and becomes another marker of the difference between life in the ‘fifties and life now, as we anxiously await the millennium.  

I like rock n’ roll immensely, but can’t think of song lyrics in the same breath along with poetry.  In fact, one of my least favorite conversations is the common one in which the poet is asked if he thinks such and such song lyrics are poetry, and if not why not.  But before I enter those waters I feel compelled to add the proviso that “The Nowhere Water” has been misread with shocking frequency.  The basic setting is factual, but the details are invented, and the poem is in its way an invective against the tendency to simplistic Oedipalizations.

But to return to the endlessly raised question about song lyrics and poetry, let me offer one simple instance of the difference.

This summer my son started listening to Paul Simon (Negotiations and Love Songs) before going to sleep.  He found it soothing.   A rhyme like “Rene and Georgette Magritte/With their dog after the war/Were dining with the power elite” is splendid in the splendid song, but a poem, a true poem anyway, exists in another sphere, risks a difficulty, resists ease.  Even the best song lyrics still need music in order to enhance the words, while accompaniment distracts from the subtle, wily, devious and complex music of poems.  Poems have a way of sticking in your mind.

You make them sound barbed.

They are.  A poem is not just a repetition of something everyone knows, in the Ecclesiastical sense.  It throws a wrench into the knowledge that preceded it.  I agree with Thoreau that masterpieces were written to be read in the morning.  And no book more than his own.  Anything that slyly subversive has to be read slowly.  Certain books force you to read every line, phrase, or sentence, as if, like a detective on a case you were looking for clues to the solutions the author is asking to arrive at ourselves and have that “ah” sensation.

In an article on The Nowhere Steps in The Agni Review, Linda Orr wrote that you were attracted to couplets because the two lines kept each other company. 

In the poem “Screen Image” I also tried to mesh the slithery actor and the father and raise the question of how the actor appeared in real life compared to the roles he played on the screen.  I traveled a lot with my father between the age of five and sixteen, but only in my mid-thirties did I begin to see the potential of the material for poems.  Everything was so palpable in memory.  And my one night in The Millennium Hotel with Sam brought back a lot of those early experiences...

Holding your own son amidst the myriad reflections makes you remember you knew your “father best in water,” as if only in that element could the barrier between self and other be broken down. Your poems of  childhood are vivid, mysterious, even haunting.  I’m thinking of the companion poem to “Screen Image;” “Gratuitous Act,” “the bongos and the castanets/on the floodlit, open-air dance floor.// The floodlights and the dust of stars.//The paw of the ocean on the shore.”

I also hoped to give a stereoscopic portrait of the fifties, and the ways in which women were dehumanized and reined in literally by fashion itself.
   
Have you considered that your couplets may have transformed themselves into the dialogic form that you began to deploy in Rider?  How did you begin to write in dialogue?

An interrogative voice asserted itself, and I was compelled to answer its questions.  This resulted in Rider.

So it was a spontaneous combustion?

Almost.  I’d meditated for a long time on the possibilities of dramatic verse and dialogue.  And I found it curious that hardly anyone after Eliot and Pound talked about Elizabethan drama as a possible source.  

It’s hard to take the contemporary theater seriously...

I don’t mean plays performed on stage.  I mean dramatic situations that are a springboard for dialogue.  Dialogue gives credence to difference, to all the people that people us.  To the high and the low.  To responsibility (Diderot, Prince Hal, Ivan Karamazov) and infantilism (Rameau, Falstaff, The Devil in The Brothers K).

The interlocutor is not as omnipresent in The Millennium Hotel and yet the book has a dialogic feel to it. 

I try to reach the moment, as in the seventh chapter of Rider, when the “little rabbi” interrupts the earthly personas because he is inflamed by their inaccuracies and then, for a brief time, the interlocutor and the narrator become indistinguishable. 

The boy is dreaming of escape from the classroom and the “little rider” is watching his reverie through the door.  

It bears some resemblance to the ending of Bergman’s Persona.

“Role Play,” your version of several poems by Horace, also prepares the reader for the book’s blend of eros, history, and politics.  I notice that you include several translations, as well as free adaptations, in The Millennium Hotel.    I have the sense that the versions of Heine, Bobrowski, and Rilke are a way of metaphorizing just how history has changed.

These renderings function in many ways tonally and underscore the themes.   Heine’s “Night Thoughts” shows how long ago there was a feeling in the air about the direction which Germany would take.  Johannes Bobrowski, who deserves to be better translated and better known in America, represents the state of the German soul after Brecht and Celan:  “we came/here to sleep, no one/walked around the bed, no one/put out the mirror, no one/will wake us/in time.”  Bobrowski’s language, like Berryman’s, is twisted, contorted.  His enjambment creates another plane of ambiguity.

If you had one word to describe The Millennium Hotel what would it be?

Metamorphosis.  The figures turn and turn about, evolve.  Think of the way the woman on the beach in “The Diver” somehow becomes the woman immersed in outer space in “The Motel En Route to Life Out There.”

That “Motel...” poem pulls together a lot of the book’s diverse themes.  The metaphysics of chance are incarnated by the casinos in the desert surrounded everywhere by pools and the “gallery of types throwing the dice.”  You appear to take pleasure in seeking after the sublime in these utterly profane settings.

I think of it as my task.  What Gary Snyder would call “the real work.” 

You give full credence to the woman’s intellect, and yet the motel image there is utterly carnal.  Her beauty, serenity, independence, and intelligence, are all a turn on.  And while your work has always had an erotic tinge, this is the first time you’ve written openly sexual poems.

Given that I have ended up writing a semi-autobiographically based poetry, I felt obligated to fill in that part of the canvas. I was aware, but only because people had told me, that Rider portrayed a male world, with four fathers center stage. The poet Claudia Keelan taught Rider to a class composed entirely of women, and she made me feel less uneasy about this imbalance by saying that while the subjects were male, the feel of the book with its openness and lack of closure was female.

But something must have given you access.

Deepening confusion about the masculine and the feminine, which happened to be consonant with the sudden surge in the culture’s interest in gender. And I realized I was not alone when I talked with women about the ambiguous messages being sent out in women’s magazines.

So your ardent pursuit of the feminine in The Millennium Hotel was a conscious strategy?

Let’s say it was time to try.  But I didn’t choose it as such any more than I chose to write two previous books in an elegiac mode. 

The title poem is an elegy. 

That’s true, but once the literal and metaphysical winter ends, a door opens onto the erotic.  It helped to view early erotic experience through a social lens.  Adolescence has gotten a bad rap.  (As we talk, the Greeks are giving teenagers a chance to practice running Parliament.)  I believe in the lost: the ones I know are...seeking.  Traveling in the desert last summer the only people who steered us toward canyons at dusk and restaurants that used cilantro and four-shot cappuccinos, bookstores, and rivers it is still possible to swim in were all between 13 and 23.  They’re people who embody the condition my generation were provoked into thinking about through Beckett and Weil: waiting.  For a taste of the eternal we cling to letting go.  To arrival and departure.  To the beauty of change over hackneyed routine.  To the unpredictability of the young--however abrasive and disruptive--over the sanguine determinism of the American day.

Is adolescence appealing terrain because it allows you deeper access to a sincerity that isn’t ponderous?

The authenticity of passion is not measured by its length.  And people reveal themselves in extreme situations.  It may have been the amount of embarrassment I felt writing poems about first loves that kept me doing it.  The only way I could deal with the peculiar squalor of “Easter Weekend in Denver” was to borrow Dante’s structure: begin it on Maundy Thursday, end it in the dawn, to think of the ditch into which the car turns over as Malebolge.

In your essay “Catastrophe Practice” in Realm, you address the “physiological roots” of Nicholas Mosley’s style and refer to stammering as an “unconscious way of repairing one-dimensional interpretations of reality.”  Do you think that applies to the sudden jumps, often signified by dashes with space between them, in The Millennium Hotel as well?

Probably, though I never stammered when I was that close to rage.  I tried not to speak.  I didn’t want people to think I was that upset.  I’ve spent a good deal of my life marveling at how people act as if nothing is wrong while something subtly awful was going on--  and quarreling with the violence of my intuitions.  But if I had acted more sensibly, rather than waiting to see what would happen even if it pained me in the present,  I wouldn’t have wasted the time that the poems recast, recapture.

The “I” in poems like “On the Wheel Of” loses his voice when he’s distraught.

Poems begin for me when there’s an impasse.  It may be the difficulty of articulation that starts up my imagination.  And the resulting imprecision of the “completed” poem plants the seed for the next poem to gestate.

Did you really feel such an immense longing for intimacy with a young woman when you were in your teens or does it appear that way to you in retrospect?

I said it as well as I could in the book.  I invent freely within these so called autobiographical contexts or settings; I never dissimulate. 

And you’re asking the reader to be keyed in by the tone.

Yes.

The theme of orphanhood is an oblique undercurrent in all of your books (in By Contraries you talk about “orphanos,” the Mexican cult of orphans) despite your multiple parents, and your close proximity to your maternal grandparents as a child.  But in The Millennium Hotel you give it an ironic twist when you pun on Jews being led to the showers with your own experience in a bizarre school for “juvenile delinquents” where you “fell into a hole” in a dormitory floor where “no one else had fallen./And it was the only way to get to the showers./And when the handsome nurse asked me to call home/I wanted to say, If I had a home/what was I doing here, dragging my life/behind me.  I wasn't an orphan.”

I get by with a lot of help from my friends.  I was once explaining some dilemma to Larry Joseph and he said, “Rudman, you’ve always been puzzled.”  A statement I found both accurate and, of course, puzzling.

How do you respond to Adorno’s dicta about lyric poetry being impossible after the holocaust? 

It’s too bad that such a great writer, especially in his literary essays, should be most remembered for a single statement that was addressed to an audience that no longer exists.  Still, I take it as a spur, like all polemics that are rooted in real problems.  We live in history, not historically.  Why should anyone born after say 1945 consider embracing silence any more than they should celibacy?  My phrasing’s imprecise...because I couldn’t take seriously any poet who hasn’t considered silence.  

What are you writing now?

Let’s say that in addition to the poems that occur in the mysterious way that poems occur, (like one that juxtaposes Joan of Arc and Jean Seberg) I’m working on another series of interconnected poems that I hope will be the final volume of a trilogy which would include Rider, The Millennium Hotel, and a work in progress I’m calling Provoked in Venice (with an emphasis on the adjective) to help me progress.

You emphasize that you’re provoked; I note your continued emphasis on place.

Or placelessness.  Venice is endangered in more ways than its fabled sinking.  But it’s also a place which never had a pretense to being other than it was.  I wrote a first draft of “Flying Into Rome” in the air, trusting in invention, which means that I quarried images from any available source, a post WWII German novel set there after the war, past visits, and wove in things I observed during the subsequent days.  Once I hit upon the metaphor, I was off and running.

                        Everything [in Rome] is open that is not under reconstruction:
                        the workmen sprinkling sawdust over dirt,
                        sanding the gaps in the mosaics;
                        the anthropologists removing the caked, by now

                        baked-in grime from the crumbling shrines,
                        and digging through ruins’ rubble for limbs
                        to fit the decapitated statues.

I’ll grant you the metaphor. I know you get edgy when someone mentions familial themes, content instead of form, but will you grant me the human touch of you and your little boy locked in some mysterious communion five miles above the earth as a way to end?

It’s your call.

                        The child and I are among the last half-dozen
                        hold-outs of some five-hundred passengers
                        to fight sleeping sitting up--
                        as if our bodies would be snatched

                       and we’d wake pod-people--
                        his head balanced crosswise on my lap,
                        my body in a position I wouldn’t have dreamed possible,
                        legs to the right, torso to the left.

Interview with Mark Rudman, Denver Quarterly