A Life on the Page

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Jarman, Mark

NOT ONLY A LIFE ON THE PAGE, but a durable life on the page, is what I think a poem should have. Despite any argument of any oral tradition, despite the necessity that a poem have an aural music audible when read aloud, despite W. H. Auden's memorable definition that a poem is "memorable speech," still if a poem does not live first on the page, in its written words, I don't think it's worth much, certainly not worth reading. I say this partly as a reaction to a strain of contemporary poetry that seems to be written or composed for performance. Like the vapid lyrics of many popular songs which become memorable only when sung to their catchy tunes, the script-for-performance poem needs some other accompaniment to come alive. Many seem to have been written for a kind of stand-up comedy routine, something rather more sophisticated than the ranting and intoning you can hear in coffee houses almost any weekend night, but just as reliant on histrionic presentation. Granted, reading some of these routines is diverting, like reading the scripts of old Seinfeld episodes. But they have a slapdash quality that points to their function as performance pieces. A poem should have a memorable and durable life on the page, and that life should be strong enough to serve as a reproach to any overly-theatrical reading of it aloud. Think of it. Ginsberg's "America," the prototype of the performance piece, cries out for scenery-chewing. Yeats's "The Second Coming" doesn't need it.

Having said all this, then, I have to admit that some of our most intriguing and moving poetry right now looks to have been written for reading aloud as a kind of monologue of the Spalding Gray variety, in which the voice and bearing of our narrator are foregrounded. These poems are autobiographical and anecdotal, while at the same time being dramatic and intimate. The poems do maintain their life on the page, but part of that life is the tone we can imagine in the poet's oral performance. The awareness is strong that further authenticity and effectiveness will be rendered when such poems are offered as public testimony or witness.

Mark Rudman in his long, haunting, and occasionally puzzling new book1 writes a poetry that hovers between emotional journalism and the music of what happens. At times it reads like flat reportage, but gradually one realizes that very flatness is part of its dramatic tone, a kind of affectless music. This book takes us from Rudman's boyhood years as the stepson of a rabbi in Utah, of all places, through his obsessions with movie stars and celebrities, an arc from kin to kitsch, while examining various couples, all of them steeped in the mystery of self and other. The first poem, "Provo," begins:

It's hard to get anywhere in Utah without going through Provo.

I can't tell you the number of times

I went there as a teenager, the number

Of times I drove into town in the early

Afternoon, hungry, and had to look around

For a place to eat. You don't have to starve

In Provo but you eat at your own risk.

At no risk. I would never have gone to Provo

On my own. I went accompanied

For reasons almost too trivial-or personal-to mention.

And the personal is not mentioned; instead, the poem becomes a riff on the place, making it seem as sinister as Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity" or the whistlestop in Bad Day at Black Rock. That Provo is a predominantly Mormon community adds to the dread, for its citizens "have masturbated without shame. / They have coveted, envied. / They have pocketed the tithe." Finally, the poet tells us, "Provo is a place where there is no reason to be." By the end of the poem, it is hard not to agree with him, even as we might suspect that he's done a job on the place for reasons that are personal. But I imagine all of us know an American place like Provo, for which we feel a similar antipathy. Like the monologuist in the nightclub, Rudman knows we all have the same beef.

The best of these poems are not monologues, however, but dialogues that read like private conversations. "Long-Stemmed Rose," an account of a failed love affair, develops a compelling rhythm based on a kind of analyst/analysand interrogation which the reader is overhearing. The technique is one Frank Bidart has also employed in his poem "Confessional" as has Anthony Hecht in "Behold the Lilies of the Field." Rudman's speakers seem to be the poet and his dead stepfather chiming in from beyond the grave. The complexity of tone is due not only to their give-and-take, but also to typographical emphasis, as we find it in Bidart. Discussing the eroticism of nakedness, they come to this moment:

nakedness itself is no aphrodisiac.

Although it can be . . .

What about the photos the master of Nantucket

light look while his wife lay sleeping

naked on the sheet in the summer heat?

They're hot.

Hot because she'd just been fucked or was about to be?

Hot-because-of heat.

Such a passage may explain why Harold Pinter has supplied a blurb for The Couple. The poetry Rudman makes at its best reflects and dwells on the tensions between one person and another, a dialectic if you will; poetry is its synthesis. Berryman's multi-vocal Dream Songs come to mind, though Rudman is neither as hectic nor as lyric. Rather than being the song of oneself, the poems in their dramatic constructions seek if not a common ground, then a communal stage.