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Mark Rudman

b. 1948
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Geography, place, diaspora and eroticism figure greatly in Mark Rudman’s work. Born in New York City, he spent a large part of his childhood traveling, living in Illinois, Utah, and Florida. He returned to New York City for school, where he earned a BA from The New School and an MFA from Columbia University. He has also spent significant time in Mexico and Italy. His books of poetry include The Motel En Route to Life Out There (2010) and the five that form what he terms the Rider Quintet: Sundays on the Phone (2005), The Couple (2002), Provoked in Venice (1999), Millennium Hotel (1996), and Rider (1994), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The critically acclaimed quintet was made available as a five-volume set by Wesleyan University Press in 2009.

Rudman’s work has often been described as novelistic. He mixes prose and lyric, and a single poem can contain multiple registers. In an interview with the Denver Quarterly, Rudman says of the dramatic situations in his work, “Dialogue gives credence to difference, to all the people that people us. To the high and the low.” Reviewing The Couple, poet and critic Mark Jarman states that “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.” Inherently dramatic, Rudman’s work lends itself to performance. He recorded his poem “The Albuquerque Interventions” with the actress Martha Plimpton; selections of Rider have also been recorded.

In addition to his own poetry, Rudman has published critical prose and highly acclaimed translations, notably of Boris Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert, and Bohdan Antonych. His translation of Pasternak’s My Sister-Life (1983) won the Columbia Translation Center’s Max Hayward Award; many of his translations appear in both Twentieth Century French Poetry and Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. His critical work includes Diverse Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry (2009) and Robert Lowell and the Poetic Act (2007). His many critical essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and the London Review of Books. He is editor in chief of Pequod, an international literary journal, and the recipient of awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. He taught at New York University and Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Poems by Mark Rudman
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Bibliography

  • (Translator, with Bohdan Boychuk) Square of Angels: The Selected Poems of Bohdan Antonych, Ardis (Ann Arbor, MI), 1977.
  • (Translator with Boychuk) Ivan Drach, Orchard Lamps (poems), Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1978.
  • In the Neighboring Cell (poems), Spuyten Duyvil (New York City), 1982.
  • (Contributor) Kate Daniels and Richard Jones, editors, Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly, Beacon Press (Boston), 1982.
  • (Translator with Boychuk) Boris Pasternak, My Sister—Life [and] The Sublime Malady, Ardis, 1983, revised edition, Northwestern University Press, 1993, illustrated by Yuri Kuper, Exile Editions (Toronto), 1989.
  • Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press (New York City), 1983.
  • The Mystery in the Garden (poetry chapbook), Spuyten Duyvil, 1985.
  • (Editor and contributor) Secret Destinations: Writers on Travel, Pequod Press/Persea Books (Northridge, CA), 1985.
  • By Contraries and Other Poems, 1970-84, National Poetry Foundation (Orono, ME), 1986.
  • The Ruin Revived: A Chapbook of Poems and Prose, illustrated by Susan Laufer, Branden Press (Brookline Village, MA), 1986.
  • (Editor and co-translator) Memories of Love: The Selected Poems of Bohdan Boychuk, Sheep Meadow Press, 1989.
  • The Nowhere Steps (poems), Sheep Meadow Press, 1990.
  • (Editor) Literature and the Visual Arts, Pequod Press, 1990.
  • Diverse Voices: Essays on Poetry, Story Line Press (Ashland, OR), 1993.
  • Rider (first volume of poetic autobiography), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1994.
  • Realm of Unknowing: Meditations on Art, Suicide, Uncertainty, and Other Transformations, Wesleyan University Press, 1995.
  • The Millennium Hotel (second volume of poetic autobiography), Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
  • (Translator with Katharine Washburn) Euripedes, Daughters of Troy, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
  • Provoked in Venice (third volume of poetic autobiography), Wesleyan University Press, 1999.
  • The Killers (chapbook), Spuyten Duyvil, 2000.
  • The Couple, Wesleyan University Press, in press.

Contributing editor, The Most Wonderful Books, edited by Michael Dorris and Emilie Buchwald, Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 1997; editor of Classics and Contemporaries for TriQuarterly, volume 106, 2000. Contributor to anthologies, including The Poem as Process, edited by David Swanger, Harcourt, 1974; New Directions Annual 41, edited by James Laughlin and Peter Glassgold, New Directions, 1980; Tribute to Stanley Kunitz, edited by Stanley Moss, Sheep Meadow Press, 1986; Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Scribner, 1989; Best American Essays of 1991, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 1991; First Light, edited by Jason Shinder, Harcourt, 1992; After Ovid, edited by Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun, Farrar, Strauss, 1994; 99 Poems, edited by Harold Pinter, Grove, 1994; Le cinema des ecrivains, edited by Antoine de Bacque, Cahiers Du Cinema, 1995;The Evolving Canon, edited by Sven Birkerts, Allyn & Bacon, 1995; Reading and Writing from Literature, edited by John Schwiebert, Houghton Mifflin, 1997; Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, edited by Steven J. Rubin, Beacon Press, 1997; and Ok You Mugs, edited by Melissa Holbrook Pierson and Luc Sante, Pantheon, 2000. Translator of poetry for various anthologies. Contributor of numerous poems, articles, reviews, and translations to periodicals, including Nation, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, New York Times Book Review, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Ironwood, Harper's, Ploughshares, and Raritan.