Mark Rudman

Posted in Past Guests  |  Tagged N-S

Born in New York City, Mark Rudman’s writing has been described as novelistic, mixing poetry and prose. He earned his BA from the New School and his MFA from Columbia University. Rudman has received awards from the National Book Critics Circle, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the CCLM Editor’s Fellowship, among others. He is author of seven books of poetry, the most recent of which, Sundays on the Phone, was published in 2005.

From The Way I Am

for G.J.

I.

“I always do everything wrong. Sans exception.
There I am again using ‘sans’ instead of ‘without.’

I can’t seem to socialize properly with anyone.
If you’d been there you could have told me why.

It couldn’t be they aren’t the right friends. We’ve been
together so long: same yoga class, same teacher, same time, three—

afternoons a week seven years passage through life’s
shifting vicissitudes you’d think we’d be…

I’m getting nervous, can’t finish the thought I set out to…
Please tell me I’m right, that what’s gone can’t have

exited my system. Tell me, there are so few people I trust,
that what I’ve learned, that what I thought I knew only

yesterday hasn’t been—erased—just marked: absent.”

Continue reading “The Way I Am” at Guernica.

Links

• “Relax, Pay Attention – A Walk in the Park with Mark Rudman, by Matt Corey. frankmatter. 30 July 2016.
• Laying It on the Line: Mark Rudman’s Sundays on the Phone,” Review by Green Hill. Stray Shot. 29 April 2008.

Media

Seminar with Leslie Scalapino | October 16, 1997