Red Carpet
A name
they call me
in the bosom
of her family
caused me
to believe
I was her first
true love
looking into
her ways
then averting
my gaze
caused me
to believe
I was her first
true love
the illusion
of looking in on
a concealed
world
the story
of women laughing
as a boy
listens in
caused me
to believe
I was her first
true love
comfortable
face subject
on a pillow
folded back
the romantic
abasement
I heard about
and mock
caused me
to believe
I was her first
true love
I am not
absolute
she compares
me to others
a feeling
of mystic
superiority
supports me
so do I
says the leaf
falling off
so do we
say the
withered
arms and necks
of Lake Sokokis
canoeing
into
a whirlpool
of the motionless
caused me
to believe
I was her first
true love
deep
happiness
that moves me
turned inside out
My initial thought, dawning on me a few poems into Steve Malmude’s Red Carpet (his first full-length collection to appear in the UK) was “Why haven’t I read this writer before?” The poet’s biography offers clues, as do the poems themselves – not through any lack of quality but because the quality they exemplify includes both charm and resistance to charm. This complexity isn’t mainly literary; it loops back to the dilemmas and survival mechanisms of an assertively independent life.
Malmude was born in Manhattan in 1940 to parents of Ukrainian Jewish and German Lutheran extraction. He studied engineering at Queens College, but, against his father’s advice, switched to English and classics after one semester. Poetry became a serious passion. After graduating, he worked as a carpenter in the Bronx. His education in practical poetics, to coin a useful phrase, forged ahead at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in Manhattan, where he met, among others, the poet Larry Fagin. Fagin published Malmude’s first book, Catting, in 1972, in the distinguished and well-named Adventures in Poetry imprint.
Having produced two further collections, Malmude relocated in 2002 to Limerick, Maine. This would appear to be the setting of Red Carpet’s title-poem, my choice from Miles Champion’s eloquent arrangement of work composed by Malmude between 1958 and 2023.
Red Carpet is a love poem, perhaps a love song, both skittish and serious. It plays with simple-seeming devices, the list and the refrain, and is structured in a form Malmude has made his own, the unpunctuated quatrain. These decisive shapes, however, contain a mass of uncertainties. The speaker is cautious: he looks, listens, guesses, an outsider to the blessing, he suspects.
The quatrain structure and the brevity of each line give the refrain (“caused me / to believe / I was her first / true love”) ample space to express hesitation. This helps the list of reasons arouse readers’ own speculations. The shy delicacy of “looking into / her ways / then averting / my gaze” may be true to life, but how, if the narrator is in earnest, does “the story / of women laughing / as a boy / listens in” lead him, even if he is the boy, to assume himself to be “her first / true love”?
The questions around the story being told and the evidence being gathered intensify. We sense the pressure to tell, and to withdraw from telling, when the inter-refrain narrative occupies two quatrains instead of one: (“the illusion / of looking in on / a concealed / world // the story / of women laughing / as a boy / listens in”). Those two stanzas (five and six) increase the suspicion I’ve felt from the beginning – that the loving woman might be the speaker’s mother. I don’t think the question is answered, but it becomes unimportant, even trivial.
Malmude is a master of lineation. In stanza 11, “I am not / absolute / she compares / me to others …”, the sentence-refit of “me to others” suggests pained recognition of not always coming well out of the cramped comparison. But the poem by now is rebuilding uncertainty into confidence. It has moved on from doubt to “a feeling / of mystic superiority”, and these lines (stanza 12) mark a kind of volta. The turn is a redirection towards the self-confidence of the unconditionally loved – which might even carry them through intimations of being loved only on conditions. The inter-refrain “narrative” now stretches over five stanzas (11-15) and introduces a chorus of corroborations – “so do I” and “so do we” being the charmingly book-ended lines of stanza 13.
After the funny-sorrowful image of the leaf “falling off” comes a harsher scene which may suggest the drowning and decimation of the Indigenous population around Lake Sokokis, near Malmude’s home in Limerick, and may revise the celebratory “red carpet” into a history-bloodied river. The line-breaks again are notable: “Canoeing / into / a whirlpool / of the motionless // caused me / to believe / I was her first / true love …” Time seems to stop, and death and love coalesce while the canoe is still whirling.
One last quatrain takes up the story, and the narrator is finally anchored. But where? The “deep happiness” that is “turned inside out” may be at risk of evaporation. Or it may declare itself and be carpentered into the glory of the captured moment.
Reading Malmude’s collection is a joyous experience. In every poem the solidity of craft amounts to more than formalism: it’s a matter of unfeigned, compressed creative energy that teases or argues outright with form and sentence-level sense. The poems are complex, yet they take the influences of the New York School and Language poetry and blend them without setting up class barriers or courting difficulty for difficulty’s sake. The voice has its own self-trained body: it doesn’t join in with the in-talk of any in-crowd. Perhaps that’s why the poems have evaded various lit-crit filters. What matters now is that they’re widely and attentively read.