About Paul Muldoon: A Profile
I first heard of Paul Muldoon through the affectionate enthusing of Seamus Heaney, who donned his conspiratorial mien -- as if agents of some imagined opposition might be lurking near -- and confided that his somewhat younger compatriot was "the real thing." I sought the work out, though I'll confess I was some time coming to it. This would have been in the mid-1980's, the time of
Quoof and earlier collections. Accustomed to the solid subject-focused work of Heaney, who had taught Muldoon as an undergraduate, I thought Muldoon was working a bit too hard at the "Musee des Beaux Arts" thing, enthroning obliquity. But eventually, I made my connection. I readjusted whatever lenses I use to read poetry, and then, suddenly, they did not seem oblique at all. They seemed right, and much of the work of others, through that peculiar inversion of readerly tastes, now came across as lumberingly obvious.
Born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951, Muldoon grew up in a house without many books. "Believe it or not," he writes, responding to my question about literary influence, "the only reading material we had in the house was
The Junior World Encyclopaedia, which I read and reread as a child. Other books must have come from the local lending library . . . But the
Encyclopaedia was my text of texts." The critic is tempted to take this cue and run with it, to find here the very source of the jackdaw-building principles of the poems, which, especially in more recent years, can scarcely curb their lore-braiding. On top of everything else, Muldoon is, in his poems, a retriever of the golden fact, a breaker-open of the habit-encrusted outer shell of words, a maker of Cornell collages from the materials of perception and recollection.
It is not usual for a poet of Muldoon's years to have not only an
oeuvre -- eight volumes of poetry, as well as numerous chapbooks, plays, and children's books -- but an
oeuvre disclosing significant shifts and evolutions. But Muldoon, more than most, is an artist in high flight from self-repetition and the deadening business of living up to created expectations. His books seem always to be in reaction to the work that has gone before, though not in an arbitrary and willed way, but in a way of testing, pushing hard at latent elements, and exploring hints dropped in earlier poems. Thus we see the balanced take on the unemphatic daily in
New Weather (1973) open out to the more engaged social and political querying of
Mules (1977); the transitional
Why Brownlee Left (1980) ushers in the more subjectively idiosyncratic
Quoof (1983), with its ramped-up wordplay and more venturesome rhyming.
Meeting the British (1987) showcases, in "7, Middagh Street," Muldoon's gift for eccentric impersonation, as he imagines himself inside the language-skin of figures like W. H. Auden, Louis MacNiece, Carson McCullers, and others who passed through Auden's
ménage à terre.
Madoc: A Mystery (1986) plays out a complex historical imagining, in the words of reviewer Lucy McDiarmid, "what might have happened if the Romantic poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had indeed come (as they planned in 1794) to America and created a 'pantisocracy' ('equal rule for all') on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania." I suspect, only half in jest, that Muldoon fastened on the subject so that he could work some acrobatic variations on thatmost beautiful word, "Susquehanna."
With
The Annals of Chile (1994) and
Hay (1998), we see the needle of the work flinging back toward center, preserving the
outré rhymes and venturesome asides, but returning to a more personal and emotionally exposed subject matter, as in the tour-de-force long poem "Incantata" that closes
The Annals of Chile. There is the sense, in these later books, that the poet has drawn the circle wide and returned, interesting in view of the fact that since 1987 he has made his home in the U.S. (he teaches at Princeton University) and is a U.S. citizen.
Or maybe it's not so interesting after all. Maybe these plate shifts on the outer crust have little or nothing to do with the chthonic element, which is all about language and memory and may well obey laws of its own.
Muldoon has noted somewhere, in interview, that he first began writing poems as a way to get around a certain teacher's weekly essay requirement, an easy way, that is, and if one wonders anything about the evolution of this poet's art, it has to be something like: What happened between the initial presumption of ease and the realization that must underwrite any serious writer's perseverance in the face of the extraordinary difficulty of getting the words to stick to the page? The business gets more interesting when we remark the contradiction between the casual-seeming surface -- the unemphatic rhythms that tighten suddenly around some image or offbeat association, the details extracted as if by crow's beak from the realms of the overlooked -- and the prodigious, patient labor that goes (by admission) into their making.
I don't believe that there is any commonsensical explanation for how this all works. I would go, rather, to the poet's own assertion -- that part of the magic of writing poetry is that "one knows as little as possible" about what one is doing. But such a profession of ignorance is not so much a retreat of intellect before the mysteries, an abjuration of responsibility, as it is a hard-fought metaphysical alignment of self to language and perception, a clearing away of expectations and the myriad comfort-giving templates that tell the poet what the poem should be before the poem itself has had a say in the matter.
Yes, this makes it sound as if Muldoon is a language mystic, a believer in annunciations and threads of inspiration. Queried about this, he responded: "I do absolutely think of it" -- the process of writing -- "as a mystical experience." Composition, he avers, is a kind of divination. Muldoon speaks of giving himself over "to the force of language, for which one is a conduit or medium." He does add, however, that "the 'divining' metaphor breaks down in the sense that the rod is at once unknowing . . . and absolutely
knowing. In other words, all the intelligence one can muster (and probably some that one can't) needs to be brought to bear on making sense of precisely what it is that is being divined."
This may seem like a somewhat recondite reflection from a poet so thoroughly immersed in the immediacies of the immanent, the detail-nubbled surface of the world. Then, moreover, there is the admission-this from the master of the windfall
trouvé -- that Muldoon's favorite poets, the poets who "continue to matter most," are Donne, Byron, Keats, Frost, and Yeats.
1 How do we explain the obscure propagation of taste and influence in any writer's work?
In Muldoon's case -- and of course I'm guessing -- it seems a steady confrontation between the irresistible force of what has been done and the immovable determination to not repeat or echo the work of the past. For the sounds and verbal connivings of the masters are precisely what stands in the way of the fresh perception.
In the opening lines of "The Mudroom," the long poem that opens Muldoon's most recent collection,
Hay, the poet writes:
We followed the narrow track, my love, we followed the
narrow
track through a valley in the Jura
to where the goats delight to tread upon the brink
of meaning. I carried my skating rink,
the folding one, plus
a pair of skates laced with convolvulus,
you a copy of the feminist Haggadah,
from last year's Seder. I reached for the haggaday
or hasp over the half door of the mudroom
in which, by and by, I grasped the rim
not of a quern or a chariot wheel but a wheel
of Morbier propped like the last reel
of
The Ten Commandments or
The Robe.
Reading, slipping in and out of comprehension like a feverish patient slipping in and out of adjoining dreams, I think: "For better or worse -- mostly better -- this poem, this book, could not have been writtenby anyone else writing in English today, or ever." If one of the triumphs of poetic voice is perfect originality in the wedding of perception to diction, then Muldoon has indeed triumphed. Here is the utterly credible wobble of the speaking voice, the easy melding of a lightly undertaken lyric convention -- "We followed the narrow track, my love" -- with the poker-faced subversion of that high address -- "I carried my skating rink, / the folding one" -- chased by a sudden drop into the obscurantist maneuvers that only the deepest spelunking rhymer could fetch forth. I love it, the sense I have of being poised between vastly divergent registers of feeling-between bemused ironic detachment and the drive-by recognition of profundity (always there in the work); how the sound of a word can, mid-line, tip us one way or
another. I love the determined tethering of sense to the progress of the outlandish matings ("Haggadah"/"haggaday"), the etymological surprises ("haggaday," "quern") that are like little Advent windows into the suddenly cavernous house of language.
Yet I heed, too, the image of the goats who "delight to tread upon the brink / of meaning," for it describes something of my feeling as a reader, that the downside of Muldoon's exciting brinkmanship is that I quite often find myself treading the fine line between what feels like a strikingly subtle apprehension and what could easily pass for non-sense, which I will maintain is different from nonsense. Not that Muldoon's lines cannot almost always be pursued into some ultimately precise signification, but on these occasions I speak of the forensics-caliber labors of figuring out are not repaid by that which is figured out.
Example. Here is a passage from the same poem, a few lines farther along. Muldoon writes:
There a wheel felloe of ash or sycamore
from the quadriga to which the steeds had no sooner been
hitched
than it foundered in a blue-green ditch
with the rest of the Pharaoh's
war machine was perfectly preserved between two
amphoras,
one of wild birdseed, the other of Kikkoman.
It was somewhere in this vicinity that I'd hidden the
afikomen
at last year's Seder.
I delight, as always, in the uncanniness, the adventuring stretch, but I also become aware that I am not so much reading a poem of insidiously complex intent as I am testing myself on a cunning obstacle course, viewing the mere wresting forth of sense a sufficient achievement.
But this path of higher risk is Muldoon's way out and way forward. It is a following out of implications latent in the work at least since
Quoof, and the effect on the poetry culture has been tonic. Muldoon has moved the fall-line, giving poets everywhere a new sense of permission about rhyme and narrative logic, not to mention scale and surface texture. Influence moves first, I think, by way of sound and rhythm. The influencer, like some influenza, creating in fellow poets a restlessness -- the old words do not want to rest on the page like they used to-as well as a quickening, as from something unforeseen in the breeze. On top of his many achievements -- through them -- Paul Muldoon is just such an influencer.
Sven Birkerts is the author of Readings
and The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,
and the editor of Graywolf Forum One: Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse.
He teaches at Mount Holyoke College and is a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
1 The list of Muldoon's influences and favorite writers is not, of course, confined to these five poets who all have five letters in their last names. In written response to this interviewer's questions, he also cited the prose of Sterne, Melville, Joyce, and Stevenson. "
Treasure Island is one of my very favorite books. I'd love to be able to write something like that." Also mentioned favorably were Ashbery and Simic. But the real revelation -- and delight -- to me was the poet's genuinely serious regard for some of our leading songwriters. I was responding to a pair of lines in the poem "I'm Your Man" in
Hay, in which Muldoon offers, apropos Leonard Cohen: "his songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called poems I've read." Asked about this, he responded: "It does seem a little excessive, I suppose, but I'm going to stick to it. I'd say 'Suzanne' or 'Bird on the Wire' or 'Joan of Arc' are much better constructed, are built to withstand more pressure per square inch, than most poetry we meet in most magazines and, alas, find collected in most slim volumes. . . . Cohen has a fine ear, too, something that's rare enough even among quite highly respected poets. So, I'd go so far as to say that, despite the fact that they're involved in a project which is not strictly 'literary,' writers like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell or Warren Zevon score an extraordinarily high number of successes. The fact that they
are involved in musical enterprises to boot means that they are likely to 'mean far more,' if only because one's more likely to be exposed to them. There's nothing strange about this, I think. Nothing mysterious. It's a function of the impact of popular culture, particularly on the second half of the twentieth century, and it's one of the reasons my comment on Cohen might seem not in the least excessive to many people of my generation."
2
2 Yes, I know that David Foster Wallace does this all the time, but I frankly couldn't think of another way to work in the to-me-fascinating fact that Muldoon -- picture it -- plays the electric guitar, about which he writes: "I've got one in the basement, along with a very impressive range of effects boxes which allow me to harbor the illusion that I sound half decent. The fact that Leonard Cohen has gone
off the road prompts me to think there might be a place for me
on it, I suppose, so I'm working towards that end."