famous irish poet for free, this thursday night
Far too often, you have to pay good money to see and hear a famous writer here in Pittsburgh. Not so this coming Thursday night, April 2nd, when you can listen to Irish poet Paul Muldoon for zero cents at 8:30 p.m. in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium at Pitt. That's the big old building just past the little park, near the giant Carnegie Library, on Schenley Drive, with the hot sculpture Pan and Harmony, on the side. Muldoon is an excellent reader and a great poet. Be there. It's part of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series.
from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19muldoon.html
November 19, 2006
Word Freak
By CHARLES McGRATH
For some reason, Northern Ireland produces poets the way the Dominican Republic does baseball players. The M.V.P., the Pedro Martínez, is of course Seamus Heaney - or Famous Seamus, as he became known after winning the Nobel Prize in 1995. In the next generation there are a number of up-and-coming stars, including Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and the poet most likely to inherit Heaney’s mantle, if he hasn’t already, Paul Muldoon. The first meeting of Heaney and Muldoon, at a county museum in Armagh in the late 60s, has been embroidered in some accounts into a mystical laying on of hands and a landmark of Irish literary legend - an occasion as momentous in its way as the first meeting of James Joyce and the 21-year-old Samuel Beckett.
While Beckett and Joyce quarreled after Beckett spurned the advances of the great man’s daughter, Lucia, the Heaney-Muldoon encounter had a happier result. When Muldoon, then 16, shyly asked Heaney if he could send him some poems, Heaney readily agreed. He read a couple and, spotting enormous sophistication in this seemingly unsophisticated boy, immediately arranged to have them published. While still in his teens, Muldoon also caught the eye of the poetry editor at Faber & Faber, and published his first book when he was just 21 and still in college. Muldoon has been publishing steadily ever since, with an almost wearying facility. His “Poems 1968-1998” is an unusually thick volume for a poet in midcareer. The collection “Moy Sand and Gravel” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, and last month he published two more books - “Horse Latitudes,” another poetry collection, and “The End of the Poem,” a collection of the lectures he delivered during his five-year stint as Oxford professor of poetry, a post that has also been held by Heaney.
Poetic reputations are fragile and fleeting, and often hard to measure. Depending on which critic you listen to, Muldoon, at 55, is “one of the five or so best poets alive,” “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War” and a serious contender for the Nobel Prize, or else he is a victim of “pyrotechnical autism” who writes “artificially enriched, overinformed doggerel.” And his literary criticism is even worse. “Bedlam - an associative madness,” the Oxford don Valentine Cunningham said after listening to some of Muldoon’s Oxford lectures.
Not that Muldoon pays much attention to his critics. He is preoccupied these days with his other careers - as a university administrator and a minor-league rock musician. He sports an Irish-Afro hairdo - an hommage, perhaps, to Heaney’s famously unruly thatch - and he still speaks with an Ulster accent. In fact, he sounds a little like David Feherty, the television golf commentator.
But for all intents and purposes he is now a comfortable New Jersey squire and garage-band guy. Muldoon’s first marriage, to an Irishwoman, Anne-Marie Conway, broke up in 1979. In 1987, he married an American, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, who was his pupil in a creative-writing course at the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire for a few weeks. She was writing poetry at the time and made such an impression that, just as she was packing up to return to the States, Muldoon called and invited her to Belfast instead.
Since 1990, the Muldoons have lived in New Jersey, where after years of running the creative-writing program at Princeton, he recently became head of the university’s new Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He drives a Volvo, sends his kids - Asher and Dorothy - to private school and owns an antiques-filled 18th-century house, formerly a tavern, where George Washington actually spent some time. The floor planks are as wide as tabletops.
Muldoon also owns the most electric guitars of any major poet from his or any other generation. The arsenal includes a Fender Stratocaster and a replica of a 1952 Telecaster; a Gibson Les Paul; a 12-string Takamini; and an all-metal resonator guitar. He plays them all, though none, it must be said, particularly well. He admitted not long ago, “If I could get to be a three-chord wonder, I’d be perfectly happy.”
It’s tempting to speculate how many of these perks would have come Muldoon’s way without Heaney’s example and sponsorship, and yet the connection between the two poets is more complicated than it seems. They have a great deal in common, including growing up in rural Ulster, attending Queen’s University in Belfast and toiling for a while at a day job (Heaney as a schoolteacher, Muldoon as a producer for BBC radio in Belfast) before securing a full-time living as a poet and poetry teacher. But their poems aren’t really much alike. Heaney’s work is rooted in the very soil of Ireland and over the years has demonstrated a deep engagement with the history and even prehistory of his country. Muldoon hasn’t turned his back on Ireland, exactly. He has written about such rural subjects as haying, lambing and gathering mushrooms. In his work, people turn up murdered occasionally, victims of sectarian political strife, and there is a poem about a high-ranking member of the Irish Republican Army. Some readers who have actually made it through Muldoon’s “Madoc,” a book-length poem in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey create a utopian community in the United States, have suggested that it’s really an allegory about the English and the Irish, which is as good a guess as any as to what’s really going on in the poem.
But a lot of Muldoon’s poetry takes the form of imaginary journeys or a rummage around the attic of his own head, a place filled with an astonishing amount of bric-a-brac. Many of his poems are lists or inventories - “Famous First Words,” for example, or “Sleeve Notes,” a long poem about classic rock-’n’-roll albums - put together by a particularly industrious cultural pack rat, or as he once titled a book, a “prince of the quotidian.” Unlike Heaney, Muldoon pays next to no attention to meter and can change tone from serious to slapstick to sarcasm in an instant; his work seems intentionally to lack Heaney’s kind of high polish, his Yeatsian seriousness and even grandness. Muldoon also goes out of his way to avoid Philip Larkin’s clenched, tight-lipped understatement and the overheated confessionalism of Ted Hughes, the other big models for poets of his generation.
Muldoon is a believer in Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, the idea that the example of predecessors weighs heavily on younger poets, though he himself does not seem to have anguished much in his struggle with his forebears. He also surprised me once by suggesting that the process is a two-way street and that he may have influenced Heaney. This is not impossible (Heaney has said, admiringly, that Muldoon moved the goal posts for poetry), but it’s much easier to see the traffic going the other way - a swerving away in what almost amounts to a deliberately anti-Heaney direction. Strictly speaking, Robert Frost and, more lately, James Joyce, have been more important examples for Muldoon’s own aesthetic. According to Alan Jenkins, a friend of Muldoon’s who is himself a poet and also the deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement, not the least of Muldoon’s accomplishments is that he has “reconceived the whole way in which modern poetry can be written.”
At the same time, Muldoon, seemingly offhand and informal, has cast his lot with the old showoffy wing of English poetry, the one where Auden, for example, spent the last part of his career, setting himself one outrageous task after another, just for the hell of it. Muldoon’s poems are sometimes so formally complicated that they can seem like stunts or else like the obsessive handiwork of someone with a freakish gift for pattern and rhyming. He is particularly fond of the villanelle, a poem in three-line stanzas that employs two refrains and two repeated rhymes and then resolves in two concluding couplets; and of the even more difficult sestina, a poem of six six-line stanzas (with a three-line coda sometimes) in which the same six words end the lines of all six stanzas but in a different order every time. He has also written ghazals, sequences of couplets that follow elaborate Persian rules; pantoums, poems written in quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of one verse become the first and third of the next; double sestinas, with 12 end words; villanelles that go on for pages; poems that use just a single rhyme; and poems in which one rhyme is embedded in another (mote/remote, portrait/trait, carbuncle/uncle). Lately he has begun to rhyme one volume with another, including long poems that use the same 90 rhyme sounds in the same order, or sometimes in reverse, creating a kind of music that most readers will never hear.
He has written poems in the shapes of their subjects (a little poem about a doorway in Cluny surrounds the French word blé, “wheat,” with the repeated English word “stable”) and poems with secret messages embedded in them. The first letters of every line in “Capercaillies” spell out “Is this a New Yorker poem or what.” (Apparently not. “Capercaillies” was rejected by The New Yorker.) Sometimes Muldoon uses these devices to great effect. For example, one of his most moving poems, “Milkweed and Monarch,” is a villanelle about visiting his parents’ graves, and the alternating last lines keep going in different directions until resolving in the quiet final couplet:
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.
And sometimes all this technical wizardry seems an end in itself, a tic almost - a fondness for the artificial that caused one of his old girlfriends to call him (in his poem “Incantata”) “Polyester” or “Polyurethane.”
Just about everyone except Muldoon thinks his poetry is often difficult. When I suggested to him once that his work is sometimes hard to follow, he shook his head and seemed almost offended. “I’m not all that keen on the idea that every poem should be full of allusions,” he said, and he added that what he strove for always was clarity. “It’s mostly a matter of clearing away,” he said. “The way Frost did.” But then after a pause, he added: “It’s hard to make a poem these days that is absolutely clear and direct - if the poem is really to be equal to its era. This is not an era in which clarity and directness, however much we hope for them, are entirely justifiable, because so much is unclear and indirect. I’m not just talking about willed obfuscation and crookedness, though, God knows, there’s plenty of that. I’m just talking about a realization that very little is as it seems, that everything has within it massive complexities - maybe even the inappropriateness of being certain about things. A proper awareness that things are just not at all as they seem - one would wish for more of that, particularly on the political front. Wouldn’t you love to hear the president or someone say, ‘Well, you know, I’m not absolutely clear on that’?”
Muldoon takes a similar stance in his teaching, insisting that poetry is an art that anyone can understand and practice. In his view, we are all born with a gift for poetry, one that lasts, in fact, until sometime in seventh or eighth grade, when our teachers begin to spoil it for us. For this reason, he makes a point of teaching every summer at Bread Loaf in Vermont - not at the famous creative-writing program but at a six-week workshop in poetry writing for a class composed mostly of high-school teachers, in the hope that they will go back to the classroom with a renewed appreciation and a few new strategies. “I try to teach them that they are not themselves writing the poem,” he explained. “It is writing through them - but only when they give themselves over to a wise passiveness.” In class he is a polite, generous and encouraging instructor, with a highly developed sense of what a poem “wants” to be - as if it had a life and will of its own and the author had only to get out of its way.
But a better clue to Muldoon’s own poetic practice may be his Oxford lectures, which drove Valentine Cunningham and a few others so round the bend. The lectures are an exercise in what Muldoon calls “stunt reading,” alert to all the hidden meanings and “cryptocurrents” running underneath a poem - puns, anagrams, double meanings, even the words a poet chooses not to use. In “All Souls’ Night,” for example, a poem by William Butler Yeats that hints at the dregs of a bottle of wine, Muldoon says that Yeats is really thinking of the word “lees,” because that’s a reference to the name of his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees. Poems read this way often turn out to be a lot sexier than we imagined. The poet H.D.’s little lyric “Sea Poppies,” for instance, is revealed by stunt reading to be an ode to masturbation.
In part, these lectures, which are often extremely entertaining to read, are a parlor trick, meant both to dazzle and to provoke, but in the process Muldoon turns all these other poets - Yeats, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Hughes, Marianne Moore, Marina Tsvetayeva - into versions of himself, and their ways of writing become his way of writing, which is a kind of poetic hyperactivity or leaping free association.
“I zap the remote control,” Muldoon begins a stanza in “Yarrow,” a long, rambling autobiographic poem that ranges over the poet’s teenage reading and movie-watching and along the way sweeps in Pauline Kael, Myrna Loy and Sylvia Plath, not to mention Ovid, Yeats and Wyatt Earp. His best poems are like one of those postmodern juggling acts in which the performer tosses up, instead of Indian clubs, a chain saw, a bowling ball and a blowtorch - they keep airborne several themes at once, the more dissimilar the better. Muldoon is one of those very rare poets, in fact, whose longer poems are often more powerful and successful than his short ones. “The Bangle (Slight Return)” races back and forth among “The Aeneid,” a scene in a pretentious French restaurant where the poet and his companions have ordered a lavish meal they can’t pay for and Muldoon’s father, who is off on an imaginary journey to Australia. One of Muldoon’s masterpieces, “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999,” is a spinoff of Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter” and is set on the banks of the Raritan Canal (where Muldoon actually lives) after Hurricane Floyd. Reflecting on his infant son’s double heritage (Muldoon’s wife is Jewish), the poet is pretty soon caught up in a whirlwind of association: the Holocaust, the Irish Diaspora, Fanny Brice, Arnold Rothstein and the Black Sox. Interspersed are numerous monitory signboards: “Please Secure Your Own Oxygen Mask,” “Keep Back Fifty Feet,” “This Truck Makes Wide Right Turns” and the like. By the time you get to “Contents Under Pressure” and, near the end, “Contents May Have Shifted During Flight,” you realize that they’re referring to the poem itself.
Helen Vendler, the poetry critic, once said of Muldoon’s poetry that there is hole in the middle where the feeling should be. She says she no longer believes that, nor do most critics. Some of his poems, especially “Incantata,” a long elegy about Mary Farl Powers, an old girlfriend, seem almost awash in sentiment, and his poems about his family - particularly “The Mudroom,” a long poem in praise of his marriage - are deeply affecting. “It’s not that Paul doesn’t like feeling,” Alan Jenkins says. “He just doesn’t like clichés, either of perception or of thinking, and so he has a way of indirectly expressing those feelings we all know.” And yet there is still something elusive about some of his work - all the playfulness, the fireworks, the layers of allusion keeping the poet himself just out of sight, as if he didn’t want to be pinned down. Much the same is true of Muldoon in person. Unassuming and a even little rumpled, he is unfailingly generous and polite, with courtly, old-fashioned manners, and almost comically humble and self-effacing. He has a way of charmingly turning a question back upon the questioner or, when he is trying to answer seriously, of closing his eyes and composing his reply in precisely phrased paragraphs.
When he first arrived in this country, he got himself in hot water at a reading by introducing another poet in the Irish fashion, which is more like a roast than an encomium, but by now he is an accomplished academic diplomat and administrator, famous at Princeton for his efficiency and for never getting rattled or losing his temper. When I asked him whether there were any headaches in his new job at Princeton, he responded with a tactful, slightly official-sounding e-mail message: “There’s a chance to set up a new structure, to build something that might have some impact in the world, and to try to do it in a spirit of humility and openness. It’s like a big poem.”
Some of Muldoon’s elusiveness stems no doubt from his childhood and from growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 50s and 60s. The Muldoons lived in a little village near Moy, in County Armagh. The place was enough of a backwater that when Muldoon was born, in 1951, it was a big deal that his birth took place in a hospital and not at home. The nearby landscape - the fields, the river, the little family plots - saturates his work, the early poems especially, but so does a certain wariness about his homeland. “Catholics were hard done by in that part of the world,” Muldoon says now. People disappeared, neighbors were shot, a cousin spent years in the prison at Long Kesh.
Encouraged by their mother, the Muldoons kept themselves apart a bit. She was an elementary-school teacher, though not a particularly cultured one. Among the few books Muldoon remembers in the house were a set of the Junior World Encyclopedia. His father, who Muldoon says “could just about write his own name,” was a laborer who hired himself out at an annual job fair not unlike the one described at the beginning of “The Mayor of Casterbridge”; eventually he became a market gardener and a mushroom farmer. He was a “joyous man,” Muldoon says, “a very attractive man,” while his mother - or “the mother,” as he often refers to her - was firm and proper, very aware of the elevated status conferred on her by being a schoolmistress in a small Irish community. Muldoon compares his parents’ relationship with that of the Morels in “Sons and Lovers” by D. H. Lawrence - the smart, ambitious mother, the coal-miner father - and something of their private struggle is suggested by the end of Muldoon’s poem “Oscar,” in which the poet visits
a grave lit by acetylene
in which, though she preceded him
by a good ten years, my mother’s skeleton
has managed to worm
its way back on top of the old man’s,
and she once again has him under her thumb.
The young Muldoon watched TV and went to the movies once a week; and if as a young boy he read many books, they failed to make much of an impression. “I suppose I must have,” he told me. “But I really don’t recall.”
He was bright enough, however, to be admitted to St. Patrick’s College, a nearby private school run by the Vincentian order, and there he fell under the influence of an extraordinary group of young lay teachers who simply took poetry for granted. “They valorized it,” Muldoon says. “In that school, poetry was a perfectly O.K. thing to do. You might get beaten up for this, that and the other, but it wouldn’t necessarily be because of poetry. We actually used to walk around between classes talking about poems - it could have been stamp collecting, it could have been rock ’n’ roll.”
Muldoon’s great discovery in those years was the poetry of John Donne - and in particular Donne’s facility at metaphorically linking vastly different themes and ideas - and to a considerable extent he still hasn’t got over it. “The nerve, the nerve of the man!” he said to me. “The delight, the danger, the pushing things as far as they can be pushed; being intellectually on the edge and yet somehow, in the midst of it all, remaining emotionally present. I find that quite extraordinary.”
In “Sillyhow Stride,” the long poem that ends “Horse Latitudes,” Muldoon’s new collection, Donne isn’t just alluded to, he’s quoted liberally - “sampled,” you might say. Dedicated to Warren Zevon, the rock musician, who became a friend of Muldoon’s shortly before his death in 2003, the poem is a dual elegy memorializing both Zevon and Muldoon’s sister, Maureen, who died of ovarian cancer (the same disease that killed their mother) last year, and there is nothing evasive about its expression of loss. Muldoon’s sister turns up again in “Hedge School,” in which the poet struggles to come to terms with the word “metastasis,” and in “Turkey Buzzards,” an extremely grim and frank meditation on mortality. The opening sequence in “Horse Latitudes,” sonnets all titled with place names beginning with “B,” is as baffling as anything Muldoon has ever written, but these elegiac poems add a different note altogether, and several critics have detected in this new book a drift toward depth and directness. “Paul Muldoon seems to me a more convincing poet now than he was 10 or 15 years ago,” Vendler wrote recently in a review of “Horse Latitudes” in The New Republic, adding that in this new book “he has been able, in his finely maintained tightrope act, to bear aloft both grief and playfulness.”
Roughly in the middle of the volume is a curious little poem called “Eggs,” about a shameful family secret, the kind of thing the Irish dwell on but don’t talk about - in this case, the time Muldoon’s grandmother got drunk while taking some newly laid eggs to market. It ends with the image of the poet himself as a chick pecking his way out not just from an eggshell but, if we apply just a little stunt-reading, the whole carapace of his family and his history.
Another place, oddly, where the inner Muldoon may be on full view is onstage, performing with his rock band, Rackett - which he formed after the death of Zevon, with whom he collaborated on a song, “My Ride’s Here,” and a musical, never finished, based on characters from “The Last of the Mohicans” and about two competing Native American gambling casinos.
Freaks With Guitars is what Muldoon’s 14-year-old daughter, Dorothy, used to call the band, which on paper, at least, is one of the geekiest ensembles ever to gather in a garage or a basement. The bassist and lead vocalist is Nigel Smith, a Princeton professor who is the world’s expert on the poetry of Andrew Marvell. The keyboardist, Stephen Allen, is an entertainment lawyer. And Paul Grimstad, the lead guitarist, is a Henry James scholar. Yet the music they play is not nearly as amateurish as you might imagine. Rhythmically, it lumbers a bit, but the lyrics have a cleverness and originality reminiscent at times of Van Morrison, who also comes from Northern Ireland, and at others of Gershwin or Cole Porter. “Don’t Try This at Home,” the title song of the group’s first, self-released CD, begins:
You may buckle your sword and sandals
To fight off the Goths and Vandals
Now they’ve dented your chrome
Just don’t sit around to count the cost
Of every shiny thing you’ve lost
Back in the catacombs
Do what you must when you’re in Rome
Just don’t try this at home.
“Meat and Drink,” a love song from the band’s second CD, “Standing Room Only,” contains the stanza:
I’m through with hitting the sake
With Kenzo and Miyake
I’m done with Valpol and polenta
With Oscar de la Renta
Now the joint is pastry-cased
Enough of the modus vivendi
Of Ferragamo and Fendi
No mooching through Balducci’s
With Pucci and Gucci
Finding nothing to my taste.
The band’s lyrics are all by Muldoon, who doesn’t sing any of them - or not in public, anyway - but who provides accompaniment and in general seems to regard the whole band project with a degree of seriousness that suggests it’s something more than just a hobby. At our first meeting, in fact, he proudly presented me with a couple of Rackett CDs. Songwriting for Muldoon is not slumming: he says he is tapping into the ancient Gaelic tradition that made little or no distinction between poetry and song.
“I do like to think of the song as a genre that might be considered as part of the general poetry world,” he said last spring. “Leonard Cohen’s collected poems, for example, are indistinguishable from his collected songs. Those lyrics stand up on the page.” He paused and then he added conspiratorially: “I’ll tell you something else: Songwriting is really much more difficult than writing poems. Once you get the first verse, you pretty much have to replicate that as you continue. The structure of a song is very rigid, comparatively speaking.
“Writing a song would seem to be such an easy thing to do,” he went on. “And clearly it is easy to do - or why else would we hear so much rubbish? But to do it well. ...” Muldoon said the first verse of “My Ride’s Here,” the song he wrote with Zevon, came to him pretty quickly.
I was staying at the Marriott
With Jesus and John Wayne
I was waiting for a chariot
They were waiting for a train
The sky was full of carrion
“I’ll take the mazuma”
Said Jesus to Marion
“That’s the 3:10 to Yuma
My ride’s here . . .”
“But it took me a long, long time before I got to the second one,” he said. “I’m still learning that structure, that template - AABA. There’s something very basic there; it’s essentially two ideas and then the third section goes off on a tangent. It’s just extraordinarily effective - as various, as commodious, as capacious as the sonnet.” And when he finally finished, he added, “I was just so fired up, I had to continue - it’s like a disease.”
A pretty cool disease, as diseases go. Jean Hanff Korelitz is now a big fan of her husband’s band, but when he first took up the guitar, after Zevon’s death, she says, she thought it was “the equivalent of the mistress and the convertible.” Muldoon replies: “When I want the equivalent of the mistress and the convertible, it will be the mistress and the convertible.” And yet at some level, surely, he is acting out every middle-aged man’s fantasy - getting up onstage at places like the Knitting Factory in New York and actually rocking. It’s a fantasy that must be particularly sweet, moreover, if you grew up poor in a backwater village in Northern Ireland and at a precociously young age happened upon poetry, of all things, as your escape route. Paul Muldoon, in his mid-50s, may at last be enjoying the adolescence he never quite had.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company