Interviews
Paul Muldoon and the Multiverse
Design
Dillon Johnston: Paul's twelfth volume of poetry is coming out in October, which is remarkable for a very young person, a very young poet. [laughter]
Paul Muldoon: That's one of the great things about being a poet, and those of you are poets are well aware of it, and probably entered the poetry business—if we may describe it as a business—because you knew that a poet may be "young" until somewhere between 65 and 70. [laughter] I don't think that applies to the prose writers—I just don't know. They have so many other advantages in life, but that's one of the very few that poets enjoy. Anyway, Dillon, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
DJ: No, no, just to say that the twelfth book, The Horse Latitudes, is coming out at the same time as the Oxford Lectures [The End of the Poem] in October, so that will be a big month for Paul Muldoon. But all eleven previous volumes have ended with a long poem and you look at the first of those volumes and think you've just wandered into this by mistake, but by the time you get to the second and third you recognize that there's some intention, and that there must be some design. And I wonder, Paul, if you would talk a little bit about at what point in the process of making a book the long poem begins to figure, and what pressure, if any, there might be to do a long poem with each volume.
PM: Well, you know, one of the things that I rather abhor about this process is the fact that it does indeed look very much as if there is a design to it. One can hardly be blamed for thinking that there's a design, because almost all of these first books, including the first, as Dillon suggests, began with, you know, maybe, what, 23 or 35 conventionalish lyric poems, the kind that often don't make it over the page to the second page, which is again one of the great excitements and advantages and attractions of writing poetry in the first place. And yet, yet, in each case, somehow there was this urge towards going over not only one page, but several — anything from half a dozen through 20 or 30 to 100, or whatever it might be.
Now, I would like to believe, and would baldfacedly stand here and perhaps shamefacedly too, and say that while there looks as if there's a design, there is no design at all. The only design involved might be one that poems themselves have on me. Right? Now that's not to say that, of course, given the history of how these books have looked, I must in some way be predisposed to the idea of writing slightly longer poem. And look, let's get this straight, we're not talking about Paradise Lost, we're not talking about The Inferno, we're talking about poems that are a bit longer than the average. You know, if anything, I suppose over the years I would have resisted the idea of writing these longer pieces. Apart from anything else, they involve so much work—you know, which is a problem, and is to be avoided. [laughter] Apart from anything else, apart from looking as if I'd be repeating myself and repeating the shape, the template as it seems to be turning out to be, of these books—because one would clearly be more inclined than not, I think, to resist that. Most writers do not want to repeat themselves; they don't want to repeat shapes that have already been seen. In a strange way, perhaps not everything, but a great deal in me would actively want to avoid repeating such a pattern, for the very reason that you outlined, because it looks as if it's written to order.
So I suppose it's something other than that. It is, I suppose, an urge to go beyond the conventional shape and scope of the lyric, which is quite massive, of course, when you think about what may be done in a lyric poem or indeed something that is barely a lyric poem, a little imagistic poem. I was talking to a student about a couple of them this morning—"In A Station of the Metro," "The Red Wheelbarrow"—are those poems long or short? I don't know! Who cares! [laughter] In some ways it's as difficult to write a poem of two lines, or certainly one line—which is an assignment by the way I often give my own students—than it is to write a 300 line poem. So, anyway, it must be some other urge, some sense, I suppose, as far as I understand it, which would be imperfectly, to go for something that's not quite so tidy, something that is perhaps more capacious, something perhaps that allows more for the possibility of its being equal to, if not the chaotic, at least the seemingly chaotic aspects of the world as we find it, or at least the variousness of the world, the world in which perhaps we hesitate more and more from being content, I suppose, with the little lyric poem that presents a moment of clarification and containment, and maybe even contentment. It's something that goes against that, because at some level, I think, we know that's not quite equal to so many aspects of the world—and is less and less equal to a world in which it used to be one knew immediately, almost instinctively, how to turn on the television. One knew immediately, and almost instinctively, how to answer a phone. Instead, we look at it and think, "Wait a minute, now, which button should I press to answer the phone?" This is in no way to begin to take into account what's happening in Africa. I was looking at that fine organ USA Today this morning in the hotel room and there was an article about ten brilliant new scientists, new thinkers, and one of them has determined, I guess, that there are many, many, many, many, many more—I think multiverses is the term he is using—I think that may be the term he is using—many more universes than we imagined, if indeed we imagined at all. So to begin to be equal to that, to the amount of information, disinformation, misinformation, that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Long Poems
I think at some level, to get around to your question, that it could be that something of that is what interests me in the longer poem. But clearly there were long poems from the outset, Milton for example, that were attempts, I suppose, to do precisely the opposite. At some level, Milton was setting out to show that God was indeed an assembler and all was right in the world and everything was containable and there was a method to everything. I suppose the person, for many of us in the twentieth century, who set us off down this particular route, would have been the great Saint Louis-i-an [Muldoon pronounces it "Saint Loo-eé-see-an]—do we say? What do we say?—
Class Member: "St. Louisan" [Saint Loó-is-an]
PM: I knew I'd get it wrong! The St. Louisan! The great St. Louisan, T.S. Eliot! Certainly, when I was growing up, The Wasteland, and to some extent The Four Quartets, but most particularly for me anyway The Wasteland was an indicator that—in the twentieth century at least, when God was perhaps not in his heaven and all was certainly no longer right with the world—that this "heap of broken images" that he set down there, threw down there, I suppose was something of an incentive, a model for many poets who followed in the twentieth century and beyond. This is not to speak of the many other longer poems: The Bridge, Paterson, from the twentieth century, some from David Jones—I'm not so familiar, I don't know David Jones quite so well, I have to say—and, I suppose to some extent, Stevens.
DJ: Brigflatts.
PM: Brigflatts, yeah, I did read Brigflatts at one point. I don't know really so much about Briggflatts, but I did read Bunting at one point. [.]
DJ: What's interesting about the long poems is what great variety they have—I mean, the Raymond Chandler—and then to recognize that most of them are—perhaps all of them are—travel poems, voyage poems, and they wouldn't be short because that would be Paul going out the front door and coming in the back—
PM: Yeah, but that could take a long time, though—
DJ: —so they could be poems by the traveling man that's going out to see the world.
PM: Certainly, that's a feature of many of these longer pieces, isn't it? I mean right the way through The Canterbury Tales and Dante, Homer.
DJ: "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants"
Epics
PM: Well, well, we can hardly speak of those in the same breath.but the epic poems, Wordsworth, the journey of the boy into becoming a man, becoming a person, I suppose, sure, some version of the journey is in there. And certainly it's true of the first one I wrote, based largely on Native American material—"The Year of the Sloes" it was called—a combining of the Irish notion of the year of the sloes a low year, the year of the haw, a braw year, an indicator from what might appear in the hedge row of how the weather might be shaping up. That's before global warming, I suppose. That then tied in with a lot of imagery derived mostly from Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's great book, but a poem also, the more I think about it, written in 1972, just after the occasion of Bloody Sunday, when in Derry there was a civil rights march where a number of unarmed people were shot down. At some level, this poem was a response to that. I'm really the last person to talk about these poems, but insofar as I can look at them myself, as a demi-semi-objective creature, I think that at some level that poem was attempting to be equal, to use that term again. It's a term I'm taking really from Wallace Stevens and from "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," to be equal to the occasion; the pressure from within the poems are equal to the pressure from without, to be equal to the occasion of the untidiness, I suppose you might say, of blood in the streets.
The next one was actually set in Northern Ireland too, it was a journey again, as you say, a kind of nightmarish journey. It was called "Armageddon, Armageddon," a little terrifically witty play, I thought, on the name of the Irish county, Armagh. Armageddon, get it? [laughter] Then there was one called "Immram," based to some extent on a great Irish voyage tale, so it sounds as if you've got the right theory here, Dillon. The voyage tale, Immram Curaig Mael Dúin, The Voyage of the Currach of Mael Dúin, which is for some people a poem probably—almost certainly—based on an idea, anyhow, a secondhand account of The Odyssey. The Odyssey was not actually available in Ireland at the time, or indeed through many other parts of Europe, but there were retellings of it, as I'm sure many of you know better than I do, I don't really know that much about this. But anyway, [there were] lots of striking coincidental scenes in both of these stories, based also somewhat on the voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, and, in this case, a little help from Raymond Chandler. So it's a kind of film noir version of Raymond Chandler and Byron, who's probably one of my greatest heroes in terms of the long poem, just quite extraordinary: "Don Juan" and some of the others that I think are even more interesting, "Beppo"!
And what else, what came next? I can barely remember. Maybe "Madoc">? Did that come next?
DJ: It did.
PM: And it was—sorry?
Guinn Batten: "7, Middagh Street" was next.
PM: "7, Middagh Street." Anyway, we don't tediously have to go through all of these. But there is a range of them.
DJ:"The More a Man Has."
PM:"The More a Man Has," I've forgotten about it. "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," which was again set in Northern Ireland, with a tale of dirty doings and blood and guts. It's also based on a template of another text, which was a particular version of the Winnebago Trickster cycle, Paul Radin's version—is that how you pronounce it, Rad-in, Rad-on, rarely is his name mentioned, R-a-d-i-n—his version of the Winnebago trickster cycle, but set down in Northern Ireland—a tale of everyday life among thugs. And so on and so forth.
But then after that I did write "7, Middagh Street," which was set in Brooklyn, New York on Thanksgiving Day, 1940. Which was "perhaps the least successful of Muldoon's long poems." [reading from a handout, laughter]. Dillon, this must be yours.
DJ: No, it's not mine, it attributed to somebody else.
PM: Is it? It's probably true.
DJ: Something's got to be less than more. [laughter]
Sprawl
PM: You do your best, but it's almost inevitable. I know what it is: "it was completed before he moved to the USA and married Jean Korelitz." She was probably responsible. I'm almost certain it was not up to par. But, anyway, one of the things that my wife did encourage me to do was really to stop it, because it was taking up too much of my life. But I paid no attention to her, and went on to write Madoc, A Mystery. [looking on the handout] I can't read that, I don't know what it is. "It goiters the space," anyway. It goiters.Ahh, Uhh. [laughter]
There is a certain amount of sprawl, I suppose, intrinsic to these forms, which I assume the word "goiters" suggests there. You know, I suppose that there's a theory that it's impossible maybe to write one of these longer structures, and its certainly very risky, very dangerous, and maybe even impossible or close to it. I mentioned Byron there—even with someone like Byron, however brilliant he is, actually there's a great tendency to get bored after a while of turning the page and seeing exactly the same, I think often, the same stanzaic shape. However brilliant it is, at some level the heart is at once racing and sinking, as you turn the page and think "Oh my god, there're more of it!" You know, it's sort of brilliant, but it's like having more chocolate cake, that chocolate cake that melts in the middle. It's just more and more of it. Tennyson the same.
DJ: The more a man has, the less a man wants.
PM: I think that's right. It's constantly an issue, it's constantly an issue. And I may be even some awareness of that that may be feeding into the title of that poem. So, what am I saying here? I don't know what to make of these things myself. They're there. What can I say?
What has been troubling for myself in the last few years is that another feature of them has taken over, which in more recent years—actually, since a poem called "Yarrow," The Annals of Chile which came out in 1994, and in it was another poem called "Incantata," and it and "Yarrow" and "The Bangle" and "The Sign of the Black Horse" and—I hate to have to tell you—the longer poem in the new book, all use pretty much the same template, in terms of the same rhyme words in the same sequence, or some version of it. Now that I find quite problematic myself, I don't know what's going on there. I really don't. I suppose on some level I got used to having this particular clothesline out the back of the house. Everything gets flung out. I mean, that can't be the case entirely, can it? But something strange has happened with the way that the poem has taken over.
And in that sense, what's quite extraordinary to me is that, you know, we understand that a lyric poem, to go back to that idea, a shortish poem, comes as a visitation. How a writer might be used over the shorter duration, might be entranced in some way—as the reader is, of course, ideally. When you come out of a novel you realize that half a day has gone by and you think "what happened, where have I been?" Some version of that we quite understand with a shorter poem. What's astonishing to me about it is that some version of it also applies with these longer poems. (This is a very roundabout way of getting back to your first question, which we've never quite left, perhaps.) Even then, however predetermined it might seem, however fixed it might seem, however designed it might seem, the fact is that—and I may be kidding myself here—but my sense is that none of it obtains, that it's absolutely the exact opposite. That, in fact, if you think about it, if you give yourself over in this case, say, to a structure, where—let's say, I can't even remember how many there are, let's say there are 90 words in a particular order—and you give yourself over to writing a poem in that vein, that, in fact, when you get right down to it, has nothing whatsoever to do with desire. It has everything to do with precisely the opposite, because you are giving yourself over completely to the Prince of Serendip, you're giving yourself over completely to the unknowing, the unknown, because it is going to guide how things turn out. And that's an idea that many writers, I think, find quite problematic—the sense that one would hand oneself over to that. One hears descriptions of it, for example, I guess, most famously, of the tail wagging the dog in a structure, for example, that involves rhyme—to which my response has always been "are you sure the tail doesn't wag the dog?" Is that so wrong?
So, it is in that sense a terrific adventure and a step into the unknown, despite how it might look if one hasn't thought about it.
Forgive me the length of that response to that question.
DJ: Oh, no, it could go on.
PM: Unfortunately it could, but I'm going to stop there. [laughter]
Disjuncture
Kathryn Davis: I couldn't help but think from what you said that you may not be a great fan of The Wasteland.
PM: Oh, I love The Wasteland. Oh, no, no, I'm sorry—
KD: But the heap of images, tossed. could you talk about that for a moment?
PM: Sure, I meant that really only in the sense that that is how he describes it himself, the heap of broken images, and the sense that, you know, it's in these shards that some version of the end of civilization was being represented. After the first World War and the rise of high modernism, visual arts, the fragmentary painting—a lot of it stemming, as you know, from the rise of photography, in the sense that the world could be broken down into stills, and then this piling up, this accrual, this accretion of bits and piece, bits and bobs, odds and ends, a phrase from here and a phrase from there—and all of them heaped together in that sense, maybe, I suppose, in the hope that, in the phrase from the poem, that it would shore us up against ruin. Something along those lines—isn't there a phrase like that in there? Yeah, "I've shored these fragments against my ruin," something like that, I haven't read it for a while. No, no I love Eliot.
KD: Would you consider the disjunct quality of that longer work less of a source of inspiration in your own writing than, say, Byron, which is more controlled?
PM: I'd say a bit of both. But one cannot, I think, have gone through the twentieth century.and by the way things are shaping up in the twenty-first century, these images of disjuncture, I fear, are going to be with us for a while. And any stay against confusion, in Frost's phrase, seems to be getting more and more momentary.
But I'm sure Eliot, and of course Joyce, we know, was really a huge influence on Eliot as he wrote The Wasteland. He was reading Joyce, and I suppose Joyce in many ways was the main influence on Eliot and The Wasteland. A similar sense of the world. I suppose that one is moving in both directions. One is accepting the universe, one is accepting disjuncture, but also attempting to make some clearing in the midst of the shash, the chaff, the ticker-tape, the ash of the world.
Guinn Batten: This follows on Kathryn's questions and your response. You are talking about Armageddon and apocalypse from the very beginning, but what you seem to be pushing towards later is not so much the end of the world as the endlessness of minor crises. At the end of The End of he Poem you conclude, after playing on the ends of things, particularly the ends of poems, that the real end of the poem is its urge to come into the world, to deliver itself. Could you talk about that notion of ending, given that your poems, as you have said, don't so much conclude as end? How do you facilitate that coming into the world, particularly when a poem like Madoc seems to involve something like "vision?
PM: Well, that's such a wide-ranging question. I suppose at some level, I would suggest that one of the things that one is attempting to do is just what we were describing a moment ago, is to cut down on the range of things, is to create a structure. I suppose more and more I am at least as interested in the physics of this as the chemistry of it, the architectural, the engineering—the structure and engineering aspects of this—the poet, in the strictest sense, of making something, of making a structure in the world, as the troubadour, I suppose, as the alchemist or alchemist, or chemist finding things in the world. So I suppose there's some sort of negotiation between those two, but with, I think, essentially, with a hope for some little clarification, however minor, some shift in the way that we look at things that might give us an insight into how we are in the world. Almost certainly some little change that takes place, in the process of the poem getting written.
That, I think, is—that's the hope. I say that, of course, and I'm sure that it varies much from poem to poem. Each poem has its own ambition in the world and they may be very various, and I guess part of our job is to figure out—as the writer, and, of course, then as the reader; and which comes first, the reader-writer—is to figure out what the ambition of the poem is, what it's trying to do, not what you want it to do, but what it wants to do, insofar as you can figure that out. Not what you hope it does as a writer or a reader, what you think it should be doing, how you think it should fall into a particular pattern, but how it might be—insofar as we can judge this—most fully itself, as it comes into being.
And that's one of the most mysterious aspects, I think, of writing anything at all—a letter, a paper, a lecture, a poem—is to try to figure out what it is one is testing that against. That really goes to the heart of your question, I think. How do we know that it's over? How do we know something has happened? That is very hard to figure out. That is very hard to figure out. I suppose that we hope that we recognize something having happened. We hope it gets told, that it has not quite happened before. I suppose that we could be fairly confident that it hasn't, but probably those words in that order, and all of the particular resonance that would have, hasn't quite happened before.
You know, we're very easily duped by ourselves. At least I am. One comes away thinking "well, that's pretty good," and then you realize "well, no, maybe not." But, anyway, that's the hope. Basically what I want to come out of the writing of the poem, and I hope that others come out of the reading of it thinking is, "Wow, what happened to me in there? Something really extraordinary happened to me when I was in there." That's not to say that I manage it, but that's the idea and the ideal, because, frankly, what's the point? There's no point unless you're trying to do something interesting. Or letting it do something interesting.