Interviews
Paul Muldoon and the Multiverse: Introduction
In September of 2006, Paul Muldoon traveled from his office at Princeton University to Saint Louis to serve as the Hurst Visiting Professor. During his residence, Muldoon led poetry workshops and presided over a free-ranging discussion on the craft of poetry, the long poem, and his own place within these fields. Muldoon settled into his chair with the look of a man who had been unexpectedly teleported into Hurst Lounge—with his touseled hair and seeming expression of surprise at walking into a room full of professors and students. The discussion which followed, moderated by Dillon Johnston and included below, demonstrates both the personality and the poetry that have made Muldoon one of the most sought-after readers, earning him accolades on both sides of the Atlantic, including the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Muldoon's visit to Saint Louis could not have come at a more significant moment in his career as a poet and a critic (not to mention his other careers: editor and anthologist, librettist, dramatist, children's author, and, most recently, lyricist and rhythm guitarist for his "three-car garage" band Rackett). In just a few weeks' time, his tenth collection of poems, The Horse Latitudes, and his second collection of criticism, The End of the Poem, would be released simultaneously by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Moving from USA Today articles and the correct pronunciation of "Saint Louisan" to the more established and proper poetic subject of Wallace Stevens, the afternoon's discussion demonstrated Muldoon's broad understanding of imarrhage, what he defined in To Ireland, I as "the tendency towards the amalgam, the tendency for one event or character to blur and bleed into another." The previous evening's reading, though, had displayed his surpassing talent for handling such contingencies in their most elemental form.
On that occasion after his first few poems, and after he had encouraged the undergraduates gathered around the entrance to brave the standing-room only crowd and camp alongside the podium, he embarked upon a reading of "The Old Country," a sonnet sequence comprised of clichés that repeat and refract each other. It's a poem that asks its audience to apply extraordinary concentration and pays dividends in the way that these phrases, when put together, nudge us like a new friend toward the value of old meaning, as with: "Every point was a point of no return / where to make a mark was to overstep the mark."
But it would be wrong to think Muldoon's abilities were restricted to his congenial warmth and its neat fit to the thematic work of his verse. On two occasions during "The Old Country," his reading was interrupted: once, by the repeated thuds of chairs from the floor above and a second time by the mating call of a cell phone. These are precisely the kinds of minor stumbles that might occasion uncomfortable silence or, at least, an irritated scowl. But neither was ignored, neither greeted as an inconvenience. Muldoon took each not as a disruption, but as an opportunity—perhaps a communiqué from the figure of "The Prince of Serendip" he mentions below. In response, the poet used the pause in the suspended cadences of "The Old Country" to introduce and read other poems, returning afterwards (and with little warning) to the exact place he had left off in his prior reading.
That display of improvisation and theatricality is reminiscent of a similar moment, in "Twice," a sonnet from the 1994 collection The Annals of Chile. In it, three friends spend half an hour sawing out a "sod of water" which had frozen overnight in a barrel. When Taggart, McAnepsie and the speaker finally extract the "fifteen- or eighteen-inch-thick manhole cover" and lay it on its side, the poem makes its turn—the object of their work becomes neither a sod, nor a manhole cover, nor even ice, but rather the aperture through which a photographer surveys the students assembled for their school picture. Through this portal, the speaker witnesses 'Lefty' Clery, having slipped ahead of the "Kodak's/ leisurely pan," appearing on both sides of the assembled class.
"Twice" concludes not with the speaker's reflection, but in the voice of 'Lefty': "Two places at once, was it, or one place twice?" But, of course, such a statement could just as easily be an utterance from the poet himself, the wide-eyed pilgrim who can alight upon any shore, no matter how quotidian, and find himself being led to "something else, then something else again." In tipping the "sod of water" askance, Muldoon casts a new light on the dull or irrelevant, those commonplace trinkets and turns of phrase that we too often take for granted.
As the companion pieces Horse Latitudes and The End of the Poem demonstrate, Muldoon has both a creative and critical capacity for such discoveries but can also order such experiences with a form appropriate to the experience—in the case of his poetry, what critic Andrew Osborn has termed the "fuzzy rhyme." Muldoon's agility at allowing a poem's formal elements to free associate with its narrative foundation, as Osborn has successful argued, suggests Muldoon's use of rhyme becomes the act of establishing a place, to stake a spot between conventional definitions, but close enough to draw from their allusions and their implications.
Indeed, negotiating the places closely bordering our easiest classifications and cultural holdings has played a key role in Muldoon's life and art. Though he has lived in the United States for over twenty years, Muldoon started out with a rural upbringing in County Armagh, Northern Ireland and a degree at Queen's University in Belfast, where he took courses under Seamus Heaney and subsequently joined the milieu of poets residing in the city during the 1970's. New Weather, Muldoon's critically acclaimed debut collection, appeared in 1973, when the poet was twenty-two years old.
Much like the character of 'Lefty' Clery, Muldoon's early collections benefited from landscapes and vantage points that both offered insights into the Troubles, but also took surprising leaps out of Irish cultural holdings. By the strength of his collection—ending long poems, Muldoon established a poetic persona that was perhaps most "at home" (to borrow Seamus Heaney's term from "The Tollund Man") when it was in transit between places—from the Irish voyage tale set in Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles in "Immram," to, perhaps most notably, "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants," a reinterpretation of the Winnebago trickster cycle set in a liminal trans-Atlantic. In sketching the space between territories, and standing like 'Lefty' at the cisatlantic position, Muldoon's longer poems progressively staked their "place" along the borderlands of personal memory. In a move which has alternately delighted and perplexed his readers (not to mention himself, we find out below), the poet has inserted the potentially limitless nature of such memory work into a recurring structure of 90 end rhymes, a strategy he has repeated, with modulations, over the last four collections.
It is this tension, between an explicit sense of design and linguistic and allusive leaps away from such notions of predetermination, which have provided readers with so much to think about. His remarks at Washington University find their way here. Muldoon invites us to understand these more recent poems as meditations on poetic process, on moving between states, both internal and external. This, of course, has always been a quality in Muldoon's work, but the following discussion is valuable in that it grants Muldoon a free rein to discuss his craft in a way that focuses less on the cultural and political elements of these works—covered quite well by three decades of critical response—and focuses more on the prosody, the philosophy behind trying to craft a poetry that, in Muldoon's borrowing of Stevens, is equal to the world.
By Matthew Fluharty