Books
The puckish poet
by Ben Naparstek
Renowned for his cryptic verse, Paul Muldoon, the New Yorker’s poetry editor, doesn’t see why poetry is inherently more difficult than film or music. Influenced by John Donne and Seamus Heaney as well as rock music and advertising, he has described himself as a “prince of the quotidian”.
Like any event that enters the realm of legend, it’s hard to disentangle fact from fiction in accounts of Paul Muldoon’s first meeting with Seamus Heaney. Even Muldoon mistrusts his memory. As he vaguely recalls it, he was 16 when a teacher introduced him to Heaney at a poetry reading in Northern Ireland with the epithet rara avis (Latin for “rare bird”). He subsequently posted Heaney some poems, asking, “What can I learn from you?” Heaney’s response: “Nothing.”
At 21, Muldoon had already published his first book, New Weather – after Heaney, then Muldoon’s tutor at Queen’s University in Belfast, showed his work to Faber and Faber’s poetry editor. Now, after 10 volumes of poetry (not counting his selected and collected poems), no Irish poet rivals Muldoon for the Nobel laureate’s mantle.
But aside from his wayward mop of hair, Muldoon shares little with his former mentor. His playful verse – where recondite allusions rub up against colloquial diction, and emotion is undercut by irony – contrasts with Heaney’s high seriousness and polish. Next to Muldoon’s brazen experiments, Heaney’s pastoral lyrics seem old-fashioned.
In person, Muldoon is equally puckish. Boyish in temperament and appearance despite his 56 years, he has a rotund figure and bouncy walk. He’s so soft-spoken and mild-mannered that it’s hard to see where the poetic fireworks come from. His lilting Ulster vowels remain despite two decades in the United States, where he teaches at Princeton University. With his tweed sportscoat and shaggy hair, he is a cross between professor and ageing rock star. In 2004, he co-founded the “three-car garage band” Rackett with the Princeton poetry scholar Nigel Smith – Muldoon writes lyrics and plays guitar.
He’s perplexed by his reputation for cryptic verse, insisting that he’s not trying “to present riddles or conundrums but to engage readers”. Even Helen Vendler, perhaps the pre-eminent US poetry critic, has suggested he publish with explanatory notes.
“Certainly, I can imagine a circumstance when a few notes would be useful, absolutely – but we’ll leave that for someone else to do,” Muldoon says. “John Donne and William Shakespeare need annotations, but they weren’t doing their own.”
He doesn’t see why poetry is inherently more difficult than film or music. “We’ve spent so much of our lives watching movies that we’re not conscious of how sophisticated we are at it,” he says, peering through black-rimmed spectacles beneath a brown-and-grey fringe.
“In the silent movies, that famous caption ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch’ had to be shot up because there was no understanding that what was happening in one frame was synchronisitous with the next frame, rather than in advanced time. And we’ve learnt a very sophisticated grammar of popular music. Poetry is not something people read, and they say, ‘I don’t understand this.’”
Muldoon’s poetry has a sonorous quality that makes it inviting even when resisting comprehensibility. His fondness for unlikely rhymes has led some to joke that he could rhyme “knife” with “fork”. Although rhyming verse has fallen out of fashion, Muldoon doesn’t see it disappearing. “These little chimes are delightful to us. They make things memorable. In popular culture, rhyme is a very potent force, in everything from rap music through to advertising.”
Referring to his love of demotic culture, Muldoon once described himself in a poem as a “prince of the quotidian”.
For such a worldly poet, Muldoon’s origins are surprisingly provincial. The oldest of three siblings, he was born into a Catholic family in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His parents were opposed to political violence – a legacy inherited by Muldoon, whose poetry maintains an even-handed view of the sectarian conflict.
His father, Patrick, was a market gardener and mushroom farmer, whom Muldoon describes as a life-battered but jubilant man. In his poem “The Mixed Marriage”, Muldoon recounts how Patrick left school to market himself as a labourer at a hiring fair: “When he left school at eight or nine/He took up billhook and loy/To win the ground he would never own.” In fact, his father was 12. Though virtually illiterate, Muldoon Sr once heard his son’s poem broadcast on the BBC and commented, “God, you made me very wee.”
His mother, Brigid, was a tough-minded schoolmistress, whom Muldoon admits to having “probably demonised more than appropriate”. In “Oscar”, Muldoon relates a visit to his parents’ grave, where he imagines that “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”. Muldoon used her maiden name, Regan – an anagram of “anger” – for the dedication of The Annals of Chile (1994).
“The mother” – as Muldoon refers to Brigid in conversation – educated her children through general-knowledge magazines. Today, Muldoon remains “less interested in literature with a capital L than just books about interesting aspects of life – history, geography, biology, almost anything”.
He started writing poetry aged 15 at St Patrick’s College, where he recalls several great teachers who fostered a love of poetry in their students. “They made it cool. Lots of people around me were writing poems. One of our past students was the Irish poet John Montague, so there was a sense that one could be a poet without having lived in some previous era.”
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