Happy Birthday, Paul Muldoon

“This work [Paul Muldoon’s book ‘The Annals of Chile’] gives the impression of coming clean and being clandestine at one and the same time. It is Joycean in its combination of the everyday and the erudite, but it is also entirely sui generis, a late-twentieth-century work that vindicates Muldoon’s reputation as one of the era’s true originals.” – Seamus Heaney

A giant in modern poetry (not just modern Irish poetry), Paul Muldoon is, like Heaney, a rural Ulster man. He grew up on a farm in County Armagh, a Catholic in the middle of a Protestant majority. His parents tried to shield the family from the political realities of the moment, although they were nationalists themselves. The Troubles reverberate through his verse. He’s published over 30 books of poetry. He is now a professor at Princeton. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s won every prize. He is self-taught.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, wrote of Muldoon:

He was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951 and brought up near the Moy, a village to which his poems return. Muldoon’s mother was a teacher with strong literary interests, his father a farm laborer friendly to the Republican cause, a Lawrentian formula that resulted not in Sons and Lovers but in poems about complementarities and incompatibilities. Fruitful and tragic misalliances are a recurrent theme in his poems, wired and triggered by ironies that can be unexpectedly savage or heartbreaking.

He went to Queen’s University Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was one of his teachers. It was a hot time in Belfast, not just politically, but in the literary scene, and Paul Muldoon was very much a part of that. Some of the names at the time: Michael Longley (post here), Derek Mahon (post here), Ciarán Carson (post here), Medbh McGuckian (post here), Frank Ormsby, Muldoon – they were all part of the Belfast Group, a writer’s workshop. Heaney was a member of the group, and much of his earliest work came out of that workshop.

One of Muldoon’s idols and guiding stars was Robert Frost. Muldoon said of Frost:

Frost was important to me early on because his line, his tone of voice, was so much a bare canvas.

Seamus Heaney wrote about Muldoon’s love of Frost, deepening our understanding of the connection between these two apparently disparate poets:

Robert Frost, a poet whose roguery and tough-mindedness are admired by Paul Muldoon, once wrote about the art of filling a cup up to the brim ‘or even above the brim’. This impulse to go further than is strictly necessary is presented by Frost as the most natural thing in the world. It’s why young boys want to climb to the tops of birch trees and why grown-up poets write poems.

Muldoon is a big risk-taker in his verse, like Frost was. He is dazzling, but not in a showy way. He’s a bit in your face. His poems are intricate and, at times, daunting, but at the heart of them is deep feeling Muldoon tries to wrestle into form. The pages of today’s poetry journals are filled with Muldoon imitators, but the original has the breath of life in it, whereas the imitators often come off as tricky, too-clever, self-conscious. Muldoon is a brainiac, as most autodidacts are. He is voracious in curiosity and scope. Information is there to be used, messed with. He is respectful, but not overly so. He’s a lot of fun to read.

Michael Schmidt again:

His formal and verbal inventiveness leads away from self. In Madoc he risks rewriting the lives of Coleridge and Southey, as if they had fulfilled the ambition of Pantisocracy and set up their community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Stephen Hawking comment tersely and in character on the enterprise. It is very funny, very learned, a high-table game. He speaks for a while histor of thought, talked down, as it were, but not trivialized. “I’m interested in ventriloquism, in speaking through other people, other voices.”

With all of this, Muldoon is also one of the most eloquent poets of “the Troubles”.

If you’re not familiar with Paul Muldoon’s stuff, check him out. Just pick up any given New Yorker.

Muldoon:

I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already think I know.

While he often writes long poems, today I’m posting a brief one. It’s only five lines, but it gets more profound with every successive reading. As you think about it, cracks in what you think it is open up … and then more cracks, and suddenly the entire culture from which Muldoon sprung is visible.

Ireland

The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it’s lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.