Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

PAUL MULDOON CRITICAL ESSAYS

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES, 41

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PAUL MULDOON CRITICAL ESSAYS

EDITED BY TIM KENDALL AND PETER M C DONALD

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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First published 2004 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2004 Liverpool University Press The right of Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 0-85323-868-5 (cased) ISBN 0-85323-878-2 (limp)

Typeset in Garamond by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

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Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors

vi vii

Introduction   



‘Thirteen or Fourteen’: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Adolescence  



Never Quite Showing his Hand: Robert Frost and Paul Muldoon  



For Father Read Mother: Muldoon’s Antecedents  



Pax Hibernica/Pax Americana: Rhyme and Reconciliation in Muldoon  



Muldoon and Pragmatism  



‘All That’: Muldoon and the Vanity of Interpretation  



Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling Through after Madoc  



‘All Art is a Collaboration’: Paul Muldoon as Librettist  



Muldoon’s Remains  



Index



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Acknowledgements

Several of these essays began life as papers given at a conference on Paul Muldoon at the University of Bristol in 1998. The editors are grateful to the Department of English for funding the conference, and to its staff for administrative support. Quotations from Paul Muldoon’s work are reprinted by permission of the author, Faber & Faber Ltd, Wake Forest and Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc.

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Notes on Contributors

Michael Allen retired as Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 2001. He is the author of Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (OUP, 1969) and Emily Dickinson as an American Provincial Poet (British Association for American Studies, 1985), and has edited Seamus Heaney: Contemporary Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1997). He has written widely on contemporary Irish poetry. Fran Brearton is Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast, author of The Great War in Irish Poetry (OUP, 2000), and co-editor (with Eamonn Hughes) of Last before America: Irish and American Writing (Blackstaff Press, 2001). Stephen Burt teaches at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. His critical study Randall Jarrell and his Age appeared from Columbia University Press in 2002. His book of poems is Popular Music (CLP/Colorado, 1999). Rachel Buxton is Salvesen Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford, and is author of Robert Frost and Northen Irish Poetry (OUP, forthcoming). Matthew Campbell teaches English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999), and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003). Tim Kendall is Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol. He was founder-editor of Thumbscrew and is author of Paul Muldoon (Seren/Dufour, 1996) and Sylvia Plath (Faber, 2001). He is currently finishing a study of twentieth-century poetry for Blackwell. John Kerrigan is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. Among his publications are Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), which won the Truman Capote Award for

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Literary Criticism, and On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (2001). He is currently completing a book for Oxford University Press entitled Dislocations: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. John Lyon is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, and a founding Fellow of the English Association. He writes on the seventeenth century, particularly Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, on the novel and on contemporary poetry. Peter McDonald is Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in English at Christ Church, Oxford. He is the author of three critical books: Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (OUP, 1991), Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (OUP, 1997), and Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (OUP, 2002); he has co-edited Louis MacNeice’s Selected Plays (OUP, 1993), and is the editor of the new edition of MacNeice’s Collected Poems (Faber, forthcoming 2005). He has written three volumes of poetry. John Redmond is a Lecturer in the Department of English, Liverpool University. His doctoral thesis, which deals with the interrelationship of contemporary poetry from Britain and Northern Ireland, was completed at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. His first collection of poems, Thumb’s Width, was published by Carcanet in 2001. David Wheatley has published two books of poetry, Thirst (1997) and Misery Hill (2000), with Gallery Press. His articles and reviews have appeared in many journals, including the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Thumbscrew and Poetry Review. He lectures at the University of Hull and co-edits the poetry magazine Metre with Justin Quinn.

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Introduction PETER M C DONALD

1550–15?? ‘So, what can I tell you?’1 Paul Muldoon’s question, in ‘Getting Round’, his Bateson lecture of 1998, is open to more than one tonal interpretation. Even so, there is somewhere in the many possible tones of this one particular address a serious question – serious, whether or not Muldoon is asking it in earnest. What can a poem ‘tell’ us, and how, for that matter, can we best tell what we have been told? Is what a poem ‘tells’ us finally – and unparaphrasably – only itself? And in that case, how far can a maker of poems tell us anything new, over and above the evidence of the pieces he or she has created? Serious questions like these have elicited serious answers over time, and they confront anyone who tries, as a reader or even as a critic, to assemble a poet from the mass of poems and other writing that he or she puts about in the world. In Muldoon’s case, the poet we have put together is already one of much complexity, a prolific producer of texts – poetic and otherwise – whose increasing critical celebrity in the 1990s and after has left him a highly visible, if in some respects still a slightly perplexing presence in the literary landscapes of Ireland, Britain and America. Like any successful contemporary poet, Muldoon publishes increasingly in a context of close academic attention: scholarship (as the present book, of course, itself attests) is watching him, while he, inevitably perhaps, is watching the scholars. In some ways, Muldoon has a great deal to tell his observers, both about himself and his work; and it follows that, from time to time, the poet is speaking their language. Of all supposedly ‘difficult’ poets presently writing, Muldoon is surely among the most critically obliging. Yet this is only part of the story, and Muldoon has in fact been far from a mere caterer for academic wish-lists. Both his poetry and his prose have often kept their distance from the kinds of certainty – whether about personal or literary history, aesthetic or political positioning – which many students of contemporary writing would like to possess. Muldoon drops hints, makes

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suggestions, and hazards guesses about such things; but this is characteristically done with reservations, and a persistent air of provisionality. It’s this combination in Muldoon’s voice of the knowingly engaged and meticulous with the easily distracted and unpredictable which has – from an extremely early stage in his writing – made the poet seem always on the verge of being understood, but never quite capable of being critically pinned down. In creative terms (which matter), if not always in academic ones (which don’t matter much, or for very long), this elusiveness is to Muldoon’s advantage. Criticism of any important writer will unavoidably go through different phases, and build up in the process a series of its own formulae and protocols, as well as a specific body of knowledge. The process intuited by Wordsworth, of poets creating the taste by which they are to be understood, applies to Muldoon just as much as to earlier poets such as T.S. Eliot, or W.H. Auden. At first, good new writing generates praise and advocacy, along with, very often, dismissal and attack. Muldoon was very fortunate in some of his early advocates; it seems now mildly surprising to recall how other critics were once capable of disliking his work. With continuing success, next, comes the work of exegesis: this has been undertaken well by Muldoon’s critics, and has had the effect of making the poet an academically approachable author; in this phase, necessarily, the academic writers on a poet often give the impression – usually a just impression – of talking to, for, or sometimes against one another. A third phase does sometimes follow, though in this case it is still too early to make out exactly the kind of figure Muldoon will cut there: this sees the poet judged alongside other poets, both of his time and apart from it, and it needs not a growing and changing body of work, but a completed and critically assimilated one. Given Muldoon’s productivity – and his continuing gift for original twists and turns of artistic development – this kind of judgement-in-the-round must remain a long way off. Nevertheless, it is already clear enough that, of all the many poets now writing to acclaim, he will present an unusually strong case for this kind of appraisal, and will be a necessary point of comparison for many judgements on major poets from Yeats onwards. Not that the future is, strictly speaking, anything poets (or critics) know all that much about: just as playing ‘who will survive’ is – as far as criticism is concerned – a sign of damaging intellectual limitation, so a preoccupation with writing your way into some best-guess literary posterity, shaped in fact by a contemporary consensus, is one telling symptom of

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bad poetry. Muldoon’s work continually bypasses such things; in this respect, the poetry’s central – and abiding – preoccupation with the complexities of present tenses, into which past and future are collapsed, and through which memory of the past and imagination about the future are scrambled and reconfigured, is also its greatest and most distinctive strength. The increasing complexity of Muldoon’s poetic forms since Madoc, which is a complexity of large-scale structures (in long poems, whole volumes, and even between whole volumes), has begun to make the poetry itself often a matter of collapsing distinctions between the present poem, its predecessor-poems, and the poems that might follow, as though Muldoon is finding a way of rendering in terms of form and structure the intercutting complexities of present experience which his writing had always registered. Like any profoundly original or daring literary experiments, Muldoon’s more recent works are risky affairs: although their immediate critical success is now something of a guaranteed business, the real significance and depth of achievement in poems such as ‘Yarrow’, or a whole book such as Hay, or for that matter a critical study such as To Ireland, I, are still not easily assessed. The essays in the present volume testify to the inherent fascination of works like these, but also to their underlying contentiousness, and they provide a number of possible critical approaches to them; as is probably to be expected, these critical reactions are not always in agreement with each other – and even on occasion not in agreement with Muldoon – about what, in the larger sense, this kind of writing might mean. Again, this is not an issue on which we should expect, or want, to find any consensus – either between different kinds of critic, or between the critics and the poet himself. To the extent that Muldoon sometimes seems to meet more than half-way those readers who have particular kinds of meaning in mind, and to pitch his voice in their direction, he risks the kind of academic assimilation which does not bode all that well for his writing: though comfortable, the bosom of the academy is not, on the whole, the best place for poets to be taken to. However, Muldoon’s ability to stand at a creative angle to an audience’s expectation remains in play, and in fact sets the academic audience a number of important challenges, all of these making more complicated and contingent the questions of ‘meaning’ in which critics have been trained to deal. In their different ways, all of the essays in this book return to the question of what a poem can ‘tell’ us, whether about its author, about itself, or about the world in which it comes into being. And what a poem

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can tell us is not separable from how it tells us what it does; in Muldoon’s case, this is especially evident, and perhaps especially problematic. Once we allow ourselves, as readers, to abandon the distinction between what and how, we begin to understand the way poetry works, and to put aside – if only for the moment – certain less important aspects of ‘meaning’. This is probably as unnerving for poets as it is for those reading or writing about poetry; some poets, such as Wordsworth, have been wrongly convinced that they possessed strengths of ‘meaning’ over and above the extraordinary vividness of sound, style and perception that were in fact their greatest strengths; others have tried to compensate, in the currency of ‘meaning’ (philosophical, political, religious or otherwise) for weaknesses in the immediacies of their poems. At his best, Muldoon finds ways of making the immediate matters of language, vision, and sound parts of ‘the great wheel’ of poetic structure, in which an always more crowded and complicated present experience repeats itself again and again, and includes within itself a whole past – whether personal or literary – made present. For this, Schopenhauer provides one appropriate gloss: Whilst science, following the restless and unstable stream of the fourfold forms of reasons or grounds or consequents, is with every end it attains again and again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running we can reach the point where the clouds touch the horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. […] It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time.2

More simply, there is an eloquent gloss on poetry’s relation to ‘meaning’ in a phrase of David Bromwich, describing Wordsworth’s poetry in ‘The Idiot Boy’ as ‘a confession of the effects of attention; a pure, pointless concentration’.3 Like poetry, criticism is often at its most alert and inspiring when it does not set its heart on the arguments of ‘meaning’, but allows us to experience instead the bracing and perplexing realities of ‘concentration’. The authors of the essays gathered here see Paul Muldoon from many different angles – biographical, formal, literary-historical, generic – but are also engaged in directing attention to complex moments of creativity in which an extraordinary amount of originality is concentrated, and on whose clarity a lot depends. Between them, and even in the degree to which they bring to light areas of disagreement about this poet’s strengths and weaknesses, they continue a conversation about what poems (and

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poets) can tell us which Paul Muldoon’s work has made both compelling and fruitful. The injunction to ‘Go figure’ opens more doors than it closes.

Notes 1 Paul Muldoon, ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism, 48.2 (April 1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 107. 2 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (1819), in David Simpson (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 164–65. 3 David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 102.

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part i ‘Thirteen or Fourteen’: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Adolescence STEPHEN BURT

1550–15?? Why do Paul Muldoon’s poems regularly include phrases such as these: ‘Mercy was thirteen, maybe fourteen’ (‘Boon’); ‘Internal exiles at thirteen or fourteen’ (‘The Geography Lesson’); ‘I was thirteen or fourteen’ (‘Making the Move’); ‘she was twenty / or twenty-one’ (‘Big Foot’)?1 The same mannerism appears in his prose: Muldoon writes that he ‘first read Donne […] at the age of fifteen or sixteen’.2 The youngest age such phrases mention is ‘ten’; the oldest is ‘twenty-one’. These paired ages (I have not listed them all) are only one of the many ways in which Muldoon’s work has used his, and our, notions of adolescence. From the adventure-tales and drug-lore of ‘Yarrow’ to the schooltime pranks of ‘Twice’, from the embarrassed chastity of ‘Cuba’ to the lubriciousness of ‘De Secretis Mulierum’, from recurring phrases to recurring characters (such as the schoolmate Will Hunter), many of Muldoon’s poems include adolescent protagonists, or feelings and situations we associate with adolescence. These adolescent figures and situations can help us interpret Muldoon’s styles, and his concerns. No critic has looked at Muldoon’s use of youth as such. Yet his poetry has long struck readers (both hostile and friendly) as somehow immature. Mark Ford described Meeting the British (admiringly) as ‘outlandish’ and ‘emotionally discontinuous’, comparing Muldoon’s provocative personae to Seamus Heaney’s ‘absolutely solid poetic personality’.3 For the American critic Calvin Bedient, Muldoon exhibits a ‘brilliant callowness’; he thus ‘fit[s] […] Ortega y Gasset’s characterization of [modernism] as masculine and youthful’.4 Other critics have described Muldoon’s ‘elusiveness’ (Peter McDonald), his ‘deconstructive impulse’ (Edna Longley), his ‘chimerical […] first-person voice’ (William Wilson), and his attraction to the ‘contingent and provisional’ (Steven Matthews). Muldoon’s versions of youth and young people explain, and act out, the elusive, provocative stances so often remarked in his work.5 In her study of novels about adolescence, Patricia Meyer Spacks suggests that to recall youth is to imagine the self as

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provisional, unfixed: ‘As during those adolescent years,’ she writes, ‘one endlessly re-created oneself, trying out […] different possible roles, so now one re-invents those past selves, converting the shifting shapes of adolescence into images that make retrospective sense.’6 Muldoon’s poems, with their slippery, shifting shapes, explore frustrated or confused identities, presenting people who do not yet know who they are or what to do. The poems imagine – with tenderness or brutality – teen romance and its failures, comparing it favourably to adults’ doctrines and disciplines. Refusing both the stable, ‘mature’ perspectives associated with adult authority, and the childhood innocence other poets associate with lyric, Muldoon imagines failed, stalled, incomplete, or continually reenacted comings-of-age. His interest in adolescence works in tandem with his tendency to entangle, or even destroy, the narrative lines of his long poems; the result is a world in which most sorts of intellectual and emotional closure are simply not possible. Instead, Muldoon’s poems tend to present people who cannot or will not complete their life-stories by settling on one identity or growing up; at their happiest, these presentations celebrate the artifice his playful, defiant, or coy personae display. Muldoon was ‘seventeen or eighteen’, he told Michael Donaghy, when he first encountered Seamus Heaney.7 He received from the older poet both advice about literary matters and practical help in placing his poems. Muldoon would be viewed as notably, or exceptionally, young, from the time he began to publish – in part because he was young (twenty-one when his first book, New Weather, appeared), and in part because he was (and still is) frequently viewed as Heaney’s younger counterpart or successor. ‘Clonfeacle’ (from New Weather) responds to the dinnseanchas genre (poems on Irish place names) which Heaney replicated in English, in the trimeter quatrains Heaney used. ‘Walk[ing] along / The river where [Patrick] washed, / That translates stone to silt’, Muldoon imagines that The river would preach As well as Patrick did. A tongue of water passing Between teeth of stones. Making itself clear, Living by what it says […] (P, 12–13)

The point of the poem seems to be that Muldoon and his companion, ‘I’ and ‘you’, cannot or will not ‘translate’ these natural certainties into any part of their own lives:

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You turn towards me, Coming round to my way Of thinking, holding Your tongue between your teeth. I turn my back on the river And Patrick, their sermons Ending in the air.

‘I’ and ‘you’ are perhaps coming to some agreement about a date, or a romance, or the end of one (Tim Kendall suggests a first kiss).8 The hesitation in the lines maps hesitations in the actors they chronicle, a hesitation which concludes in silence, in mid-stanza. This youthful uncertainty is where ‘I’ and ‘you’ and the poem’s sound agree; all are set against the older certainties Patrick and the river (and, perhaps, implicitly, Heaney) embody. Another poem from New Weather uses adolescent romantic and sexual uncertainties as figures for larger, metaphysical ones. ‘Whatever the mottoes are,’ Muldoon has remarked, ‘when they become organized, codified, there’s a very fine line between organized religion and organized crime’.9 The uncertain young lovers of ‘The Kissing Seat’ seem about to cross a related line: ‘The organized crime / Of the kissing seat, / How well it holds us’, the poem begins. Its lovers seem in two minds about one another: both are looking Elsewhere. It’s getting late now, You’ve only a linen shift Between you and harm. (P, 27)

Muldoon seems to be quoting a girl’s parents (as he would do explicitly in ‘Cuba’), placing their language into his own poem, without telling us how ironically we ought to read it, whether a kiss, or more than a kiss, would indeed be ‘harm’. Such hesitancies are not Muldoon’s alone (Heaney, in fact, signed his earliest poems Incertus). Yet more than most young poets the Muldoon of the 1970s liked to present himself as young and uncertain, even in poems with few or no autobiographical elements. Often he combined these uncertainties with a vertiginous anger. Other people condescend to, or ignore, the personae through which the Muldoon of the 1970s speaks; he and his apparent surrogates try out sarcasm, understatement, in-jokes, and defensive exasperation as responses.

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All these tactics inform ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’, in which Muldoon finds himself harangued by a ‘celebrated pamphleteer’, and asks ‘where (I wonder myself) do I stand?’ By the end of the poem Muldoon has disclosed its parabolic status; he has also hinted at its origins in a crude joke about eating human excrement.10 The ‘celebrated pamphleteer’ (author of such ‘preposterous titles’ as The Dream and the Drums) turns out to be a man Muldoon invented. Muldoon envisions himself as a flustered young writer; he has, however, become well-known enough that genuine young writers seek his advice, though he feels too much like them to offer any: What should I say to this callow youth Who learned to write last winter— One of those correspondence courses— And who’s coming to lunch today? He’ll be rambling on, no doubt, About pigs and trees, stars and horses. (P, 42)

The prematurely weary poet of ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’ finds himself surprised, even offended, by the authority others attribute to him. More usually Muldoon’s youthful personae can take their ambivalent perspectives – and offer the insights that come with them – precisely because they are distant from adult authority. ‘I was only the girl under the stairs’, ‘The Big House’ begins, ‘But I was the first to notice something was wrong’ (P, 43). The opening ‘But’ would make more sense as an ‘and’: it is because the guests and the mistress have paid her little attention that she can report on the Big House so well, and it is because she is the servant-girl (up first in the morning) that she has seen the squire arrive, dead, on horseback. Nor is the serving-girl who speaks the poem the only young person whom we might identify with its author: one of the guests at the haunted estate is ‘a young man who wrote stories for children’, though ‘The young man’s stories were for grown-ups, really’. Another early poem, ‘February’, likens its man or boy (‘he’) to a tree: He heard that in Derryscollop there is a tree For every day of the year, And the extra tree is believed to grow One year in every four. He had never yet taken time to grieve For this one without breasts Or that one wearing her heart on her sleeve Or another with her belly slashed.

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He had never yet taken time to love The blind pink fledgling fallen out of the nest Of one sleeping with open mouth And her head at a list. What was he watching and waiting for, Walking Scollop every day? For one intending to leave at the end of the year, Who would break the laws of time and stay. (P, 13)

The poem is the first of many in Muldoon’s oeuvre to mingle remembered sex with imagined violence, or to portray the former in terms of the latter, and it requires conjecture as well as decoding.11 Yet the poem coheres only if we take its subject to be, first and last, youth: the poem imagines that stage of life as a condition of rural, or village, isolation, a condition at once magical, limiting, violent, and subject to ‘laws of time’ which send the residents away (in Muldoon’s own case, to university) despite their mixed feelings about it. The ‘fledgling’, the girl or woman with her ‘belly slashed’ (a fatal wound, an appendectomy – or an abortion), the ‘one wearing her heart on her sleeve’ and the ‘one without breasts’ may share not only victimhood but youth. The romantic figure the poem awaits can redeem them all, apparently, by ‘break[ing] the laws of time’. ‘They’ are, perhaps, the girls of a village, and the poem’s final lines seem to reverse its implicit situation: it may be ‘he’ who plans to leave but asks if he should stay. From New Weather all the way up to Hay Muldoon has written poems that look back critically at his own failed romances – from divorces to difficult dates. The first such poem to achieve real tonal control was ‘Elizabeth’. In it, unexpected migrations of birds (arriving ‘inland, they belong to the sea’) stand for the uncertainties of the young woman Muldoon names: You are inside yet, pacing the floor, Having been trapped in every way. You hold yourself as your own captive. My promised children are in your hands, Hostaged by you in your father’s old house. I call you now for all the names of the day, Lizzie and Liz and plain Beth. (P, 26)

These figures of self-enclosure and self-imprisonment are the ‘selfinwoven similes’ Christopher Ricks identified with Northern Irish poetry in

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general.12 Their use here, though, suggests not civil war (much less reconciliation) but a baffled or balked self-creation. Muldoon does not know what to call Elizabeth because Elizabeth does not know who she is, what name she prefers, or what she wants, and no one – not her father, not her lover – stands in any position to tell her. Without the ability to make such decisions (or to let them be made for her) she seems to be fading away: the birds ‘will stay long / Enough to underline how soon they will be gone, / As you seem thinner than you were before’. That ending suggests both a figurative ‘shrinking’ (from the imposing outdoor birds) and anorexia (a condition Muldoon would reuse in Quoof). Elizabeth’s unsettled, in-between status is not a source of power (as it can be for Muldoon’s male juveniles) but a debilitating condition. An earlier, cruder romantic-erotic failure takes place in ‘How to Play Championship Tennis’, whose lonely ‘third-form’ narrator flees the groping advances of ‘the school caretaker’; safely outdoors, he compares himself to ‘Joe and Cyril’, whose confident proficiency in tennis belies their status as the school outcasts (P, 46). Heterosexual initiations guide still other poems from this period, among them the tender ‘Boon’ (which features Mercy, along with Will Hunter) and ‘The Girls in the Poolroom’, whose speaker delights in malapropism: The girls in the poolroom Were out on their own limbs. How could I help But make men of them? (P, 53)

It is they, and in particular a confused girl called Emily, who ‘make a man’ of him: the reversed language suggests that no one in the poem has got very far towards maturity. A far stronger poem of sexual initiation, ‘Cuba’, also sets its young people against its adults. The poem depends on implication and understatement as it places the absurdities of its adults’ belief systems against its teenagers’ tentative search for something else. ‘My eldest sister’ (named May) has been out all night, and returns home ‘in her white muslin evening dress’ (P, 78). First-time readers assume she has been out with a man, and perhaps that they have had sex. ‘My father’, too, knows, or thinks he knows, that May has done something sinful, instructing her to ‘“make your peace with God”’. In the same way the father feels sure that President Kennedy will start a nuclear war over Cuba, because he is ‘“nearly an Irishman”’, hence temperamental, ‘“not much better than

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 :  

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ourselves”’: the young siblings can only listen in fear. May then proceeds to the confessional: I could hear May from beyond the curtain. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I told a lie once, I was disobedient once. And, Father, a boy touched me once.’ ‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest? Did he touch your breast, for example?’ ‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’

It may be that May has simply lied to the priest. Most readers, however, probably imagine that she has told the truth: her night out in evening wear has led to nothing more indecent than that. Against her, the poem’s grown men (and perhaps its readers) seem prurient in their assumptions, and this may be part of the point: May’s body is none of the Father’s business, and perhaps not much of her father’s either. ‘The poem’s fathers manipulate May,’ Kendall writes, ‘imposing their narrow prejudices upon her; “Cuba” is a parable of innocence destroyed […] by their sanctimonious codes’.13 Yet her innocence seems to have been preserved, almost against her wishes. What the poem has to set against its fathers is a youthful solidarity and curiosity: we identify with the more benign snooping represented by the poem’s young narrator, and with the innocent curiosity represented by his sister’s night out. Muldoon casts the last six lines wholly in dialogue, so that we – like the boy who overhears them – can make of them what we will: though it plays on our adult sense of poignancy, the poem positions its readers and itself on the side of youth. Set in 1963 (rather than 1962), the sonnet ‘Profumo’ works as a sequel of sorts to ‘Cuba’. Its innocent teen romance involves not an older sister but Muldoon himself: My mother had slapped a month-long news embargo on his very name. The inhalation of my first, damp menthol fag behind the Junior Common Room. The violet-scented Thirteenth Birthday Card to which I would affix a stamp with the Queen’s head upside down, swalk, and post to Frances Hagan. The spontaneously-combustible News of the World

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  ’    

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under my mother’s cushion as she shifted from ham to snobbish ham; ‘Haven’t I told you, time and time again, that you and she are chalk and cheese? Away and read Masefield’s “Cargoes.”’ (P, 155)

The ‘snobbish’ mother works as a blocking agent, parallel to the father in ‘Cuba’. As in that earlier poem, public affairs, mediated by the distracted adults, interfere with the private world of the young people in the poem, a world with its own cute code words, such as ‘swalk’ (‘sealed with a loving kiss’). The discreditable secrets of the Profumo affair of 1963, with its call girls and shadowy high-class pimp, emphasize the relative innocence of the young Muldoon’s secretive actions, from cigarette to birthday card to the tabloid under the cushion. John Masefield’s once-famous poem about nautical voyages, meanwhile, stands in mocking contrast to Muldoon’s domestic troubles: ‘Cargoes’ sets a ‘Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir’ against the humdrum, practical freight of England.14 Masefield’s first line is also the first line of Muldoon’s long poem ‘7, Middagh Street’, and Kendall has attacked ‘Profumo’ as a mere aide-memoire to the larger poem.15 In fact, the allusion works perfectly well within the sonnet: this poem, built on the binarisms inside–outside, domestic–foreign, familiar–exotic, old–young and old–new compares what Muldoon’s mother thinks would interest him, what she thinks the boy would find exotic, to his actual interests. Even more than ‘Cuba’, however, this poem emphasizes the tentative, furtive attitudes of its youthful actors. After the abrupt first sentence, most of the poem consists of sentence fragments, with the verbs buried in dependent clauses. Those clauses, moreover, introduce actions recalled or contemplated, rather than undertaken and completed. Muldoon has not yet stamped and sent the birthday card; ‘my mother’, at the edge of her seat, has not uncovered the tabloid, perhaps never will. Muldoon’s rhyme scheme, meanwhile, seems exceptionally tangled even for him. The sonnet rhymes abcd ecfg ebdgfa, with no completed rhyme until line six, and only one in the octave. The system of rhymed pairs at irregular, sometimes quite long, distances encourages readers to match up distant pairs of words, to decipher a hidden system of couplings, as if decoding youthful crushes, or sex scandals. It would be overreading to connect the rhymes’ couplings to the couples the poem considers (Muldoon and Frances Hagan, John Profumo and Christine Keeler). One can, though, say that the rhyme scheme suggests a world in which the connections that matter have to be kept from the wrong eyes.

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 :  

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Muldoon’s poems of failed or comic romance belong to a larger pattern: his youthful characters try to come of age and find they cannot. Other failed comings-of-age take place in the drinking binges and drug trips the poems from Quoof, in particular, record. Subtler poems of ironic, failed initiation take their raw materials from the adventure stories the young Muldoon read. In ‘Making the Move’ the powerlessness which the adult Muldoon feels as his marriage breaks up, and the compensatory fantasies of male heroism it prompts, reproduce the comically simple fantasies and adventures of teenaged boys. Its couplets, with their deliberately obvious rhymes, mime the speaker’s juvenile failures; Muldoon remembers A primus stove, a sleeping-bag, The bow I bought through a catalogue When I was thirteen or fourteen That would bend, and break, for anyone, Its boyish length of maple Unseasoned and unsupple. Were I embarking on that wine-dark sea I would bring my bow along with me. (P, 90–91)

Ulysses’ bow ‘would bend for no one but himself’; he used it as he travelled circuitously back to his own ‘good wife’. Muldoon’s journey away from his marriage will instead return him to the juvenile state in which he identified with ‘bad Lord Byron’ and hoped to emulate Ulysses.16 In fact, he comes closer to emulating the mock-Telemachean Stephen Daedalus, who in Ulysses hears and repeats the same Homeric phrase: ‘blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea’.17 Muldoon would later say he had been ‘taken by the idea of the “self” bow, the bow “made all of one piece”, as opposed to “backed” or composite […] The yew self bow is traditionally six feet long, man-tall’.18 From these sources Muldoon has shown not only a young man in a collapsing marriage, but a man who returns ambiguously to his teenage preoccupations as part of a continuing effort to make some sense of himself, a self who is not, and will not soon be, ‘all of one piece’ – even if he has long been ‘man-tall’. ‘Making the Move’ also names Raymond Chandler, whom Muldoon has lauded as ‘a pure stylist’, ‘a man who pretended to be engaged in narratives but wasn’t the least interested’.19 Muldoon’s attraction to versions of adolescence, to baffled or failed or unfinished growing-up,

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  ’    

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makes itself evident in his own narrative poems, not only in their incidents of adventure but in their frustrated and frustrating forms. ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ ends in symptomatically, confrontationally anti-closural gestures – ellipses, an incomplete sentence, the final line ‘“Huh”’ (P, 147). Tales told within the poems become shaggy-dog stories; land and sea journeys, quests, and even paved roads come to sudden and baffling endings. ‘Ontario’, a prose-poem of mock ‘dream-visions’, is exemplary. Muldoon has been offering trivia to ‘a girl in a bin-liner dress’ he has met in a disco: Her back was an imponderable green furrow in the ultraviolet strobe. —Did you know that Yonge Street’s the longest street in the world? —I can’t say that I did. —Well, it starts a thousand miles to the north, and it ends right here. (P, 151)

As ‘Incantata’ (with its meditation on ‘the word “might”’) acknowledged, Muldoon has been drawn to verb forms which suggest uncertainty. One critic has described his verse as ‘slyly interrogated by conditionals and subjunctives’.20 Another critic has shown how Muldoon’s scepticisms inform his intricate rhymes, which (Andrew Osborn writes) ‘like fuzzy logic, spurn […] all-or-nothing dichotomies in favour of greater or lesser probabilities’.21 Muldoon’s preference for young, and aggressively uncertain, characters – from his Irish schoolboys to a snappy girl in a Toronto disco – works in tandem with his abrupt or random endings, his odd tastes in verb moods, his elusive rhymes, and his stated attraction to indeterminacy. His adolescent characters let him depict lives and choices as matters of sympathetic beginnings followed by vexing or indeterminate middles, and relieves him of having to depict the conclusions he has such difficulty drawing. Muldoon’s poetic goals have changed considerably since Why Brownlee Left and Quoof. His 1987 move to America, marriage and fatherhood, settlement in New Jersey, historical research, work on opera libretti and (most recently) on literary criticism have all helped him make his recent poetry less oblique and more baroque. The adolescents in his 1990s poetry are less frequent, less tormented, and more likely to be viewed in retrospect. Yet – at least up to The Annals of Chile – they still appear, and they still do the same kinds of representative work. Expansive and hyperallusive where the earliest poems seem cannily restrained, the long poem ‘Yarrow’ may seem (like Muldoon’s other recent verse) the stylistic opposite of New Weather. Muldoon’s uses of youth, however, suggest that the early and late poems share core concerns.

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 :  

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‘Yarrow’ juxtaposes punningly related incidents from Muldoon’s own life with symbols and quotations from Plath, King Lear and other sources, including boys’ adventure stories; the assembled fragments serve, among other purposes, to mourn Muldoon’s mother. Much of the putative autobiography takes place in ‘the winter of 1962–63’, when Muldoon would have been aged eleven; much of the rest imagines his later romance with an almost comically self-destructive woman called S—, addicted to New York City, to heroin, and to self-dramatization.22 Other parts of the poem revisit ‘Profumo’ – ‘the mouth of Christine Keel- // er’, ‘a photo of Mandy Rice-Davies’, the profaned head of the Queen. As in ‘Making the Move’, Muldoon’s failed romance prompts him to recall the youthful quests, the coming-of-age adventures, which now seem to him to have failed or never ended. The bow of the one poem recalls the arrow and ‘dirk’ of the other: It was thirty years till I reached back for the quiver in which I’d hidden the carbon-slip from Tohill’s of the Moy: my hand found the hilt of the dirk I confiscated from Israel; the carbon-slip was gone; what with those ‘persimmons’ and ‘swedes,’ I’d been diverted from my quest. (P, 376)

‘The division of self inherent in the child’s role-playing,’ Kendall writes, ‘allows him to elude his mother’s morality, freely slipping into personae and worlds to which such codes no longer apply’.23 The milieux in which Muldoon meets S— (the law firm Skadden, Arps, the demi-monde of drug suppliers) are in this sense simply more such worlds, though they are not a child’s. In them, as earlier, the poet is not only eluding his mother’s black-and-white codes, but becoming a man defined by such elusions. In the course of ‘Yarrow’, the young Muldoon discovers adventure, heroic (impossible) versions of himself, sex (and the idea of the erotic), Latin (and the idea of translation), danger (and the thrill of the forbidden). He discovers, moreover, that for him these things are confusingly, but compellingly, related. These discoveries seem to lead directly into the glamorous, absurd affair with S—. And if they begin in Muldoon’s 1963, they continue throughout his teens: That was the year I stumbled on Publius Ovidius Naso vying with Charlie Gunn in an elegiac distich: the year Eric and Jimi rode the packet

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on the Chisholm Trail and Mike Fink declaimed from his Advanced Reader the salascient passages from Amores. (P, 357)

Though the previous page refers to the extreme cold, and the Profumo scandal, of 1963, the ‘year’ this page describes must have been later, since Jimi (Hendrix) released his first single (‘Hey Joe’) in December 1966. Almost all of ‘Yarrow’ contains such mixed signals, frustrating any reader who tries to put it together as an unambiguous narrative. ‘The polylingual parodying of […] noble heroic deeds […] and of romance,’ concludes Steven Matthews, ‘continues Muldoon’s attack on all idealisms’, while its ‘demotic measures of time’ repudiate any ‘fixed sense of history’.24 ‘Yarrow’ offers instead a sort of anti-narrative anti-history, starting from Muldoon’s twelfth year, and festooned with red herrings, hyperactive allusions, and double entendres, in which Muldoon in effect fails to grow up. From this angle ‘Yarrow’ seems consistent with much of Muldoon’s first two decades of work. Girls just old enough to walk out with boys; boys old enough to devour (or try to act out) adventure tales; and men and women in their late teens or twenties (often seeking sexual exploits, or taking hallucinogens) are the usual, almost the only, centres of consciousness in New Weather, in Mules, in Why Brownlee Left, even in Quoof (whose poems about Muldoon’s father see him through the eyes of an admiring son). With the brief exception of ‘The Right Arm’, Muldoon’s corpus before Hay seems almost devoid of young children, since (among other reasons) he does not seem to believe in childhood innocence: his poems begin with the entry into experience, and with the uncertainties and missteps attendant upon it. One such entry seems to take place in ‘Mules’, whose hybrid foal should ‘have the best of both worlds’ but cannot, since its innocence is a condition it has lost by the time it has hit the ground (P, 67). The uncollected sonnet ‘Under Saturn’ announces much more coarsely Muldoon’s dissent from childhood innocence, painting its formative encounter – apparently a first kiss – as excitingly ‘dirty’, always-already sexual. The octave recalls ‘a child’s vow / Sworn in all integrity […] To a girl with hair in braids’; the sestet then recasts the memory in decidedly un-Yeatsian terms: I grasp the nitty-gritty Plait between her shoulder-blades. My mouth on her faintly urinous Mouth. Brisket-bone.

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 :  

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And now, blah-blah, now At a snail’s lick across a stone.25

Yeats’s poem ‘Under Saturn’ invoked ‘lost love, inseparable from my thought / Because I have no other youth’.26 Assuming Muldoon’s ‘I’ describes a memory from his own youth (rather than casting himself as a Humbert Humbert), the point seems to be that this is how formative experiences really feel: messy, vertiginous, smelly, exciting, wet – and, in retrospect, sometimes comic. These poems’ disbelief in childhood innocence is matched by their general lack of trustworthy, or even sympathetic, adults. In Muldoon’s world to grow up is to know more facts, to have more experience, to see more of the conjunctions and resemblances that could link anyone to anything. It is not, however, to learn how the world makes any final, stable sense. To try to condense from the world a foundational truth (on which codes of conduct or institutions might rest) might be as irrational, as destructive, as trying to ‘squeeze’ ‘a moral for our times’ out of a frog (P, 120). Almost the only figure in Muldoon’s early poems who does grow up – whom we see in his youth and as an adult – is Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward, in ‘Anseo’, whose young adult role as a Republican militarist ironically repeats his role as class rebel (P, 83-84). And one of the admirable aspects of Muldoon’s father, as the poems present him, seems to be his distance from authorities: he exerts himself to demonstrate farm skills, or shares a decidedly non-instructive moment (watching ‘our favoured wrestler, the Mohawk Indian’), rather than promulgating rules and judgements (P, 111). ‘What I resist very strenuously,’ Muldoon has declared, ‘is […] any kind of ism, that insists on everything falling into place very neatly […]. I’m antiprescriptive’.27 Many readers link this ‘antiprescriptive’ bent to his background and his generation. Muldoon arrived at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1969; his frequently quoted, unpublished essay ‘Chez Moy’ recalls those times.28 ‘Unlike Heaney and slightly older writers’ whose university days coincided with the Northern civil rights movement (Clair Wills argues), ‘Muldoon’s adolescence was overshadowed by the beginning of the Troubles, perhaps fostering a feeling of political impotence rather than ethical responsibility’.29 His earliest poems on political violence share a terse, difficult attitude of non serviam: ‘We answer to no grey South / Nor blue North’, the American Civil War soldiers in ‘The Field Hospital’ declare (P, 33). We might compare Muldoon’s refusals and obliquities not only to

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  ’    

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those of the committed, violent men and religious believers Muldoon can depict (from Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward to Gallogly), but to the real young people studied by social psychologists, whose research suggests that children in Northern Ireland after 1969 sensed less ‘complexity of moral problems’, became more ready to accept adults’ rules and norms, than children in England or the United States.30 Even more than in another milieu, scepticism in this one might come to seem a form of individuation: individual doubt becomes odder and more powerful as a component of character, and of poetry, the more the people and works around it seem committed to violent certainties. While Heaney wrote newspaper columns and book reviews, Muldoon’s only remotely ‘civic’ publication from the 1970s would be The Scrake of Dawn, a commissioned anthology of poems by Northern Ireland’s schoolchildren, aged 8–16.31 If Muldoon’s generation was the first to grow up with the Troubles, it was also the first to grow up into a world already full of rock music, a genre whose associations with youth have endured from the 1950s to the present. Rock bands and songs have become obvious presences in Muldoon’s own poems only recently, in ‘Yarrow’ and in the recent (perhaps commissioned) sequence ‘Sleeve Notes’. Originally entitled ‘Wow and Flutter’, the sequence tracks Muldoon’s favourite records from Hendrix through Elvis Costello and beyond.32 Part of its point seems to be that his debts to rock music cannot be confined to one stage of life. (In fact, Muldoon still plays the electric guitar.33) At the same time, the sequence returns to discoveries from ‘Yarrow’, and from earlier short poems. Here, again, the poet seems to discover that risk and adventure, rock music, verbal incongruity, translation (across cultures as across languages), and youthful independence are inextricably linked (at least for him): to seek, or grow into, one is to encounter the rest. A segment on Nirvana’s Bleach revisits the nautical journeys, the sexual adventurism, and the drifting disconnections of Quoof, whose ‘wild and wicked poems’ (another segment insists) took hidden inspiration from Warren Zevon’s Exciteable Boy. More memorable in its own right is an epigram on the Beatles’ 1968 double album, popularly known as the ‘White Album’: Though that was the winter when late each night I’d put away Cicero or Caesar and pour new milk into an old saucer for the hedgehog which, when it showed up right on cue, would set its nose down like that flight back from the U.S. … back from the, yes sir…

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 :  

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back from the… back from the U.S.S.R. … I’d never noticed the play on ‘album’ and ‘white.’ (P, 411)

That hedgehog would appear in a poem from New Weather. The bilingual puns and semantic doubles (Cicero–Caesar, US–USSR, album–white) reappear all over his later work. The winter memory links the poem to the series of winters in ‘Yarrow’. With the exception of ‘Sleeve Notes’ (and perhaps in some ways ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’), Hay pays comparatively little attention to adolescence: its most successful poems concern the adult Muldoon as husband and father. If there are logical stopping points to Muldoon’s representations of adolescence they occur before Hay, in ‘Yarrow’ and in short poems of the 1980s and 1990s which recall particular young people with admiration. One such poem, the sonnet ‘Twice’, seems to remember deceased schoolmates, among them the prank-loving ‘Lefty’ Clery: It was so cold last night the water in the barrel grew a sod of water: I asked Taggart and McAnespie to come over and we sawed and sawed for half an hour until, using a crowbar as a lever in the way Archimedes always said would shift the balance, we were somehow able to manoeuvre out and, finally, stand on its side in the snow that fifteen- or eighteen-inch-thick manhole cover; that ‘manhole cover’ was surely no more ice than are McAnespie and Taggart still of this earth; when I squinnied through I saw ‘Lefty’ Clery, ‘An Ciotach,’ grinning from both ends of the school photograph, having jooked behind the three-deep rest of us to meet the Kodak’s leisurely pan; ‘Two places at once, was it, or one place twice?’ (P, 330–31)

‘Fifteen- or eighteen-inch-thick’, the manhole cover has taken unto itself the distinctive adjectival phrase Muldoon’s other poems attach to people. (That ‘lever’ may be a riposte to Heaney, too.34) As in ‘Pancho Villa’, the last part of the poem (here, the sestet) reveals the status of earlier parts as parable before moving on to a final symbol: that symbolic photograph, like the fictive ice disc, turns individuals into illusions or doubles of themselves. The poem has done likewise with its key words. Ciotach is Irish for ‘left-handed’ or ‘lefty’; ‘sawed’, ‘water’, ‘manhole cover’ each appear twice close together, while the homophones saw (‘cut’), saw (‘viewed’), said, sawed and sod trade places throughout.

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  ’    

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A poem about doubled, traded, fluctuating identities, ‘Twice’ is not coincidentally a poem about boyish mischief. It makes no sense to ask which of the two ‘Lefty’ Clerys in the school picture is real – no more sense than to ask, faced with Muldoon’s eye-rhymes, whether ‘sod’, ‘sawed’, ‘said’, or ‘side’ is the original word. The prank, played in a school photograph, mocks the official, school-standard view of the world. It allies Muldoon and his language with the unofficial (‘subversive’, even) gestures practised by the schoolmates he remembers, sets his sense of himself apart from the fixities of an adult world. Moreover, it works to commemorate those schoolmates and their tricky sense of themselves; they may no longer be ‘of this earth’, but Muldoon’s poem, like their ghostly image, still is. Muldoon’s delight in double and multiple lives – and in lives that prove hard to pin down – has been apparent to many of his admirers. As Peter McDonald has put it, in perhaps the best recent overview, ‘Muldoon’s writing gestures towards […] an ideal abandoning of identity’, often at the same time as it practises autobiography.35 In ‘7, Middagh Street’, Mick Imlah decided in a review, ‘identities are disrupted largely for fun […]. We are only precariously ourselves’.36 Poems such as ‘Twice’ indeed depict copies without originals, dual and multiple chains of shifting selves whose narratives fail to reach clear ends. Yet Muldoon’s youthful personae, with their tenuous romances and school pranks, ‘attempt to take both roads’ (as Kendall has put it), and try to conceal or joke about those attempts, not because they have no sense of self, but because the selves they sense are dual, multiple, tricky.37 The figures in those poems are still becoming, exploring, provoking, testing the limits of our and their comprehension. Muldoon’s verbal strategies have struck other readers as a Derridean rejection of logos, a Kristevan exploration of pre-verbal abjects, or a ‘postmodern disavowal of origins’.38 Readers who seek purchase on Muldoon’s language from social and cultural theorists might turn instead to recent studies of youth and youth culture, which (one anthropologist has argued) encourage ‘an especially acute awareness of the contingent character of any cultural experience’, ‘impart[ing] a constant edge of private scepticism to social action’.39 ‘Muldoon’s subject,’ McDonald observes, ‘has often been, not disconnectedness (or “deconstruction”) per se, but the connectedness which the “arbitrary” brings about’.40 These sorts of connectedness cannot lead the narrative poems to clear and firm conclusions, the lyric poems to ringing affirmations, nor the characters in them to stable, mature self-knowledge.

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 :  

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What they can do is enable a verbal art, an art which – in its early tenderness, in its frequent outrage, in its unpredictability – Muldoon has always associated with the unstable self of youth. It is such a self that ‘Lefty’ Clery celebrates, or once did, and such a self that Muldoon runs aground, or ‘los[es] with all hands’, in ‘Yarrow’ (P, 392). Such a self, too, distinguishes Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps the least remarked of the many personae in Muldoon’s ‘7, Middagh Street’ – and, perhaps, the only person in Muldoon’s poems before Hay whom we can call happy. In her section of ‘7, Middagh Street’, the vaudevillian-turned-ecdysiast tells stories from her early career. At the same time, she explains how she discovered (to put it more flatfootedly than Muldoon does) that art is our nature, that to become oneself is to learn concealment and evasion, that to grow up successfully, in her line of work, is not quite to grow up at all. Muldoon has pieced Gypsy’s monologue together from anecdotes in her memoir, some of them pages or years apart.41 In his poem, she remembers a show with horses onstage: the first five rows were showered with horse-dung. I’ve rarely felt so close to nature as in Billy Minsky’s Burlesque Theatre. This was Brooklyn, 1931. I was an under-age sixteen. Abbott and Costello were sent out front while the stage was hosed down […] (P, 181)

Impatient ‘customers’ boo not only the comedians but the scenery, an imitation Garden of Eden, until Gypsy shows up: Gradually the clamour faded as I shed all but three of my green taffeta fig-leaves and stood naked as Eve.

Even ‘naked as Eve’, the young stripper still wears three fig-leaves, reversing Yeats by ‘walking not quite naked’; it seems an appropriate compliment when Nudina the snake-dancer tells her ‘I loved the act’ (emphasis added). Most readers of ‘7, Middagh Street’ find Muldoon’s spokesman (rightly) in Louis MacNeice. We might also see his points of view in Gypsy Rose Lee, whose entertaining story is the story of how to become Muldoon’s sort of artist. It is also a story of her youth; and it is, finally, a whimsically adaptable story about bravado, versatility, and her persistent

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refusal to settle down. Existing between her own famous past and the present in which she speaks, Gypsy Rose Lee becomes at once the silliest and the happiest of Muldoon’s expert representations of immaturity. Lee’s act, and even her costume, mock received notions of innocence (Eden) as they stretch decorum (and local laws). As an adult, she enjoys retailing, and even interpreting, her stories of under-age exploits; she has, too, ‘grown accustomed’ to ‘a life-size cut-out of’ herself – another of Muldoon’s flexible, doubled identities. At the same time, she holds on to the props of other acts, and of her own youth: ‘I keep that papier-mâché cow’s head packed,’ she quips in closing, ‘just in case vaudeville does come back’ (P, 182).

Notes 1 Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), pp. 54, 76, 90, 112. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. My thanks to John Redmond and to Tim Kendall for their advice and assistance. 2 Paul Muldoon, ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism 48.2 (April 1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 108. 3 Mark Ford, ‘Out of the Blue’, London Review of Books, 10 December 1987, pp. 20–21, at p. 20. 4 Calvin Bedient, ‘The Crabbed Genius of Belfast’, Parnassus, 16.1 (1990), pp. 195–216, at pp. 210–11. Ortega y Gasset wrote that ‘modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world […]. Europe is entering upon an era of youthfulness […]. For a while women and old people will have to cede the rule over life to boys.’ The Dehumanization of Art, trans. Helene Weyl et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 50–52. 5 Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 149; Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revision in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), p. 55; William A. Wilson, ‘Paul Muldoon and the Poetics of Sexual Difference’, Contemporary Literature, 28.3 (Fall 1997), pp. 317–31, at p. 321; Steven Matthews, Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 186. 6 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 4. 7 ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, by Michael Donaghy, Chicago Review, 35.1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 76–85, at p. 77. 8 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 34. 9 ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature, 35.1 (Spring 1994), pp. 1–29, at p. 17. 10 In the joke, the teller asks an old Mexican man if he knew Pancho Villa. The old man answers that he once encountered the revolutionary on a road; Pancho Villa pointed a

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

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 :   gun at him, told him to drop his pants, then forced him to eat the products. The old Mexican then seized the gun and forced Pancho Villa to do likewise. The punch line: ‘You ask me if I knew Pancho Villa? I once had lunch with him!’ Such jokes are hard to find in reference books: one version exists on line at http://www.io.com/~jvaughn/ tmor/lunchpv.htm. Kendall has said that the poem ‘evokes, but never explains or even confirms […] mutilation’ (Paul Muldoon, p. 35). Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 51–55. Paul Muldoon, p. 76. John Masefield, Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 43–44. Paul Muldoon, p. 147. As a boy, Muldoon tried to purchase a bow from Richard Greene (ITV’s Robin Hood) ‘when [Greene/Robin Hood was] done with it’ (‘Getting Round’, p. 113). James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), p. 40. ‘Getting Round’, p. 119. Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, pp. 79–80. Jane Stabler, ‘Alive in the Midst of Questions: A Survey of the Poetry of Paul Muldoon’, Verse, 8.2 (1991), pp. 52–61, at p. 55. Andrew Osborn, ‘Skirmishes on the Border: The Evolution and Function of Paul Muldoon’s Fuzzy Rhyme’, Contemporary Literature, 61.2 (Summer 2000), pp. 323–58, at p. 328. ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 4. Paul Muldoon, p. 232. Irish Poetry, p. 205. Paul Muldoon, ‘Under Saturn’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 February 1981, p. 219. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 179. Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 18. Muldoon wrote: ‘Though my student days coincided with a period of extreme political unrest in Northern Ireland, I myself never took any direct part in political activity […]. I’ve often considered how easily, though, I might have been caught up in the kinds of activity in which a number of my neighbours found themselves involved. As it was I preferred to come to terms with the political instability of Northern Ireland through poetry, often in an oblique, encoded way.’ Paul Muldoon, ‘Chez Moy’ (unpublished), quoted in Kendall, Paul Muldoon, pp. 16–17. Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 21. Ed Cairns, Caught in Crossfire: Children and the Northern Ireland Conflict (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1987), p. 76. The Scrake of Dawn, ed. Paul Muldoon (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1979). Paul Muldoon, ‘From Wow and Flutter’, Harvard Review, 8 (Spring 1995), pp. 23–26. The sequence first appeared in Ireland in My Generation: Rock’n’Roll Remembered, An Imperfect History, ed. Antony Farrell, Vivienne Guinness and Julian Lloyd (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1996), an anthology of Irish writers’ reminiscences about favourite rock records: almost all the other pieces there consist of short, personal prose. Sven Birkerts, ‘About Paul Muldoon’, Ploughshares, 26.1 (Spring 2000), pp. 202–208,

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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at p. 208. On rock music in American poetry, see David Wojahn, Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), pp. 196–214. Heaney used the metaphor of a ‘lever’ to describe Muldoon’s poetry in the 1980s: Muldoon’s ‘lever for the Troubles has never been less than the proverbial forty-foot pole’. Seamus Heaney, ‘The Pre-Natal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry’, Georgia Review, 42.3 (Fall 1988), pp. 465–80, at p. 479. Mistaken Identities, p. 150. Mick Imlah, ‘Abandoned Origins’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 September 1987, p. 946. Paul Muldoon, p. 17. Guinn Batten, ‘“He Could Barely Tell One From the Other”: The Borderline Disorders of Paul Muldoon’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 95.1 (Winter 1996), pp. 171– 204, at p. 188. Vered Amit-Talai, ‘The “Multi” Cultural of Youth’, in Youth Cultures: A CrossCultural Perspective, ed. Vered Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 223–33, at pp. 232, 228. Mistaken Identities, p. 160. For example: in the memoir, Gypsy moves from vaudeville to burlesque in Chicago, and it is her egregious mother (rather than Gypsy herself) who keeps the cow-head packed for ‘the moment vaudeville comes back’. Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), p. 255. For more of Muldoon’s sources, see pp. 253 (horse dung), 257 (Nudina), 296–97 (the Eve costume) and 307 (the Daily Worker).

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 :  

Never Quite Showing his Hand: Robert Frost and Paul Muldoon RACHEL BUXTON

In 1985, the poet Michael Donaghy interviewed Paul Muldoon for the Chicago Review. Towards the end of the interview the two consider why, in recent decades, a number of Irish poets have looked to America for inspiration. Muldoon’s explanation is that ‘in terms of writing it seems to me that a lot of exciting things have happened here’ – and he then declares that ‘One of my favorite poets is Robert Frost’. Donaghy notes that ‘You’ve mentioned Frost in other interviews, and so has Seamus Heaney. In a way it seems to suggest that you two see more going on in Frost than a lot of Americans do.’ Muldoon’s response: ‘Well, I think Frost is partly to blame for that.’1 The connections between Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost are arguably quite obvious, even on a casual reading of the two poets’ work – as Heaney explains in his Nobel lecture, ‘I loved Robert Frost for his farmer’s accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness’,2 and these same qualities are perceptible in Heaney’s own poetry. With Frost and Muldoon, however, the similarities at first seem far less convincing. On the surface, much of Muldoon’s poetry appears to be more cerebral, more obscure, perhaps in some ways more difficult, than either Frost’s or Heaney’s. Yet, despite the fact that the influence has taken a different form, Frost’s impact on Muldoon has been no less considerable than it has been on Heaney. Muldoon was introduced to Frost’s poetry in the early 1960s, at about the age of eleven, by Gerard Quinn, who was his teacher at St Patrick’s College, Armagh. It is evident that Quinn’s reading of Frost profoundly affected Muldoon’s own attitude to the American poet: in the interview with Donaghy he remarks that, when talking about Frost, he is still ‘to some extent reflecting the ideas of my friend Gerard Quinn’.3 Muldoon has written a poem about this early encounter with Frost’s poetry, and about Quinn’s influence on his reading of Frost. The poem, dedicated to Quinn, is entitled ‘Gold’, and it was published in the 1987 collection Meeting the British:

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You loomed like Merlin over the class of 1962, your soutanepocket like the scar of an appendectomy. * Just a year earlier old Frost had swung the lead while hailing Kennedy – A golden age of poetry and power. * Twenty years on you reach into the breast of a wind-cheater for your blue pencil: ‘All cancelled; Nothing gold can stay.’ * Not the dead weight of a grouse flaunted from an open car. Not Soutine’s Hare on a Green Shutter. Not Marilyn.4

The underlying theme of the poem is – not surprisingly, given the title – gold, and more precisely gold being, for Frost, something which is necessarily transitory, even necessarily negative. This is suggested by two of the italicized quotations, which are from two separate Frost poems. The first of these – ‘A golden age / of poetry and power’ – is taken from ‘For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration: Gift Outright of “The Gift Outright”’, which Frost wrote for the inauguration ceremony in January 1961.5 Because of the glare of the sun on the page, however, he was unable to read it out – so he recited just ‘The Gift Outright’ instead.6 In his 1998 Bateson lecture, Muldoon describes ‘For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration’ as ‘famously double-edged’, arguing that gold is ‘a symbol of immanence in Frost’.7 In the Donaghy interview he is more expansive in his explanation of this:

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Frost says that the new administration welcomes in a ‘golden age of poetry and power / of which this noontide’s the beginning hour’. Now noon is the peak of the day. If the beginning is the peak of it, the rest is a kind of decline. Then consider the phrase ‘golden age’. The word ‘gold’ as it occurs throughout Frost is almost inevitably pejorative. ‘Nothing gold can stay’, for example, or ‘We almost ate our peck of gold’. So old Frost was up to his tricks at Kennedy’s Inauguration. That kind of complexity beyond the cracker barrel image is something we are going to have to come to terms with in Frost, if he’s to be properly understood.8

The second quotation in ‘Gold’ is taken from Frost’s poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, and Muldoon uses the phrase to highlight the sense of decline forecast by Frost in his inaugural poem. On one level, then, Muldoon’s poem represents the trickiness and the slipperiness of Frost’s poetry. This reading is borne out by Muldoon’s use of the rather unflattering phrase ‘swinging the lead’ to describe Frost’s recital: the implication is that Frost, both here and in his discussions of the poem in interviews before and after the inaugural,9 is being evasive, not declaring openly his expectations for the presidency. Frost and Kennedy are, however, just two of several figures in the poem: Muldoon depicts their histories as overlapping with both Monroe’s and Quinn’s, as well as with Muldoon’s relationship with Quinn. And, in each instance, gold is symbolic of mutability and decline, as well as of artificiality, perhaps even of deceit. This transience is driven home most forcibly by the fact that many of the figures in the poem died in 1962 and 1963: Monroe was found dead on 5 August 1962, Frost died on 29 January 1963, and Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November that same year – his death figured in the image of the grouse in Muldoon’s poem. Moreover, as Muldoon observes in ‘Yarrow’, it was in 1963 that Plath and MacNeice also ‘kicked the bucket’: alluding to Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice’ and Yeats’s ‘The Cold Heaven’ he writes that That was the year of such frost and snow and burning ice I was kept home from school for almost two weeks […] (P, 360)

In each of these cases, gold is a key distinguishing feature – be it Kennedy’s, Quinn’s or Marilyn’s (artificially coloured) hair, the colour of the grouse, or the carcass of the golden hare in Chaim Soutine’s visceral painting.10 Also key in each case is the connotation, or the actual depiction, of death: ‘nothing gold can stay’.

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This mutability is conveyed by Muldoon in other ways. Words, objects, and people merge and dissolve into each other – soutane into Soutine, Merlin into Marilyn. There’s the substitution of Frost’s swung lead with the blue lead of Quinn’s pencil, and then the alchemical transformation of that, via the ‘tin’ suggested by the last syllable in Soutine’s name, into the gold of the poem – and that gold itself is, of course, portrayed as ephemeral. The ‘blue pencil’ – which was a ‘red pencil’ in an earlier draft, but altered when Quinn demurred at its suggestion of fault-finding11 – accentuates the ‘All cancelled’ in the third section: blue pencils are often used by editors not only to make corrections but also to mark sections to be cut from the final version of a text. The fact that Frost’s ‘For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration’ was not actually read out at Kennedy’s inauguration is perhaps a supreme example of an inadvertent blue-pencilling. Moreover, as Clair Wills observes, ‘blue is a “fugitive” colour, an ink that disappears’, and she traces its appearance and disappearance in several other poems in Meeting the British, including the ‘fugitive, indigo inks’ of ‘Something Else’ and the ‘snow lavender-blue’ of ‘Meeting the British’. Her argument is in part that ‘the play on disappearing ink suggests a kind of invisible writing, whose secret may be unlocked by means of a code, or at least a very good dictionary’.12 ‘Gold’ is undeniably a complex and highly personal poem, one that draws extensively not only on Frost’s poetry and on the myths that have been built up around Kennedy and Monroe, but also on several conversations between Quinn and Muldoon. The poem certainly ‘works’ without the explication of these private, or coded, references – indeed, situating the poem solely within the context of a few conversations between teacher and former student would lead to a single, and unnecessarily narrow, reading of the poem which would fail to do it justice. Yet understanding these references – which a dictionary, however good it may be, will not help the reader to fathom – can provide the reader with another level on which to read the poem. Consider, for example, the reference to the soutane-pocket in the first section of ‘Gold’. Quinn, while a teacher at St Patrick’s, was still a priest, so wore a priest’s cassock, and he explains the image of the pocket as a scar as follows: as a pocket, the pocket is the height of realism: its being like the scar on an appendectomy is brilliant because that particular pocket, with its neat stitching showing, and no flap on it, was located on the right just above the groin. I had forgotten all about it till Paul wrote about it. He asked me in Sligo what it was like for me to be a priest in the early 1960s. I told him it was a

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dreadful thing: it entailed my thinking of myself as having my balls cut off as if they were functionless as an appendix.13

The idea of the soutane-pocket then develops by the end of the poem into Chaim Soutine’s painting of the dead hare. And, just as the soutane translates into the Soutine, so too does the figure of the sorcerer Merlin, the teacher who ‘looms’ over the class of 1962, become transformed, by the end of the poem, into Marilyn. The fluidity and ambiguity of gender suggested by this not only ties in with the other instances of mutability in the poem, but also reiterates the priest’s sense of castration; his concomitant feeling of being ‘snared’ in ‘depersonalizing roles’, as he put it in a letter to Muldoon, is implied by the Soutine carcass.14 Given the parallels drawn between his life and the histories of Kennedy and Monroe, Quinn describes ‘Gold’ as ‘lethal, but beautiful’.15 The theme of cancellation and obliteration within the poem is related to a conversation that he had with Muldoon at Sligo in 1982 – this being the year referred to in the second half of the poem, which is set ‘Twenty years on’ from 1962. Muldoon, writing to Quinn in 1983, with a draft of ‘Gold’ enclosed, explained that the poem ‘came out of some things we talked about [the previous year in Sligo]’.16 As Quinn recalls, in that conversation Muldoon raised the ‘gold’ question with ‘Didn’t you once say that ours was a golden year?’ He was clearly disappointed with my reply, upset at a loss of something important. As we talked he pointed out that Frost had said Kennedy’s presidency would launch a golden age. I pointed out that gold is usually pejorative in Frost, and so is millennium talk. I said there had been some undertow in Frost’s high praise of Kennedy. I quoted Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold’.17

The many portrayals of transience and change in ‘Gold’ therefore underscore what is perhaps its central theme: that of the untrustworthiness, or mutability, both of language and of memory, and of the sense of disillusionment associated with that realization. ‘Gold’ was written some twenty years after Muldoon had first been introduced to Frost’s work, yet it is a good indication of the manner in which Quinn influenced Muldoon’s reading of Frost, and also a pertinent example of the ways in which Muldoon subsequently drew on Frost’s poetry in his own work – especially his tendency to cut-and-paste scraps of Frost into his own poems. Yet, although Muldoon was introduced to Frost’s poetry as a schoolboy, it was not until he started university at Queen’s, in 1969, that he began to read Frost more extensively, and was, as he says in an interview with John Haffenden, truly ‘excited’ by Frost’s work:

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I think the writer who most excited me at university was Robert Frost: an apparently simple, almost naïve, tone of voice and use of language, underneath which all kinds of complex things are happening. […] If you take a poem like Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, the complexity is astounding, and yet it just flies off the page. […] He’s a good man to learn from in that he has no particular nervous tics, no characteristics but the strong, classic, lyric line. But the most important thing for me in Frost was his mischievous, sly, multilayered quality under the surface.18

While at Queen’s, Muldoon was encouraged in his reading of Frost by discussions with Michael Allen: he took Allen’s American literature course, and wrote about Frost in his final year.19 His interest in Frost was reinforced through conversations with Gerard Quinn, who was working on his MA thesis on Frost and Bergson in the early 1970s.20 The ‘mischievous, sly, multi-layered quality’ Muldoon perceives under the ‘strong, classic, lyric line’ in Frost, and which Quinn first alerted him to, has exerted a considerable influence on his own poetry. Equally significant for the then unpublished poet, however, was the fact that Frost had ‘no particular nervous tics’. Muldoon has reiterated the importance of this in another interview, affirming that Frost was both ‘a great influence’ and ‘a marvellous model for a writer because he has no quirks of style. He has just this plain, very simple, style.’21 This ‘great influence’ is quite evident in a number of Muldoon’s early poems. For example, Frost’s ‘A Hillside Thaw’ is invoked in the closing lines of an early, uncollected poem, ‘January’, although Muldoon inverts Frost’s simile: where Frost writes of the ‘hillside on the day the sun lets go / Ten million silver lizards out of snow!’, Muldoon describes how In Norway The lemmings like molten snow Stream from the mountainsides.22

Or again, in a poem also written in the late 1960s, allusions to Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Acquainted with the Night’ and ‘Choose Something Like a Star’ are obvious, notwithstanding the substitution of the word ‘something’ with ‘very’ in the fifth stanza: Mileages prove nothing looking back. My saying the distance I have travelled Is saying how far I have survived. Mileages tell nothing of the future.

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My saying the distance I hope to travel Is saying how long I hope to live. Mileages are something of the mind. My going the strange road takes so long Where returning the road is shorter. Yet telling how far is a kind of need. I need to be sure of how far you are away Where you and I appear not to move. very I think you must be something like a star is Whose light has been scattered by my atmosphere. You may be a thousand years distant. Your light may take so long to travel That it is no longer what you want to say. If you are dead I need to know how long.23

This poem was never published. It does, however, indicate the way in which Muldoon used Frost’s poetry as a model in the early stages of his writing career, and the impact clearly continued to be felt through his first few collections. As Tim Kendall observes: Frost is almost inescapable throughout New Weather […]. The volume’s diction and even its poetic landscape are ghosted by Frost. Pools, rivers, plains, woods, fences and hedges, meadows, mountains – individually, none of these backdrops is particularly Frostian, but taken together, as they are in New Weather, Frost’s influence is obvious.24

If readers are actually looking for Frostian influence in the early Muldoon they will discover it everywhere; otherwise the presence is relatively invisible. Yet if, as Kendall notes, only one reviewer of Muldoon’s first collection commented upon the Frost connection,25 reviewers of subsequent volumes were a little more perceptive. Anne Stevenson, reviewing Mules, writes that ‘Muldoon resembles a sleeker, Irish Robert Frost. His frame of reference is earthy, sly, obliquely religious and calculated to astonish as much as to please.’ She returns to this relationship a little later, observing that ‘Like Frost, Muldoon is a fine dramatic poet’. Knute Skinner, reviewing the same collection, stresses Muldoon’s ‘Frost-like ability to compress the chief essentials of a fiction into a short narrative poem, as he does in “The Country Club”’, and Andrew Motion, in a

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review of Why Brownlee Left, remarks that at his best Muldoon ‘often writes like a miniaturised Robert Frost’.26 There are, clearly, some basic similarities between Muldoon’s and Heaney’s attraction to Frost. These are most obviously the bucolic backdrop to much of Frost’s poetry, and Frost’s use of dialogue, of the dramatic mode. Yet, whereas Heaney has often appeared to turn to Frost as a validating model, Muldoon seems to be more genuinely excited by what he perceives to be happening both on and beneath the surface of Frost’s poetry. From the outset, Muldoon has been drawn to the unpredictability, the playful discrepancy between surface and subterranean in Frost’s poetry. As he puts it in ‘The Country Club’ – quoting Frost’s ‘The Mountain’ – ‘“But all the fun’s in how you say a thing”’ (P, 64).27 The implication, of course, is that things may not be quite what they seem, that what is said could be interpreted in a number of ways. This idea that a number of alternative readings, quite possibly at odds with one another, might be concealed within a single poem is intertwined with suggestions of alternative realities, of paths not taken but nevertheless hinted at. This same fascination with a poem’s undercurrents, with its refusal to be tied down to a single, unambiguous interpretation, is also closely related to Muldoon’s stated ‘strong sense’ that ‘anything that smacks of pronouncement is necessarily problematical. This includes the pronouncement I’m even now making.’28 Looking through the drafts of Muldoon’s poetry, which are held at the Woodruff Library at Emory University, one can perceive the ways in which Muldoon has drawn on Frost’s legacy in his writing, most often in terms of emulating Frost’s complicating undertow. It can be seen how he has, at times, written Frost into his poetry – how, for example, ‘The Country Club’ began life with no references to Frost, these only being spliced in several versions later. It is also possible to trace how Muldoon has, in some cases, written the Frostian influence out of the poetry. One poem, for instance, was evidently worked on over several years, then finally published as ‘Come Into My Parlour’ in the 1980 collection Why Brownlee Left. In the earliest draft catalogued at Emory, and quoted below, this is full of Frostian postures and turns of phrase, but in subsequent drafts these are written out until, in the final poem, the reader would not necessarily consider it a particularly Frostian poem unless he or she was aware of the preceding versions. This is an example of Muldoon using Frost as ‘a good man to learn from’ – that Frost whom he describes as one whose ‘line’, whose ‘tone of voice’, was ‘so much a bare canvas’:29

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 :   The Digger looked right through me That morning in the graveyard. He was cutting an uneven swathe From this half-acre of common He held in trust for the parish. Few graves were named or numbered For most were family plots. If the family happened to lose track The Digger knew which was which And what was what, Where among the heights and hollows Were the Quinns and the O’Briens.

suppose

‘I’ve been at the burying Of so many of the Cromwell McAuleys I guess they must be stacked As high as dinner-plates. Mind you, this ground’s so wet They’re away again like snow off a ditch. They, and the best of good timber, Have perished, perished, They have come into their kingdom.’ The Digger leaned back on his scythe [And stroked his thin gray beard] And started back to mow.30

The echoes here of Frost – particularly the Frost of North of Boston and Mountain Interval – are immediately apparent. This is in part due to the subject matter: note the swathes, the snow, the scythe, the starting back to mow; note also the North of Boston-type conversation, complete with contemplative ‘I suppose’ and ‘Mind you’. Arguably the poem contains allusions to a number of specific Frost poems as well: the melting snow recalls ‘A Hillside Thaw’ and the perishing wood ‘The Wood-Pile’; more obviously the McAuleys ‘stacked / As high as dinner-plates’ share a common ancestor in the skeleton from Frost’s ‘The Witch of Coös’ which ‘carried itself like a pile of dishes’.31 Muldoon, in writing and rewriting this poem, is self-conscious regarding Frost’s influence: there is a degree of knowingness to it as he plays with the idea of that influence on a number of levels. Muldoon has long been attracted to the combination of surface simplicity and inner complexity

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that he apprehends in Frost and, although he seldom achieves a comparably accessible surface in his own work, he does duplicate Frost’s ambiguities and hidden depths. He contemplates this in the interview with Donaghy, arguing that Frost’s great virtue is that ‘he’s accessible, but sometimes, if you look twice, there’s a complete undercutting of what he seems to be saying. I find that quite interesting, and it’s something that I try to do myself. I try for a sub-text which is quite often totally at variance with the main text.’32 In Hay’s ‘They that Wash on Thursday’ Muldoon claims to have become proficient in writing such verse: So I learned first hand to deal in the off-, the under-, the sleight-of-hand, writing now in that great, open hand yet never quite showing my hand. (P, 442)

Critics have long acknowledged that Frost delighted in never quite showing his hand, and that as a consequence his verse can be read on a number of levels. The Georgian poet Wilfrid Gibson, reviewing North of Boston back in 1914, pointed out that, to the unsophisticated reader, ‘it may seem to be an unsophisticated production, the work of a naïve and unsophisticated mind’, and that even the ‘innocent reviewer’ may mistake Frost’s ‘assured art for artlessness’. Nevertheless, of the four poets he was reviewing, Frost was ‘certainly the most sophisticated’.33 W.H. Auden, writing several decades later, argues this same point: ‘I cannot think of any other modern poet, except Cavafy, who uses language more simply’, he declares. Yet, he continues, ‘like all manners it is calculated, more sophisticated than most’.34 In ‘Come into My Parlour’, one can see the way in which Frost’s complexity, his sense of disorder and of disturbance within order, has been an influence on Muldoon’s poetry. In the published version, the six quatrains are replaced with four eight- to eleven-line stanzas, with the final stanza being largely new material, introducing the graves of Muldoon’s own parents. The lines of speech remain almost identical, but the scythe has been replaced with a shovel, and there is no explicit reference to that unmistakably Frostian activity of mowing: When someone died, for miles around, You were sure to find Coulter In the graveyard at Collegelands With his spade and navvy’s shovel. Once a plane broke up in mid-air

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And he collected the bits and pieces, A pocket-watch, a monocle, As if all should come as second nature To one who has strayed no farther Than a ripple from its stone. What Coulter took as his text Was this bumpy half-acre of common. Few graves were named or numbered For most were family plots. If the family had itself lost track He knew exactly which was which And what was what, Where among the heights and hollows Were the Quinns, and the O’Briens. ‘I’ve been at the burying Of so many of the Souper McAuleys I declare they must be stacked As high as dinner-plates. Mind you, this ground’s so wet They’re away again like snow off a ditch. Them, and the best of good timber Are come into the kingdom.’ And I saw over his tilting shoulder The grave of my mother, My father’s grave, and his father’s; The slightly different level Of the next field, and the next; Each small, one-sided collision Where a neighbour had met his future. Here an O’Hara, there a Quinn, The wreckage of bath-tubs and bedsteads, Of couches and mangles, That was scattered for miles around. (P, 93)

One of the principal themes, both in the draft of the poem and in the published version, is that of genealogy. The lives and deaths of family members are marked by the plots at the Collegelands graveyard, and impressed in the mind of the gravedigger who ‘knew which was which / And what was what’. The poem might be considered a forerunner of Meeting the British’s ‘The Coney’, an elegy which focuses on the relationship between father and son, and revolves in part around images of

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mowing and scythes (P, 152–53).35 The more obvious connection, however, is with Heaney’s poem ‘Digging’, from Death of a Naturalist, which centres both on the father–son relationship, and on the idea of excavation, of digging through the layers of Irish cultural, political and literary subsoil in search of roots, of identity. In Muldoon’s poem, however, the idea of burial, or concealment, is just as important as, if not more significant than, the Heaneyesque excavation. These twinned ideas of genealogy and of concealment can be held quite profitably alongside the fact that there are a number of allusions to Heaney, and more especially to Frost, in the poem. In the published version, the graveyard is described as the Digger’s ‘text’, and this term is crucial. Muldoon recalls in his inaugural Oxford lecture that Frost himself argued that a poem ‘is best read in the light of all other poems ever written’: We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold themselves apart in their places as the stars do.36

This is, of course, aligned with the mainstream critical position that the very act of reading is an entering into a network of texts. So we have Kristeva’s assertion that ‘in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another’.37 Or again there is Barthes’ reminder that the word ‘text’ originally meant ‘a tissue, a woven fabric’,38 and that the ‘idea of the text, and thus of intertextuality, depends […] on this figure of the web, the weave, the garment (text) woven from the threads of the “already written” and the “already read”’.39 In Muldoon’s poem the generic text is figured both as web and as field, or graveyard, in which are buried fragments of other poems, other texts, some of which are identifiable, others not. In one interpretation of this poem, Muldoon can be seen to be playing with the ideas of intertextuality and poetic influence, and arguably with the influence of Frost in particular: the poem, which contains scraps of Frost’s poetry, acts both as testament to his legacy and as an enactment of the encoding of that influence. Perhaps this is all a little ‘extravagant’, a little ‘far-fetched’, to use two of Frost’s favourite adjectives. Yet Muldoon, in lectures, often refers to the concepts of ‘conglomewriting’ and ‘cryptocurrents’,40 and the word ‘cryptic’, of course, means not only hidden or obscured, but also drawn from the crypt, from below the surface, from the

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place of burial. It is also worth bearing in mind a letter that Quinn wrote to Muldoon in 1983, in which he recalls a conversation between the two of them, noting that ‘I appreciated your remark about a “crypt-parallel” between Frost and yourself’.41 In the lecture on Frost’s ‘The Mountain’ which he delivered in May 2000, Muldoon argued that [it’s] precisely because of his appetite, and aptitude, for a readily available surface, a ‘level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above,’ that Frost’s depth and durability tend to be ‘missed’. In my discussion of this poem, I’ll want not ‘to make the mistake that Pound makes’ and overlook the fact that Frost is ‘not undesigning,’ that he is, in the phrase he uses in ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’, ‘the lurking frost in the earth beneath’.42

The Frostian playful disorder beneath the surface, much like the frost (pun doubtless intended) beneath the earth in Frost’s poem, is very much evident in Muldoon’s ‘Come into My Parlour’. Not only are there Frost poems hiding within it, but, in the published version, the Digger has been given a name, ‘Coulter’, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, literally means ‘a vertical cutting blade’. The original scythe still makes an appearance, therefore, albeit in an oblique manner – a Frostian, or Muldoonesque, ‘crypto-current’, one might say. The consequence is a poem which, somewhat paradoxically, by so concealing, or veiling, the obvious initial Frostian influence, is transformed into a poem which, in its very playfulness, its layerings, its allusiveness, becomes in another way even more Frostian. Enacted through the drafts, the rehearsals, of this poem is a process of concealment, the ‘en-crypt-ion’ of Frost’s influence. Then presented, in the final, published poem, is a statement of that process and of the relationship between the two poets. The critical position suggested by this reading of the poem is at a remove from that of Barthes and Kristeva in one crucial regard: namely that presiding over the graveyard is the figure of the Digger. In the early draft of the poem he can be equated quite easily with Death, leaning on his scythe and overseeing his ‘kingdom’. In the final version the analogy between the Digger and Death can still be made: the title, ‘Come into My Parlour’, is drawn from the nursery rhyme ‘The Spider and the Fly’ in which the spider asks the fly, ‘“Will you walk into my parlour?”’ (the fly quite sensibly points out that ‘“whoever goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again”’). Yet, just as the final poem is far more complex than the early draft, so too is the gravedigger in the final version a far more complex figure than is his earlier incarnation. It is not possible to draw a direct and uncomplicated analogy between poet (be that Frost or Muldoon)

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and Coulter; nevertheless he can, arguably, be equated both with the figure of the poet burying his poetic predecessors, and with the reader, or critic, or poet, who interacts with and might act as guide to that poem. At the risk of sounding too psychoanalytical, then, it could be argued that this poem is questioning the extent to which the enterprise of poetry involves, on one level, a burying of poetic forebears. This is, of course, a Bloomian stance, and indeed Neil Corcoran has suggested not only that Bloom’s theory of influence can be applied to the relationship between Heaney and Muldoon, but also that ‘if you were wholeheartedly to relate Bloom to Heaney and Muldoon you might discover a mutual precursor in Robert Frost’. He goes on to quote Muldoon’s approval of Bloom: ‘What Bloom said about the anxiety of influence makes sense’.43 The poem goes beyond this, however, in also suggesting that Coulter, as poet who knows ‘exactly which was which / And what was what’, might have a role not only as burier, but also as a guide, of sorts, to ‘his text’. Such a reading inevitably invites questions about the perceived relationship between poet and reader, and of the role of the text within this. In his exploration of this relationship, Wolfgang Iser quotes Sterne’s declaration, in Tristram Shandy, that ‘no author, who understands the just bounds of decorum and breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve the matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself’.44 Yet this stance still presumes that the author has a role to play in the process of interpretation, retaining a level of control over what the reader might think or understand. Muldoon, adopting a similar position in his Bateson lecture, uses the cryptic complexity and exclusivity of Frost’s poetry as a stick with which to beat those theorists – specifically Barthes and Derrida – who argue for the death of the author: On the one hand I’m arguing for the supremacy of ‘unknowing’, for the Keatsian model of poet as conduit, channel […]. On the other I’m arguing for the almost total ‘knowing’ of Robert Frost, a ‘knowing’ which I’ve been at pains to substantiate. The point to which I’ve been getting round is that it’s the poet’s job to take into account, as best he or she is able, all possible readings of the poem. […] Let Barthes claim that there is no ‘father-author’. Let Derrida proclaim against ‘phallogocentrism’. Let them try to get round the ungetroundable fact that the poet is the first person to read or, more importantly, to be read by, the poem. […] What must be determined is the intent of the poem. For it is the poem […] that ‘creates the role’ of that first reader, and all subsequent readings must take that into account.45

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The position here espoused, which emphasizes the intent of the text over all else, is analogous to Eco’s, who argues that although the intention of the work (intentio operis) cannot be reduced to the pre-textual intention of the author (intentio auctoris), it is nevertheless a constraint upon the free play of the reader’s intention (intentio lectoris).46 The notion that the reader’s free play might be subject to constraint, and moreover that the author, as first reader, might have a role to play in predicting and determining subsequent interpretation, is what sets Muldoon’s critical stance apart from that of Barthes and Derrida. Muldoon has, for example, stated that ‘the writer should be alert to all these possible readings. And alert to the curtailing of readings that are not productive. And I don’t care what people say, it’s the writer who does that. […] What it’s about is discovering the extent of limits, the confinement, the controlling of readings, of possible readings.’47 The conclusions that Muldoon reaches about this interplay between poet, poem and reader – between site of production and site of consumption – are allied with his reading of Frost’s poetry. In one interview he discusses his poem ‘Yarrow’, which he compares to Frost’s ‘Directive’.48 He admits that ‘Certainly “Yarrow” is complicated in one sense, but in another way it’s actually a very simple poem. One has to learn to read these poems, just as one has to learn to read a three-line, little imagist poem, just as the writer had to learn to write it.’ ‘You mean that you have, in a sense, moved the goalposts,’ responds the interviewer, ‘educating the reader as you went along’ – and Muldoon answers ‘Sure. That sounds very arrogant, but surely it is also very common. I don’t want to sound self-regarding about it. Forget about me. The poems are interested in changing the shape of things. Whether they’re little poems or longer poems they all have that interest in common.’49 In this light, one can view the poet as a teacher or mentor, educating the reader in the ways of reading, so that those who take the trouble to follow will find themselves included in the elect few who discover a ‘salvation’ of sorts through poetry – who might, as Coulter puts it, ‘come into the kingdom’, although the clichéd nature of this statement does indicate a degree of irony on the poet’s part. In this sense, the complexity of the poem in part puts the onus back on the reader. It is, of course, only a short step from this position to the one articulated in the closing lines of Frost’s ‘Directive’: I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail

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Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. […] Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.50

Whereas Heaney interprets this primarily as meaning that poetry can lead the reader to a place of potential resolution – that, through poetry, oppositions, both political and poetic, can be reconciled, and conflict in part assuaged51 – Muldoon is drawn to the complex, exclusive nature of the poem, and to the somewhat disturbing challenge that this poses to the reader. For one could read the end of ‘Directive’, as Charles Berger does, as a slightly arrogant ‘courting of the fit audience’: the poet is intentionally alienating large numbers of his readers.52 Frost himself unapologetically describes the stance as one that is ‘[t]horoughly undemocratic, very superior’.53 And it must be conceded that Muldoon has at times been vulnerable to similar accusations of a cryptic and alienating style, his verse viewed as little more than an engaging and diverting performance staged for the exclusive benefit of an élite scholarly audience.54 Yet, whatever the reader’s opinion of Muldoon’s ‘nonchalant virtuosity’55 – and regardless of whether one subscribes to the personality-driven theories of Harold Bloom, to poststructuralist assertions that the author has no responsibility for multiple textual meanings, or stakes out a position aligned more with Iser or Eco – it is apparent that Frost’s poetry has indeed had a significant impact on Muldoon, and that this influence has at times taken the form of a mischievousness and a complexity that demands a degree of effort on the part of the reader. Clearly, what is most crucial is for the reader ‘to get among the poems where they hold themselves apart in their places as the stars do’,56 for only then will Frost’s and Muldoon’s poetry yield up its cryptic depths.

Notes 1 ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, by Michael Donaghy, Chicago Review, 35.1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 76–85, at p. 84. 2 Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1995), p. 12. 3 Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, p. 84. 4 Paul Muldoon, ‘Gold’, in Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 154. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 5 Robert Frost, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp. 435–37.

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 :  

6 ‘The Gift, Such as This Land Will Become’, Boston Herald, 21 January 1961, p. 7. 7 Paul Muldoon, F.W. Bateson Memorial Lecture, ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism, 48.2 (1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 117. 8 Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, p. 84. Donaghy evidently misheard Muldoon’s reference to the line in Frost’s poem ‘A Peck of Gold’ which reads ‘“We all must eat our peck of gold”’. See Frost, Collected Poems, p. 228. 9 See, for example, ‘Poetry, Politics Blend at Inaugural Tomorrow’, Boston Globe, 19 January 1961, p. 7; Beryl Pfizer, ‘Robert Frost Sees Poetry and Power both Forthcoming in the New Age’, Today, with Dave Garroway, WNBC-TV, 23 January 1961, Frost Papers, Starr Library, Middlebury College; Stuart Udall, ‘Frost’s “Unique Gift Outright”’, New York Times Magazine, 26 March 1961, pp. 12, 98. 10 Norman L. Kleebatt and Kenneth E. Silver, eds., The Paintings of Chaim Soutine (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1998), p. 192 (Plate 32). ‘Hare on a Green Shutter’ was painted c. 1925–26. 11 Gerard Quinn, letter to the author, 2 June 2001. 12 Clair Wills, ‘The Lie of the Land: Language, Imperialism and Trade in Paul Muldoon’s Meeting the British’, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran (Bridgend, Seren, 1992), pp. 123–49, at pp. 137, 145. 13 Quinn, letter to the author, 2 June 2001. 14 Gerard Quinn, letter to Paul Muldoon, 9 November 1983. Courtesy of Gerard Quinn. 15 Quinn, letter to the author, 2 June 2001. (In response to his querying with Muldoon this apparent expectation that he ‘die suddenly’, Muldoon inscribed Quinn’s copy of Meeting the British with the words – which allude to the Frost poem – ‘For Gerard and what stays’.) 16 Paul Muldoon, letter to Gerard Quinn, 27 October 1983. Courtesy of Gerard Quinn. 17 Quinn, letter to the author, 2 June 2001. Writing to Muldoon a year after the exchange in Sligo, Quinn explained a little more fully his recollection of the conversation: ‘I was confused, and then felt guilty when a moment later I suspected I’d been twotiming and had called more than one class in Armagh golden’. See Quinn, letter to Paul Muldoon, 9 November 1983. 18 John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 133–34. 19 Michael Allen, letters to the author, 7 April 1999 and 31 October 2001. 20 Quinn, letter to the author, 2 June 2001. 21 Siobhan McSweeney, unpublished interview with Paul Muldoon, January 1981. Paul Muldoon Papers, Special Collections Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Collection 784; Box Series 4; Folder OP148. 22 Frost, Collected Poems, pp. 218–19; Paul Muldoon, ‘January’, Honest Ulsterman, 13 (May 1969), p. 35. 23 Paul Muldoon, ‘Mileages’, typed manuscript, Paul Muldoon Papers, Special Collections Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Typed in black, apart from the strikethroughs and the words ‘very’ and ‘is’ which are written by hand in black ink. Collection 784; Box 9; Folder 75. 24 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 28.

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25 Roger Conover, review of New Weather, by Paul Muldoon, Eire-Ireland, 10.2 (Summer 1975), pp. 127–33. 26 Anne Stevenson, ‘Snaffling and Curbing’, review of eleven collections including Mules, by Paul Muldoon, Listener, 13 October 1977, p. 487; Knute Skinner, review of four collections including Mules, by Paul Muldoon, Irish Press, 25 August 1977, p. 353; Andrew Motion, review of Why Brownlee Left, by Paul Muldoon, New Statesman, 26 September 1980, p. 22. 27 Citing Frost, Collected Poems, pp. 45–49. 28 Paul Muldoon, Oxford Inaugural Lecture, ‘The End of the Poem: “All Souls’ Night” by W.B. Yeats’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6. 29 Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 134. 30 Paul Muldoon, untitled, typed manuscript, Paul Muldoon Papers, Special Collections Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Typed in black, apart from the strikethroughs, the bracketing and the word ‘suppose’, which are by hand in black ink. Collection 784; Box 9; Folder 14. 31 Frost, Collected Poems, pp. 218–19, 100–101, 188. 32 Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, p. 84. This accords with Muldoon’s slightly facetious contention that ‘we mustn’t take anything at face value, not even the man who is presenting things at face value’(Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 135). 33 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, ‘Simplicity and Sophistication’, review of North of Boston, by Robert Frost, Bookman (July 1914), p. 183. 34 W.H. Auden, Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), pp. 151, 152. 35 ‘The Coney’ draws upon Muldoon’s poems ‘Solitary’ and ‘The Sharping Stone’. These can be found, respectively, in Irish Press, 21 June 1969, p. 12, and the early, unpublished collection Lines for the Girl Who Ate Apples, typed manuscript, Paul Muldoon Papers, Special Collections Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Collection 784; Box 9; Folder 59. 36 Muldoon, ‘End of the Poem’, p. 2; citing Frost, Collected Poems, p. 815, originally in the preface to Robert Frost, Aforesaid (New York: Holt, 1954). 37 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 36. 38 Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 159. 39 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 6. 40 See, for example, Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56, 58; ‘End of the Poem’, pp. 2, 24. 41 Quinn, letter to Paul Muldoon, 9 November 1983. 42 Paul Muldoon, Oxford Lecture, ‘“The Mountain” by Robert Frost’, 2 May 2000; subsequently published in American Poetry Review, 30.1 (January–February 2001), pp. 41–46, at p. 42; citing Frost, Collected Poems, p. 252. 43 Neil Corcoran, ‘“A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59.3 (Spring 1998), pp. 559–80, at pp. 573–74; citing ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature, 35.1 (Spring 1994), pp. 1–29, at p. 16. 44 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), p. 212, quoting Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (London: Collins, 1955), p. 79.

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45 ‘Getting Round’, pp. 119–20. This is similar to the stance he took back in 1972, when he declared that ‘I can only approach the poem as another reader, hoping that it communicates even if it is never fully understood’ (Paul Muldoon, 1972 introduction to ‘The Iron Island’, 1967, typed manuscript, Paul Muldoon Papers, Special Collections Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. Collection 784; Box 8; Folder 15). 46 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 64–66. 47 Clair Wills, personal interview with Paul Muldoon, June 1987, quoted in ‘Lie of the Land’, pp. 124–25. 48 ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 10. 49 Redmond, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 7. 50 Frost, Collected Poems, pp. 341–42. 51 Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), pp. xiv–xvi. 52 Charles Berger, ‘Echoing Eden: Frost and Origins’, in Modern Critical Views: Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 147–65, at p. 164. 53 Frost, Collected Poems, p. 910, from ‘On Extravagance: A Talk’. 54 For example, see John Carey, ‘The Stain of Words’, review of The Haw Lantern, by Seamus Heaney, and Meeting the British, by Paul Muldoon, Sunday Times, 21 June 1987, p. 56. See also Helen Vendler, ‘Anglo-Celtic Attitudes’, New York Review of Books, 6 November 1997, pp. 58–59; Peter Porter, ‘Public and Private in Contemporary British Poetry’, in New Writing, 5, ed. Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (London: Vintage, 1996) pp. 269–84, at pp. 277–78; Ian Duhig, ‘Annals Mirabilis’, review of The Annals of Chile, by Paul Muldoon, Fortnight, 331 (September 1994), p. 47. 55 Alan Jenkins, Paul Muldoon (London: Book Trust, 1988), n.p. 56 Muldoon, ‘End of the Poem’, p. 2; citing Frost, Collected Poems, p. 815.

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For Father Read Mother: Muldoon’s Antecedents FRAN BREARTON

‘Should they not have the best of both worlds?’1

‘A historical dictionary should always be within a poet’s reach: preferably the big Oxford English Dictionary – the two-volume edition is insufficient’; ‘a single “trip” under psilocybin, the toxic derivation of a Mexican mushroom, can […] be most informative. It […] reveals in pictorial imagery the hidden terrors and aspirations of the […] mind’; ‘it is all done with mirrors […]. The intricate pattern [is made by] interlinked images of several round mirrors set at different angles to one another […]. This is a close enough metaphor for Poetry’; ‘True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity.’2 Such comments are irresistibly evocative of Muldoon’s own poetic practice, with its lexicographical obsessions, dabbling in symbolic and actual (sometimes magic) mushrooms, fascination with circular patterning – to the extent that it seems as if Muldoon is trying to draw his entire oeuvre, though concentric circles, into one Great Wheel3 – and habitual modus operandi in which he leaps, seemingly arbitrarily, from ‘something else’ to ‘something else again’. But they belong, of course, not to the current Oxford Professor of Poetry, rather to one of his predecessors in that role in the early 1960s, Robert Graves. Graves, whose poetry has always appeared reassuringly straightforward, might seem an unlikely precursor for the mythological and lexicographical challenge posed by Muldoon’s work. But the unlikely precursor, the one who generally goes unmentioned by Muldoon, may – in this instance as in others – prove more likely in the end, on the basis not so much of what Muldoon professes in interviews, but of what he practises in poetry. In ‘Errata’, the poet suggests one way to ‘read’ the Muldoon oeuvre: For ‘Antrim’ read ‘Armagh’. For ‘mother’ read ‘other’.

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For ‘harm’ read ‘farm’. For ‘feather’ read ‘father’. (P, 445)

The poem is an invitation to dwell, through rhyme, in more than one place at the same time (or in the same place twice). It is also an invitation to consider that perhaps what isn’t there is there after all. The process of substitution here is a process of endless deferral, one which refuses to circumscribe, and in a sense denies responsibility for, meaning, and which disallows any easy assumption that what Muldoon says can ever be trusted. Similarly, Muldoon’s citations of influence themselves tend to come in the form of an unstoppable list, a chain of more-than-coincidences, often with Heaney at its head (‘inspiration […] and […] challenge’), and a refusal to close the list at the tail (‘I like a great number of poems by a great number of people’; ‘once I start naming names I don’t want to leave people out’4). To suggest that Graves is one of the people Muldoon has in fact left out is something of a leap in the dark. But Graves’s importance, in different ways, to Heaney, Longley and Mahon – and more obviously to John Montague – places him, for Muldoon, as an invisible presence behind the immediate precursors: Graves may thus be seen in terms of affinity if not of influence. For those earlier poets too, ‘for Graves read Yeats’ is one way of coping with twentieth-century Irish poetry’s predicament in relation to its ‘father-figure’. The link between Graves and Muldoon, in other words, need not end with mushrooms and dictionaries. Muldoon’s literary criticism, notably in To Ireland, I, bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘proleptic or analeptic method of thought’ expounded by Graves in The White Goddess – ‘the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning […] [or] the recovery of lost events by the same suspension’5 – a method which, as Graves himself notes, tends to confound orthodox scholars, but is also bound up with the processes of memory in poetry. Both transform etymological quests into literary interpretive strategies; both work to some extent on the principle that arbitrary connections (in Muldoon’s case worked out through an alphabetized sequence) yield a form of narrative coherence. Graves as, in Fussell’s phrase, the ‘manic illusionist […] gaily constructing flamboyant fictional anthropology, re-writing ancient “history”, flourishing erroneous or irrelevant [I would add irreverent] etymology’6 is not as far removed as a critic from his Oxford successor as their obvious divergence in terms of poetic styles might imply. Shaman or trickster figures both might be, but Graves is invoked here

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primarily because his preoccupation with mythological origins in The White Goddess merges almost imperceptibly with anxiety of influence, and with autobiographical concerns. The White Goddess, as an apology for poetry, a work of literary criticism, and a disguised autobiography, offers one interpretative model for reading Muldoon. Graves’s anxiety plays itself out through the 1950s and 1960s in terms that shed light on Muldoon’s own preoccupation with origins – in which the poetic and the familial are habitually interlinked – and on his mythicization of those origins through the 1970s and 1980s, a process which to some extent culminates in the paradoxical failure and resolution of his 1994 collection The Annals of Chile. As Clair Wills notes, Muldoon’s exploration of biological antecedents may at times overlap with his exploration of literary antecedents.7 But one might also take this further and suggest that the two in fact always exist in Muldoon’s work in a complex symbiotic relationship in which myth plays a vital connecting role.8 For mother read muse, or mythological figure (‘the muse’, as Graves writes, ‘is the perpetual other woman’); for mother read beyond the merely autobiographical into ‘other’ possibilities – not least of which is the (neglected) feminine precursor; for mother read the often remote and unsympathetic character of Brigid Regan as she appears in Muldoon’s work. Graves’s The White Goddess is a ‘difficult’ book, as difficult in its own way as some of Muldoon’s long narrative poems. It is also the psychoanalyst’s gift, articulating as it does the classic Oedipal struggle, in which the aspiring poet-king must do battle with and defeat the goddess’s existing Hercules or spouse in order to take his own place by her side. The defeated Hercules, who is both self and other, is ‘flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar-stone’.9 The terms may certainly be more expressive – and, as always, slightly tongue-in-cheek – but the point is also Harold Bloom’s: the ‘swerve’ and the creative misreading are required for the strong poet to displace his precursor. Lest Graves appear to be merely delineating an ancient myth, he claims the process as essential for the contemporary poet: ‘No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers […] with [their] monotonous chant of: “Kill, kill, kill”’.10 This is, in effect, anxiety of influence in mythical freefall, and its terms do partly explain why Bloom’s later, restrained explication of the process has always proved more academically palatable than Graves’s lopped oak fetish. But those terms are also indicative of Graves’s anxieties about his

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own father, who becomes a threefold figure: Laius; the despised symbol of an English society and tradition that has been left behind; and the representative Irish Revival literary father-figure (an inferior version of Yeats) that Graves is anxious – and in this instance able – to overcome. Nevertheless, this interpretation of the text shows only one side of the contradiction at its heart. The White Goddess is full to overflowing with masculine anxiety, masculine self-indulgence and a concern with the male poetic line of inheritance; but it simultaneously runs a framing counterargument that argues for recognition and reinstatement of the ‘Mothergoddess’ (herself threefold – bride, mother and layer-out) who has been displaced by ‘the usurping Father-god’.11 Its underlying anxieties thus become subsumed in the profession of belief in that matriarchal myth of origins, in the almost total absorption of autobiographical and cultural contexts into a mythical pattern, one which apparently reconciles contradiction by validating patriarchal lineage within a matriarchal framework. Myth mediates between seemingly irreconcilable opposites, allows the poet to hold on to both at once. Muldoon, more than Graves, has habitually been read in terms of father-figure anxieties. Some of those terms were established by Edna Longley’s 1985 essay, ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’, in which she argues that the trope of fathers in Northern Irish writing provides a means of ‘getting at the various configurations the past assumes’ in the writer’s imagination and as a means of locating the individual in history. ‘Fathers in Northern Irish literature,’ she goes on to say, ‘calibrate tradition and transition, small shifts in the land of “Not an Inch”’.12 For Muldoon, the frequent, apparently autobiographical poems about his father serve some of those purposes. His father becomes both a symbol of the past and a trustworthy starting point for the leap into an unknown future. Patrick Muldoon stands as representative of a particular way of life – not the academic or intellectual life, but a more instinctive rural stability: mushrooms, but not magic mushrooms. The language in which he is described is also evocative of Heaney’s own apparently instinctual and ‘natural’ aesthetic, with its emphasis on continuity. In the wake of much of the critical work on Muldoon’s poetry from the last ten to fifteen years, it is now a commonplace to suggest that Muldoon’s ‘father’, as he appears in the poetry, can sometimes slide in Heaney’s own ‘father’, or into Heaney himself as poetic father-figure (as he can also, in more politicized readings, become a symbolic representative of history, cultural tradition or the nation). That conflation is exemplified in ‘Gathering Mushrooms’:

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He’ll glance back from under his peaked cap without breaking rhythm: his coaxing a mushroom—a flat or a cup— the nick against his right thumb; the bucket then, the punnet to left or right, and so on and so forth till kingdom come. (P, 106)

From Muldoon’s father, to Heaney’s father from ‘Digging’, to Heaney himself, who habitually asks to be read in terms of such ‘natural’ activities, is an easy transition. The next transition implicit in this – to Muldoon himself – is the one the poem ruptures: Muldoon does, of course, literally break rhythm (and break ranks) here, refusing poetic or familial continuity and inheritance and the patriarchal line (a refusal that spills over more overtly into the political sphere with such poems as ‘Anseo’). Since the language of ‘Digging’ is patently ludicrous when applied here to mushroom-gathering, Muldoon’s poetry, by implication, will also refuse to fit into the established moulds, the existing poetic discourse. Muldoon, in effect, demands a new critical framework. Nevertheless, the appeal, critically, of the Heaney/Muldoon (father/ son) connection is that it offers a way of both having one’s cake and eating it. Muldoon is thus the poet who breaks with tradition, but who, very fortunately, provides within his own poetry a parody of the tradition he disrupts. Like Graves, therefore, he implicitly offers at least the illusion of continuity even as he refutes it. The familiar (and familial) language in Muldoon works, like the father-figure himself in the poems, to provide its own recognizable and stable starting point for a critical evaluation of Heaney’s more complex ‘son’. In part, Heaney offers a temptingly accessible way into an otherwise notoriously ‘difficult’ poet: the ‘in-jokes’ at Heaney’s expense, whatever else they may do (such as crucify Heaney to the lopped oak, for example), offer a teeny-weeny foothold of familiarity on an otherwise slippery slope of allusion. Criticism thus replicates the movement laid out autobiographically by Muldoon: from Patrick Muldoon, mushroom-gatherer, to Paul Muldoon, magic mushroom experimenter; from the safe empiricism of a Heaney or a Frost to the unsafe elusiveness and surrealism of a Muldoon. Muldoon’s ‘father’ poems may be read as forming their own narrative in the 1970s and 1980s, from ‘The Waking Father’ in his first collection, through ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, ‘The Mirror’ and ‘Cherish the Ladies’, the ambiguously described ‘last poem about my father’ where the narrative itself has implicitly become ‘[s]uch a well-worn path’ (P, 117), into ‘The

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Coney’. They also run alongside a more oblique, and by comparison slight collection of ‘mother’ poems. The two narratives are brought together in antithetical relation in ‘The Mixed Marriage’. The ‘father’ poems have always – and understandably – provided a starting point for exploration of the Heaney/Muldoon relationship. The seductiveness of that relationship for critics – allied with the predominance of ‘father’ poems – is such that it can become the means by which Muldoon’s work is more generally read. But the strategy is not always convincing. In two recent studies of Irish poetry, for instance, the Heaney/Muldoon approach to Muldoon is posited as the way to read his 1994 collection, The Annals of Chile, and as a central theme of ‘Yarrow’, Muldoon’s elegy for his mother which makes up Part II of the collection. For Steven Matthews, the form of ‘Yarrow’, comprising 150 poems of two, three or four three-line stanzas is ‘surely an attempted outdoing of Heaney’s airily architectural “Squarings”’; the references to Plath ‘obviously question Heaney’s conclusions about her’; in The Annals of Chile, ‘exuberance and freedom is gained in response to loss’, thus linking the collection with The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things; and, finally, the ‘sense in Heaney of a familial warmth and strength in a shared language’ also ‘underwrites’ Muldoon’s poetry here.13 If this approach to Muldoon goes some way to explaining why those Lough Neagh eels have had as many critical lives as a cat, Neil Corcoran pushes it to its logical conclusion in Modern Irish Poetry, where Muldoon, it seems, can be read only in relation to Heaney. This approach doesn’t quite go so far as to turn Muldoon into the undead poet who would collapse in a heap of dust if the literary tradition were not there to feed him, who does it all with mirrors, but whose own reflection is mysteriously absent. Nevertheless, it does implicitly suggest that without Heaney, Muldoon would lose a substantial part of his audience and meaning. The relationship becomes, in criticism, one of mutual dependency (again replicating the terms in which Muldoon plays out his own relationship with his father in the poetry). Corcoran expresses some anxiety about the relation of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence to ‘American masculinism’, but nevertheless suggests that in the case of Heaney and Muldoon, it offers a way of reclaiming ‘the ground of contestation from political history, where Edna Longley too frequently locates it, for literary history’. Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence can, he argues, be applied here for two reasons: first, because ‘both Heaney and Muldoon have known the theory for as long as it has been around’ (Muldoon has affirmed its pertinence in interview, and Heaney has used some of its terms to describe Muldoon’s practice); secondly, because

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a masculinist, neo-Freudian theory of poetic stress, which reads literary history as the Freudian ‘family romance’, may seem peculiarly appropriate to a relationship between Irish ‘friends and countrymen’ who have been so closely kinned in various forms of precedence and substance too: as teacher and pupil, mentor and charge, both of which may be read as versions of what Bloom calls precursor and ephebe; as Irish poets published by the London firm of Faber & Faber […] [and] as Irish-American emigrant East Coast, Ivy League academics.14

The first of these may be all the more reason, particularly in the case of Muldoon, to distrust Bloom’s applicability: Muldoon’s habitual selfconsciousness about literary-critical approaches to his work (culminating in Madoc’s own parodic interventions in those debates) applies in this instance too, and that very consciousness, or ‘knowingness’, brought to bear on his thesis-fodder relation with Heaney, works against Bloom’s own portentousness and dubious gender politics to suggest that the theory itself is being as much parodied as played out. The second leaves out a crucial counter-narrative or argument related to those gender politics that is present in Muldoon (as well as in Robert Graves), and thus creatively misreads the relationship as existing too much in its own masculinist isolation. Like Matthews, Corcoran effectively sees the Muldoon/Heaney relationship as culminating, in productive ways, in The Annals of Chile – more particularly in ‘Yarrow’. He writes: the magnificent long poems ‘Incantata’ and ‘Yarrow’ come into new possession of modes and tones that Heaney has long since managed; and they are, significantly, elegiac modes and tones […] appropriate to grief, loss and anxiety about one’s own mortality […]. [‘Yarrow’] appears to ask […] how your memory might find the proper frame to freeze when your finger is always, figuratively as well as literally, on the remote control of the video […]. For the Paul Muldoon of ‘Yarrow’, painful memory insists, nevertheless, on isolating frames, and one name for the space such frames create will always, I suspect, be for this poet ‘Seamus Heaney’.15

Without wanting to dispute Heaney’s influence as an elegist on a number of poets, including Muldoon, the fact that Corcoran feels the compulsive urge to put ‘Seamus Heaney’ as an ineradicable if benign virus in the main frame of Muldoon’s poetry is revelatory in perhaps more ways than had been intended. In part, Corcoran is concerned here to transcend the terms of Bloom’s theory, in which Heaney would ultimately be displaced by his ephebe, and posit instead the relationship as one ‘transformed […] into something […] poised, resistant and calm’, in which ‘the sharing of a

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difficult inevitability […] restores to poetic interrelationship a benignity and mutuality effecting a return of the repressed generous impulse’, and in which, in effect, Heaney’s dignity is restored. But the essay as a whole is also, perhaps inadvertently, underwritten by a parallel between Muldoon’s anxiety of influence in relation to Heaney, and its author’s own anxieties in relation to Edna Longley.16 (Criticism, Bloom writes, is also necessarily antithetical, ‘a series of swerves after unique acts of creative misunderstanding’.17) In a sense, it is Corcoran’s preoccupation with the latter that encourages elisions in the former. Uneasy about what he sees as Edna Longley’s politically motivated polarizing of Muldoon and Heaney – he describes this as ‘a characteristic and sometimes […] even far-fetched binarism in her work’ – Corcoran looks for an alternative approach in which that ‘binarism’ can be read as a complementary, and to some extent depoliticized, dual enterprise in which the two poets begin to possess the same ‘modes and tones’.18 But an equally characteristic feature of Edna Longley’s criticism is the tendency – in a rather Muldoonish fashion – to place a latent behind a manifest argument. Ivy League academies notwithstanding, Muldoon stayed in Belfast for 13 years after Heaney left, from 1973 to 1986, during which time his most immediate poetic relationship was not with Heaney but with Michael Longley. The two poets habitually read each other’s work in progress during these years. Longley’s influence is traceable in Muldoon’s work and vice versa from the early 1970s onwards. If the Heaney/Muldoon connection is the stuff of myth, a myth both of them tend (however mischievously in Muldoon’s case) to promote, the Longley/Muldoon relationship works in tangible, if generally unspoken, ways as a counter-myth. In other words, it might helpfully be seen as a poetic interrelationship that for all its critical invisibility is nonetheless a crucial underpinning not merely to Edna Longley’s criticism, but, more importantly, to Muldoon’s poetry. Muldoon dedicated his first collection to ‘my Fathers and Mothers’, acknowledging the ‘parental’ role of various critics and writers in his development. Heaney, as Muldoon’s tutor, is, of course, the most frequently cited figure here – in criticism at any rate. But among Muldoon’s literary parents are also former tutors Michael Allen and Edna Longley, as well as writers Michael Longley and John Morrow. The recent poem ‘Hinge’, Muldoon’s account of his relationship with Michael Longley through the 1970s and 1980s, is an extraordinary validation of the importance of that literary friendship. It takes the reader on an autobiographical trip down memory lane and also on a tour through the Longley oeuvre. It

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details shared assumptions and poetic principles: ‘Together we would set sail […] or read our poems everywhere from Buchna to Bucharest […] while never losing sight of what was meant / by “ploughing by the tail”’.19 It remembers a domestic intimacy (positing the Longleys as surrogate as well as literary family). But most importantly, Muldoon acknowledges here a textual intimacy that critical preoccupations with the more obvious trail he lays down elsewhere have rendered obscure: Once I directed you in a bitpart as your own grandfather, and you reminded me to take a reverse angle of your slow spirit-walk from Flanders to the East End, I’m not sure, of London. Often it had seemed we co-wrote each others’ poems. All that cut and paste. Now, as your spirit-walk came to an end, I heard you call out, as if by rote, across the no man’s land of that narrow street, ‘Cut, dear boy. Cut. Cut. Cut.’

There is here, as in Muldoon’s relationship with Heaney, some male rivalry going on – poet-kings slaying each other – with cut and thrust behind the cut and paste, and a dialogue taking place across no-man’sland. But ‘the no man’s land of that narrow street’ also collapses Longley’s First World War poems into Muldoon’s own Golightly’s lane in ‘The Boundary Commission’ to suggest a shared poetic hinterland somewhere between absolutes or opposites. And the crucial point in that relationship is that Longley reminds Muldoon to ‘take a reverse angle’ (echoing Douglas Dunn’s judgement on Longley’s own poetry as ‘always at an imagined angle to reality’20). The ‘reverse angle’ may also be related to the fact that Longley’s influence on Muldoon has always worked in opposition to the rather masculine ideas of lineage that Muldoon deliberately mocks in his presentation of Heaney. Muldoon’s ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ may draw on Heaney’s ‘Digging’ but the poem also looks back to Longley’s own ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ from No Continuing City. And in that first collection by Longley, a shy beast enters the language, one that will ultimately makes its way into Muldoon’s Mules. For Longley, ‘The Freemartin’ Comes into her own (Her barren increments, Her false dawn) As excess baggage, A currency defaced–21

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The note to the poems reads: ‘A freemartin is a heifer whose hormones have been overwhelmed in the womb by those of her male twin. She is born sterile and, sometimes, sexually malformed’. Longley pre-empts here his own later autobiographical preoccupations with the ‘twin brother / Who threatened me at first like an abortionist’, and to whom, elsewhere, he reads ‘like a mother’.22 But the poem is also concerned with the poet’s dual inheritance (both in the context of literary traditions in Northern Ireland, and in the context of Longley’s English parents and Irish upbringing). Muldoon’s ‘Mules’ also explores origins as irreconcilable opposites: the mare as pagan, the donkey as ‘significant in Christian mythology’;23 the parental opposition of ‘The Mixed Marriage’; the literary and cultural inheritance from two traditions. Poetry itself, as a consequence, is sexually malformed or sexless – with both positive and negative connotations – seeking ‘the best of both worlds’ (P, 67), or at least some space between the two. The mulish cross-breed becomes a paradigm of the poetic self. Longley’s influence is not an obvious ‘inheritance’ in Muldoon, but that is partly because inheritance itself, too often bound up with monolithic and ‘masculinist’ versions of history, is seen by both as a problematical and conflictual ‘baggage’. The inheritance, in a way, is the problem of inheritance. Poems are not ‘elements of continuity’; they are, like the freemartin, ‘incorrigibles’, disruptive and ‘[d]ifficult births’. While Muldoon’s ‘for my Fathers and Mothers’ dedication might, in a literal sense, place Edna Longley as critical mother alongside Seamus Heaney as critical father, as influence works itself out in the poetry, it is Michael Longley who offers ‘modes and tones’ that also question Heaney’s aesthetic. In Corcoran’s and Matthews’ readings of Muldoon, two problems thus converge: the Heaney/Muldoon trail, seductive though it may be, elides much of the story of influence in Muldoon’s poetry as a whole (a story which, needless to say, also has alternative players to those suggested here, and in which the links suggested above are only the beginning). More specifically, to follow through the essentially ‘masculinist’ Heaney/ Muldoon anxiety of influence relationship into ‘Yarrow’ sits uneasily with the fact that the 1990s mark a shift in Muldoon’s representations of his parents (and by extension his literary parents), not least in placing the mother-figure, for the first time, in the dominant rather than the secondary narrative. Clair Wills and Tim Kendall identify some of the features that mark out The Annals of Chile as a divergence from Muldoon’s earlier practice. For Kendall, it is Muldoon’s ‘most elegiac collection to date’ and also, therefore, ‘his most candidly autobiographical’. Personal loss, he

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notes, ‘does not as easily allow for mischief’, for the untrustworthy firstperson voice characteristic of Muldoon’s earlier poetry.24 Fun and games with literary forebears and literary critics seem not to be on the agenda here. For Clair Wills, Annals is (like The Prince of the Quotidian) ‘more open and lyrical’ than anything Muldoon has produced ‘for some time’, a change she suggests may be attributed to ‘the powerful feminine presence in the books, and to the fact that these are, among other things, narratives of birth and death’.25 Both Wills and Kendall, in illuminating readings of ‘Yarrow’, suggest ways in which it runs, as much in its structure as anything else, narratives and counter-narratives against each other, partly through clockwise and anti-clockwise movements (widdershins and deasil), and also through the ways in which it counterpoints father and mother. In Wills’s case, she suggests that Muldoon is implicitly struggling towards ‘the circular movement associated with femininity’.26 That movement marks its own form of resistance to a linear, patriarchal notion of poetic inheritance. It is thus at this point in Muldoon’s career that the running of a counter-narrative (in Gravesian and mythic terms) becomes most evident, a counter-narrative that also complicates the Frost to Heaney to Muldoon ‘anxiety of influence’. On the one hand, ‘Yarrow’ is a narrative of the boy-quester on his rockinghorse who grasps ‘with both hands / my sword in the stone’ (which is also the Heaneyesque ‘rusted blade of the loy’). It remembers and to some extent relives the mythical (masculine) fantasy world of King Solomon’s Mines, of Rob Roy, of ‘Lancelot du Lac’ (P, 350, 356). But its overriding concern is with the female principle, with the Muse who is also mother and harlot simultaneously. The mother herself becomes, as she is in Celtic mythology, a threefold figure, mother, virgin, crone, displaced in her various guises across the female characters of the poem, all of whom are, like Graves’s goddess, keepers of the mysteries of death: the haggard and drug-addicted ‘S—’; Sylvia Plath as Ariel and Artemis; the sacrificed daughter Cordelia. Celtic mythology runs in opposition to Christian mythology – the threefold goddess against the three-in-one patriarchal God, moon against sun, thus revisiting the symbolic opposition of mare and donkey that underpins ‘Mules’.27 For Graves, the mythological framework allows him to hold contradiction in place; for Muldoon, however, the myths are unstable, eclectically and inconsistently evoked, and in the end collapse into each other to disrupt straightforward oppositional readings. In miniature, that process has already been enacted in The Annals of Chile in ‘Milkweed and

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Monarch’, where the earlier father-poem and mother-poem antithetical narratives become synthesis: ‘as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father / he could barely tell one from the other’ (P, 329–30). In ‘Yarrow’, the poet on his rocking-horse merges with Plath/Artemis; Mina Loy (Lear) howls for the fictionalized father (Cordelia); and the threefold structures of myth sink with the trireme at the close of the poem. Yarrow’s conclusion takes collision into collapse. The poem fails to sustain a consistent position, fails to console, and instead loses itself ‘somewhere between’ (P, 392). Nevertheless, that somewhere between, while it might mean loss – everything swept away – is in another sense precisely where Muldoon as poet tries to place himself. The poem read in terms of poetic as opposed to familial antecedents turns the art of losing into a more productive bringing together of two streams – the poet engendering himself from his literary mothers and fathers even as his origins vanish. All major elegies, Bloom writes, ‘center upon their composers’ own creative anxieties. They offer therefore as consolation their own ambitions’.28 The subject of ‘Yarrow’ – lament for the loss of the mother/lover – pushes Muldoon (both here and in ‘Incantata’) to acknowledge in his debts, and draw more directly on Michael Longley’s own elegiac and stylistic practice, with its syntactical (and temporal) distortions, than on Heaneyesque modes of assuagement. It does so partly because Longley shares Muldoon’s sense that mothers are ‘difficult’: in both cases the gap between the mother’s death and the ‘in memory’ volume – which for Longley is Gorse Fires in 1991 – is a long one. While all three poets indicate that mothers are difficult, Muldoon and Longley do not try to assuage that difficulty. As a consequence, Longley becomes, in The Annals of Chile, the more pervasive and dominant influence, reflecting the volume’s own thematic shifts in emphasis. As Clair Wills writes, ‘Clery’s trick in “Twice” (“Two places at once was it, or one place twice?”) becomes the volume’s central image for the capacity of poetry not simply to recall or reduplicate, but to enable us to be in more than one time or space’.29 That central image looks back to Longley’s ‘Alibis’ (‘a simple question / Of being in two places at the one time’30), as well as to the capacity, explored throughout Longley’s poetry, for memory to work forwards as well as backwards, poetic thought as proleptic and analeptic. The closer one gets to the poetic texture in Muldoon, the less other poets, whether Heaney or Longley, are present there. Nevertheless, Muldoon draws on some of the characteristic stylistic and syntactical features of Longley’s elegies – the single-sentence poem and the (quasi-)chiasmus

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(‘that you might reach out, arrah, / and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink’ [‘Incantata’, P, 341]), both of which offer a way of working grammatically with mirrors, of manipulating space and time, engraving, in Longley’s phrase, both ‘reflection and departure’.31 The opening sentences of ‘Yarrow’ echo the colours, images and consolation failures of Gorse Fires: the ‘poppies sown in the sweet-sap April rain’ look back to Gorse Fires, in which the poet, preoccupied with the terms of remembrance, travels ‘from one April to another’; the ‘snow-capped sierra of non-combustible coal’ (P, 348–49) pulls together motifs that appear in Longley’s ‘Thaw’ from the 1970s and which continue to mutate and resurface in his early 1990s poetry.32 The sensibility that underpins Gorse Fires, of a disappearing as well as angst-ridden inheritance – ‘making do with what has been left me’, being ‘an orphan now’33 – is also the belated and painful recognition behind ‘Yarrow’: ‘Little by little it dawned on us […] that all would be swept away’ (P, 346–47). Yarrow itself is: Achillea millefolium: with its bedraggled, feathery leaf and pink (less red than mauve) or off-white flower, its tight little knot of a head, it’s like something keeping a secret from itself, something on the tip of its own tongue. (P, 348)

As Kendall points out, yarrow here is grief itself, an unspoken yet almost spoken recognition of loss. It ‘symbolizes both loss and comfort; it simultaneously overwhelms and heals’.34 It is also, in its own way, a hybrid that reappears in various guises throughout the poem. It is both the penis tip, or ‘the tip of each little arrow’ – giving tongue (‘right royally’) in ‘Yarrow’ is also linked with giving good head – and the furled leaves of female sexuality (from Plath’s misread ‘Edge’), the ‘secret and inviolate rose’. A rather mulish device, therefore, and one particularly reminiscent of Longley’s own miniaturist, Latinate botanical preoccupations, yarrow becomes the emblem of both birth and death (‘Even now a larva was gnawing at her “most secret and / inviolate / rose” of Damascus’), male and female, and is, in and of itself, the site of the poet’s own origin. ‘Whatever it is, it all comes down to this: / My father’s cock / Between my mother’s thighs’ (‘October 1950’; P, 76). Everything is covered by it; everything is swept away. This is to agree with Clair Wills that Annals is distinguished by its powerful feminine presences. But it is also to suggest that Longley, one of

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the few poets who, in Douglas Dunn’s formulation, ‘has had the candour to draw extensively from the anima of his personality’, whose poems can be ‘discreetly feminine’,35 becomes part of the elegiac and ‘feminine’ presence in the book. Since Muldoon’s ‘parents’, as they appear in the poetry, are as much, if not more, mythical than actual creatures, even the relatively early poem ‘The Mixed Marriage’ may be read in terms of literary rather than parental origins, setting as it does the rural figure with ‘billhook and loy’ against the ‘world of Castor and Pollux’; the instinctive and ‘natural’ against the self-consciously literary; masculine against feminine (P, 60). The poem, of course, is not literally ‘about’ precursors, and to read it this way is to read in the context of mythic reverberations that Muldoon’s oeuvre more generally permits. Nevertheless, the opposition is strangely reminiscent of the stereotypical terms in which, say, Heaney and Longley have been read: the rural empiricist, and politically marginalized Catholic (who tries with spade to ‘win the ground he would never own’) versus the urbane classicist (and, incidentally, former classics teacher who is also one of twins); phallic pen/spade versus cunty petals; animus versus anima. Typically, Muldoon is left to flit between the two, between ‘a hole in the hedge / And a room in the Latin quarter’ – the poetic self, as much as the actual self, in other words, is engendered from both ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Literary antecedents are no less open to manipulation and creative misreading than biological antecedents. Muldoon’s ‘exploration’, in ‘Mules’, of ‘lives […] that were sterile in themselves’,36 thus becomes the creation of a poetic self that is anything but sterile, one that can be seen to illustrate aspects of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ theory – like all good ephebes, Muldoon is an elliptical misreader – but which also ‘take[s] a reverse angle’ to manipulate its more complicated and less commonly invoked principles. As Bloom himself points out, the poet or ephebe must not only displace his precursor, the covering cherub, who is male, or a male female; he must also dislodge the sphinx ‘whose works are mighty’, and who is female, or a female male. One is met ‘upon the road back to origins’, the other ‘upon the road forward to possibility’. Sphinx and cherub are antithetical; but like all antitheses they are held in ‘the wholeness of the poet’s imagination’.37 The cherub is the visible – literally ‘covering’ – figure (both in this theory, in the poet’s work, and, in this particular instance, in critical responses to that work); the sphinx tends to be virtually invisible. Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence is, as Corcoran suggests, an enormously seductive text with which to read Paul Muldoon. But its very seductiveness sends warning

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signals. ‘I’m not an expert,’ says Muldoon, ‘on “the anxiety of influence”, but I can see the argument for that. Basically, I’m a person who can see some value in a great many of the theories that come floating by.’38 Muldoon does not simply replicate Bloom’s essentialist gender terms in his own ‘anxiety of influence’; the terms are adopted with a deliberate ‘knowingness’, implicitly applied to his precursors, parodied, and ultimately collapsed. ‘What I resist very strenuously,’ he adds, ‘is the superimposing of any particular world picture […] that insists on everything falling into place very neatly.’ This is not, therefore, to suggest simple substitutions: for Heaney read Longley, for Frost read Graves, and so on ad infinitum. (Reading ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ alongside ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, as Michael Allen does elsewhere in this volume, could put Derek Mahon in the frame instead; with ‘Yarrow’, Sylvia Plath could in some respects be inserted instead of Longley. As with ‘Errata’, the connections multiply indefinitely.) Rather it is to suggest that if Muldoon’s poetry works by questioning and ultimately collapsing binaries – as in the move from ‘The Mixed Marriage’ to ‘Milkweed and Monarch’, or from ‘October 1950’ to ‘Yarrow’ – and if it does so even on the level of poetic influence, two sides have to be there in the first place, even if one will always remain latent rather than manifest content. The ‘binary’ in Muldoon’s poetry, in other words, is not so much Heaney/Muldoon (father/son; precursor/ephebe), as it is one that is unacknowledged: Heaney/Longley – a contrast that ultimately enables the collapse of one into the other and hence, in Bloom’s terms, the emergence of a fully-fledged, independent poet-mule-Muldoon from the Northern Irish literary heritage. To apply such terms makes Muldoon the triumphant (and androgynous) poet-king that Robert Graves never really became: a poet who is ‘amphidexios, which includes the sense of “ambidextrous”, “ambiguous”, and “ambivalent”’, who is ‘himself and his other self at the same time’39 (why should he not have the best of both worlds?), and whose right hand always professes, however deceptively, not to know what his left hand does.

Notes 1 Paul Muldoon, ‘Mules’, in Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 67. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 2 See Robert Graves, Collected Writings on Poetry, ed. Paul O’Prey (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995), pp. 377, 497, 501; and Robert Graves, The White Goddess, ed.

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Grevel Lindop, 4th edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 481. 3 See Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 228. 4 Muldoon in John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 134; ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature, 35.1 (Spring 1994), p. 27. 5 The White Goddess, p. 334. 6 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 206. 7 See Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 223n. 8 The ‘analogue between human and poetic birth, between biological and creative anxiety’ is taken to its extreme in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, where it is justified, in his phrase, only through treading on ‘shadowy and daemonic ground’. See The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 58 and passim. 9 The White Goddess, p. 120. 10 The White Goddess, p. 439. 11 The White Goddess, p. 467. 12 Edna Longley, ‘“When Did You Last See Your Father?” Perceptions of the Past in Northern Irish Writing 1965–1985’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), pp. 152, 154. 13 Steven Matthews, Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 205–206. 14 Neil Corcoran, Poets of Modern Ireland: Text, Context, Intertext (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 130–31. 15 Poets of Modern Ireland, pp. 133–34. 16 Corcoran describes her, rather misleadingly in some ways in view of her Republic of Ireland background, as ‘a Northern Irish insider if ever there was one’, whose criticism thus has to be taken into account. He also worries about ‘the usual anxiety that Edna Longley has, to some extent, already got there before you’. See Poets of Modern Ireland, pp. 125, 130. 17 The Anxiety of Influence, p. 93. 18 Poets of Modern Ireland, pp. 125, 133. 19 Paul Muldoon, ‘Hinge: for Michael Longley’, Honest Ulsterman, 110 (Summer 2001), pp. 12–13. 20 Douglas Dunn, ‘The Poetry of the Troubles’, review of Selected Poems 1963–1980, by Michael Longley, Times Literary Supplement, 31 July 1981, p. 886. 21 Michael Longley, Poems 1963–1983 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), p. 52. 22 See ‘Self-Portrait’ and ‘Readings’, in Poems 1963–1983, pp. 75, 183. 23 Muldoon’s own gloss on the poem, in Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 131. 24 Paul Muldoon, p. 209. 25 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 158. 26 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 185. 27 In this sense, Muldoon replicates Gravesian terms – Celtic versus Christian – more accurately than Graves’s more obvious inheritor, Seamus Heaney, whose ‘cults and devotees of a god and goddess’ effectively translate as Catholic versus Protestant.

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The Anxiety of Influence, p. 151. Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 185. Longley, Poems 1963–1983, pp. 104–105. Michael Longley, Gorse Fires (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), p. 6. See Poems 1963–1983, p. 155, and Gorse Fires, p. 10. Gorse Fires, pp. 1, 36. Paul Muldoon, p. 227. ‘The Poetry of the Troubles’. Muldoon, in Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 131. The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 36, 63. Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 8. See The White Goddess, p. 437.

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Pax Hibernica/Pax Americana: Rhyme and Reconciliation in Muldoon MICHAEL ALLEN

I think that the writer should be alert to all these possible readings. And alert to the curtailing of possible readings that are not productive. And I don’t care what people say, it’s the writer who does that. And the points at which he doesn’t do it are the points at which there is confusion […]. Because that’s what the process of writing is about. It’s about opening himself, or herself to the floodgates, what it’s about is discovering the extent of limits, the confinement, the controlling of readings, of possible readings.1

Muldoon is not talking here just about meaning, but about the whole creative process. His words register the distinction between what Kristeva calls the symbolic or thetic aspects of poetic language (‘discovering the extent of limits, the confinement, the controlling of readings’) and their semiotic source, the poet ‘opening himself, or herself to the floodgates’. The latter point, Kristeva implies, is where rhyme comes in: ‘this experience of the semiotic chora in language produces poetry. It can be considered as the source of all stylistic effort, the modifying of banal, logical order by linguistic distortions such as metaphor, metonymy, musicality’.2 Rhyme is certainly part of poetry’s ‘musicality’. But music itself involves intellectual awareness and command as well as semiotic energies: There are non-verbal signifying systems that are constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic (music, for example). But, as we shall see, this exclusivity is relative, precisely because of the necessary dialectic between the two modalities of the signifying process, which is constitutive of the subject. Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both.3

Poetry’s musical dimension is inseparable from its discursive potential: ‘No text, no matter how “musicalized”, is devoid of meaning or signification; on the contrary, musicalization pluralizes meanings’.4 W.K. Wimsatt points out that the musical element of poetry in isolation ‘has little if any

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aesthetic value’, while the varied degrees and kinds of meaning carried by the rhyme words are crucial: ‘verse in general, and more particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic structure in virtue of a studiously and accurately semantic character. They impose upon the logical pattern of expressed argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical implication.’5 A characteristic piece of Muldoon wordplay of three years later may be relevant: Foley was working on a sequence involving a police line-up, in which the victim shuffled along, stopped with each suspect in turn, then shuffled on. At a critical moment, she dropped a key on the floor. Foley was having trouble matching sound to picture on this last effect. I was struck by the fact that, just as early radio announcers had worn dinner-jackets, he was wearing an ultramarine tuxedo. After half a dozen attempts, he decided to call it quits, and emerged from his sound booth like a diver from a bathyscope. He offered me a tidbit that tasted only of mesquite. I wanted to say something about Marina, something about an ‘identity parade’ in which I once took part, something about the etymology of ‘tuxedo’, but I found myself savouring the play between ‘booth’ and ‘bathy-’, ‘quits’ and ‘mesquite’, and began to ‘misquote’ myself […]6

I shall return to this passage later. My point here would be that the discursive and the ‘alogical’ aspects of semantic procedures seem to be represented by the distinction in the speaker’s mind between what ‘I wanted to say’ and what ‘I found myself savouring’, where the balance seems to be tipped towards the latter. Musicality, the ‘alogical’, is given priority in the antithesis of saying and savouring by the alliteration and the repeated vowel which points towards a rhyme without being one. When the speaker savours the ‘play between “booth” and “bathy-”’, the attraction for us and for Muldoon is in the potential pararhyme which raises the possibility of a ‘bothy’ where the parodic (and heavily rhymed) folk materials which follow might be at home: When he sookied a calf down a boreen it was through Indo-European. When he clicked at a donkey carting dung your grandfather had an African tongue. (P, 197)

Knowing Muldoon and alerted earlier by the word ‘etymology’, we are not surprised to find that the OED entries for ‘bothy’, ‘booth’ and ‘bathy-’7 seem to vindicate the international slant which has been thrown over these lines, so that what the speaker ‘wanted to say’ has emerged out of what he

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found himself savouring. (Nearly all the poems in Madoc [1990] show Muldoon testing out ways to bring his Irish identity with him into the wider – not merely American – world he was now entering.) Foley’s rhyming reply to the verses I have just quoted will become relevant later in this essay. Muldoon’s sportive demonstration that meaning is inseparable from what Wimsatt called ‘a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical implication’, however, allows him to promote a central paradox of his enterprise: that to give priority to such things as rhyme is not to circumscribe or repress meaning. (In Kristeva’s terms, this is because they engage ‘the two modalities of the signifying process which is constitutive of the subject’.) It is a premise which is particularly crucial to formal and metrical undertakings (Muldoon’s staple), since in them rhyme is always conjuring up the ghost of a kind of hoped-for stability, never meaningfree and capable of vanishing at any moment. This is the phenomenon about which, as writer, and on behalf of readers, Muldoon becomes almost euphoric in an interview of 1996: I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they’re not imposed, somehow, on the language. They are inherent in the language. Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. I believe… I was almost going to say ‘I accept the universe!’ I believe in the serendipity of all that, of giving oneself over to that.8

Comparison of ‘giving oneself over to that’, here, with ‘opening himself or herself to the floodgates’ in the earlier interview suggests a practitioner’s recognition of the way rhyme can function on the borders of the semiotic. Both his common inheritance with his Irish predecessors in this respect and his sharp differences from them are revealing, particularly when they are all treating on both a personal and a social level themes of aggressivity and conciliation in the divided community, the disputed territory in which they have successively had their roots. In an essay entitled ‘Northern Ireland: Poetry and Peace’,9 Edna Longley traces an idea of Coventry Patmore (mediated by Arthur Symons) through two of Yeats’s essays into a poem of 1912: And when they drove out Cosimo, Indifferent how the rancour ran, He gave the hours they had set free To Michelozzo’s latest plan For the San Marco Library, Whence turbulent Italy should draw Delight in Art whose end is peace,

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In logic and in natural law By sucking at the dugs of Greece.10

Certainly the idea itself (‘Art whose end is peace’) may be thought of as authoritarian and conservative. It reverses Kristeva’s belief that poetry is subversive (because of the disjunctive and disordering force of the semiotic) and even confirms her darker notion that the bourgeoisie can use the disruptive potential of poetry as a safety valve and so maintain the status quo.11 In the first place, of course, the latter view does not quite fit the pre-proletarian and only ambiguously postcolonial Irish situation. And in any case the poem is far from foregrounding its key idea (a good example of what Peter McDonald calls ‘“content”’s necessarily uncatchable relation to “form”’).12 As Longley herself points out: ‘ “To a Wealthy Man” is not itself a very peaceful poem. The speaker’s polemic is inflected, even infected, by rancour and turbulence that belongs to Ireland rather than Italy.’13 In fact, only the weight and assurance of the full rhymes do anything to persuade us of a congruence between the situations of ‘Cosimo’ and the speaker. Whether or not Cosimo is ‘[i]ndifferent’, Yeats certainly isn’t. And this is communicated primarily by two particular pieces of rhyming. Cosimo’s ‘indifference’, Yeats’s vehemence (the latter fuelled in 1912, as Longley demonstrates, by the Ulster Covenant as well as by the philistinism of Dublin’s citizens), are set in motion by the rhyming of ‘latest plan’ (casual, clichéd and colloquially run-on) with the heavily alliterated ‘rancour ran’. The implication that Italy’s (Ireland’s) turbulence is infantile (‘dugs of Greece’) is compounded by the sardonic physiological (and even scatological) innuendo thrown back (‘end […] is peace’) onto futile if honourable high-cultural liberal platitudes by the parallel portmanteau effect of the rhyme. Of course, ‘You can’t say it that way any more’,14 as John Ashbery puts it in another context. Wilfred Owen’s legacy to the peace theme was a variety of ways of more or less subtly disrupting the authoritarian resources of full rhyme to address the trauma of modern warfare. Heaney, writing obliquely about the Northern Irish ‘troubles’, saves full rhyme for the impotent aggressivity of the generation of Catholics represented by his father (‘flushes / Nothing’) and the rural political stasis (‘tongue-tied’) of his childhood: You with a harvest bow in your lapel, Me with the fishing rod, already homesick For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

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Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes Nothing: that original townland Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand. The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal dresser— Like a drawn snare Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.15

In that final stanza it is the very lack of the assurance of full rhyme that displaces the word ‘frail’ onto what we may not want to call the ‘peace process’ in a way that deters complacency. In his turn, Muldoon’s rhyming (and his ethics of gender) are subtly chafing against Heaney’s general influence in an almost generational way when he tackles the same theme: ‘Those Yankees were touch and go as it was— If you’d heard Patton in Armagh— But this Kennedy’s nearly an Irishman So he’s not much better than ourselves. And him with only to say the word. If you’ve got anything on your mind Maybe you should make your peace with God.’ I could hear May from beyond the curtain. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I told a lie once, I was disobedient once. And, Father, a boy touched me once.’ ‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest? Did he touch your breast, for example?’ ‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’ (P, 79)

Almost as in Heaney, the father of ‘Cuba’ is given a heavily stressed (if not completely full) rhyme (‘word / God’), probably needing a County Armagh accent, to imbue his aggressivity and that of the priest (‘Father’) with their precise socio-religious weight. In contrast, a lighter version of the same vowel emerges first internally (‘once’) and then as a same-word/line-end rhyme to (almost) vindicate decisive non-aggression despite its ineffectuality. The contrast is not just of sound; it sets gross overstatement against understated indubitable precision, and raises important questions about the relationship between aggressivity and gender which would be quite

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foreign to Yeats or Heaney. An ambivalent sense too of the vulnerability of Irish culture to transatlantic influences sets neo-imperialist and native violence against a home-grown version of ‘Make love not war’. Both the international theme and the device of same-word rhyming will be crucial to Muldoon’s later development. More characteristic of the period of Why Brownlee Left (in which ‘Cuba’ appears, 1980), however, is the way in which, in a poem called ‘Truce’, Muldoon allows subtle line-end patterning to insinuate the nuances of Northern Irish violence into World War I materials (a thematic strategy picked up from Michael Longley). The enemy soldiers who have negotiated an unofficial Christmas disengagement draw on their last cigarettes As Friday-night lovers, when it’s over, Might get up from their mattresses To congratulate each other And exchange names and addresses. (P, 87)

The tip-tilted rhyme in the third and fifth lines here results from the relocation of stress in the second rhyme-word. It reinforces the wide opposition of meaning between the two rhyme-words, inevitable temporariness in the first, the pretence of permanence in the second (of course, the war situation is also a comment on the sexuality and both reflect the Irish peacepredicament). The equation which throws this not entirely cynical slant of light back onto a historical example of the peace theme has gender implications which were not available to Wilfred Owen or indeed Heaney. Thematic promptings for both these poems grew out of what began as personal literary relationships in Belfast and became intertextual later. Heaney and Longley were not the only writers available as influences – there were also John Morrow (who wrote fiction), and fellow-poet Ciaran Carson – but they provided a generational impetus, a fatherly exacerbation, the kind of spur to assertive originality Harold Bloom writes about. Fatherhood dominates ‘Cuba’, is (a little wistfully) absent from ‘Truce’. And despite Muldoon’s common inheritance alongside Heaney and Longley in matters of form (which goes back through Kavanagh and MacNeice to Yeats) there was one important difference. The poems and inspiration the student-poet Muldoon brought with him from the Moy in the late sixties had a narrative potential, would grow into a fragmented Künstlerroman, initially at least more like Sons and Lovers than Joyce’s Portrait in the way it explores the sexual and Oedipal drives of the maturing artist. Maintaining the ambiguity of the word ‘artist’ in Joyce’s

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title, they will be partly fictionalized but in a precise social and cultural context. (That is Belfast student life, for instance, at the end of that last poem.) And Muldoon’s experimental rhyming from very early on helped to fill out by implication these extra dimensions. In particular, the eruption of rhyme into story and discourse seems to associate (however ironically) radical possibilities in the public sphere with the new sexual ethos of the younger generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s to which the author belongs. One can see the beginnings of all this in New Weather (1973) (note the title) and Mules (1977). Halfway through the latter book, for instance, the literary riddle set for the young suitor by ‘Mercy’ (how to catch a yellow bittern – the answer is buy it a drink) has eventually slipped from her mind but not entirely from his, something clinched by the rhyming of ‘bittern’ (with its exotic rhotacized nasal) and ‘forgotten’: We climbed the hills to the highest hill-farm Without a word of snow or bittern And viewed the extravagant wilderness Of the brawling townlands round the Moy, The cries from the football-field grown so dim We might be listening on the wireless. When I’d all but forgotten that she’d forgotten Mercy would take me in her arms. (P, 54-55)

The delayed off-rhyming of ‘farm’ and ‘arms’ shifts the rural older generation’s material location of home and security onto the individual and egalitarian erotic relationships of the young. Hence the force of the conditional verb in the last line: we don’t know, as the poem ends, whether she did, or whether he only hopes she will. The protraction of the penultimate line carries (by way of an internal same-word rhyme) a dual implication, since, in not quite forgetting, the speaker may have been maintaining the alertness of the sexual hunter, or merely securing the (literary) possibility of this poem. Either sexual generosity (some time after the last full stop) or the poem itself is the ‘Boon’. The association of literary culture and a dominant female here carries a trace of Oedipal tension, confirmed when ‘The Yellow Bittern’ becomes one of Brigid Regan’s cultural weapons against her son and the ‘loanin’end ideologues’ he knocks around with in The Annals of Chile. The parallel one looks to for Muldoon’s Künstlerroman moves away from Lawrence and towards and beyond Joyce as the Oedipal theme develops through

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‘Ma’, ‘Cheesecake’ and ‘Profumo’ to ‘Brazil’ and ‘Yarrow’. And the incipient Oedipal death-wish he is to dramatize and controvert in the latter poem is already detectable at the end of ‘Ma’: And the full moon Swaying over Keenaghan, the orchards and the cannery, Thins to a last yellow-hammer, and goes. The neighbours gather, all Keenaghan and Collegelands, There is story-telling. Old miners at Coalisland Going into the ground. Swinging, for fear of the gas, The soft flame of a canary. (P, 48–49)

The ‘story-telling’ associates the speaker’s mother (and, at one pole of his sensibility, the poet) with local tradition and community and at the same time through the traditional literary iconography (bird-song = poetry) sets up creativity (for one phase of the moon at least) as the only positive consequence of Oedipal fixation. But we reach this ending responding retrospectively to something raw and contemporaneous in the narrator’s sensibility: this is because of the unsettling shift of stress as between ‘canary’ and its anticipatory rhyme ‘cannery’ as well as the hint of a generational alternative in both the sense and sound of ‘yellow-hammer’ (which has the same truculent short consonant-clipped ‘a’ as ‘cannery’). Moreover, in a wider context, ‘cannery’, like ‘wilderness’ in ‘Boon’, sings out as part of Muldoon’s calculated Americanization of his Irish terrain, along with the GI in this poem, ‘Patton’ and ‘Kennedy’ in ‘Cuba’, the couple who meet ‘At Martha’s Deli’, ‘The Girls in the Poolroom’ and the sly speaker of the latter poem. One can see already that Muldoon’s surrender to the energies inherent in rhyme, an almost novelistic immersion (‘I believe in the serendipity of all that, of giving oneself over to that’), intensifies the sense (already communicated by my more univocal Yeats and Heaney examples) of the poetic persona as just one component of an exploratory process involving extradiscursive forces. This is why the poems can respond so sensitively to the metanarratives that accompany social change without any discursive commitment; and why Muldoon’s response to a particular strain of related doctrine, precept and practice originating in the America of the 1960s is at once ironic, flirtatious and pervasive. The ethos in question centred on ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexual behaviour functioning as an ‘endeavour to recover the body of infancy’, which would (it was claimed) result in the overcoming of repression and the eradication of aggressivity: ‘more Eros and less strife’.16 (Muldoon will lift not just the motif but the whole ethos

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from its origins in the United States of the sixties and ironically interrogate it in progressively wider ‘killing fields’ – South Armagh, nineteenthcentury America, a range of colonial and postcolonial territories, in the volume-by-volume para-narratives17 which accompany his central Künstlerroman.) I quoted above from Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959); But these structures of living and thinking were transmitted to the young (and not so young) in the Irish countryside and elsewhere less by gurus such as Brown, Marcuse and Leary or even the Beat writers than through a kind of generational osmosis reinforced by musical performers such as Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Bob Dylan and the rest. There is a considerable correspondence between the list of musicians provided by Muldoon’s nostalgic ‘Sleeve Notes’ in Hay (1998) and that given so much of the credit in The Greening of America (1970) for the construction in the United States and worldwide of what its author, Charles Reich, calls ‘Consciousness III’18 (though Muldoon’s version of the ethos is never as roseate or as sanitized as Reich’s). The earlier appearances in Muldoon of the new ethico-erotic vocabulary are sometimes naïve. (One can see why he excluded from both the Selected and the New Selected a love-poem addressed in what is now Clintonesque mode to ‘you who took / The world into your mouth’ [‘Leaving an Island’, P, 17]). But another early poem, ‘Thrush’, sharply dramatizes (if in ironically chosen circumstances) the key recognition that repression begets violence: And suddenly the yellow gum secreted Halfwayup The damson bush Had grown a shell. I let those scentless pages fall And took it In my feckless hand. I turned it over On its back To watch your mouth Withdraw. Making a lean, white fist Out of my freckled hand. (P, 6)

The poem depicts at once the end of a love affair and the discovery of a condition we all know about which inhibits oral sex. Similar uses of medical circumstances to subvert an erotico-political Eden are found later in poems such as ‘Whim’ and ‘Aisling’: here it is the descending vowels in an emphatic half-rhyme (shell / fall) which give the poem its prelapsarian

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colouring, showing (along with the sustained ornithological pun) how the need to mount defences breeds incipient aggression. It is in Quoof (1983), the first book of Muldoon’s poetic maturity, that the configurations which reify ‘the body delighting in the activity of all of its organs’19 come together as a kind of initiating and structuring myth, motivating the speakers and characters though it neither explains nor redeems their predicament. While he pays only cynical or ironic attention to the possibility of achieving ‘that Dionysian ego which does not negate any more’,20 Muldoon does find imaginatively releasing and fruitful (and confirmatory of all his early interest in the natives of the American continent) the attendant identification with ‘archaic man’ who both retains ‘the magic body of infancy’ and ‘has a massive structure of excremental magic, which indicates the degree to which his anality remains unsublimated’.21 While Muldoon’s touch in dealing with such materials is wry and delicate, the epigraph to Quoof makes it clear that his attitude to such sources of creative power is neither dismissive nor parodic: But the old foster-mother was a great shaman and, when they had been left alone, and all her neighbours had gone their way, she turned herself into the form of a man and married her adoptive daughter. With a willow branch she made herself a penis so that she might be like a man, but her own genitals she took out and made magic over them and turned them into wood, she made them big and made a sledge of them. Then she wanted a dog, and that she made out of a lump of snow she had used for wiping her end; it became a white dog with a black head; it became white because the snow was white, but it got the black head because there was shit on one end of the lump of snow. Such a great shaman was she that she herself became a man, she made a sledge and a dog for hunting at the breathing-holes. Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos22

The Künstlerroman assumption that the artist’s soul is constructed in his sexual encounters,23 for instance, is elaborated in ‘Yggdrasill’ by way of what is demotically known as ‘round the world’ sexuality, pursued in a (drug-?) heightened state of consciousness, and identified with a shamanic quest: They were gathered in knots to watch me go. A pony fouled the hard-packed snow with her glib cairn, someone opened a can of apricots.

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As I climb my nose is pressed to the bark. The mark of a cigarette burn from your last night with him. (P, 118-19)

The linguistic play simulates ‘excremental magic’ through the visual congruence of the ‘knots’, the ‘apricots’ and the ‘glib cairn’ together with the olfactory suggestiveness whereby ‘nose’ reverses the vowel and consonantal elements of the sullied ‘snow’. Full end-rhyme, of course, gives a comic resonance to this (the good humour of communal shibboleths), which is simultaneously ruptured by a delayed half-rhyme (stanzaically reinforced), ‘cairn / burn’, the contrast of the coy archaism with intimate knowledge of another person bringing together different levels of experience, infusing erotic illusion with jealousy and pain. Aggressivity is released rather than diminished, lending itself eventually to a half-prophetic and half-mocking close (the mystery of insight caught in the ‘later / water’ halfrhyme, authority in the visually and linguistically provocative full rhyme of ‘today’ and ‘Neagh’, subversion when ‘Erne’ takes you back to ‘yearn’): my people yearn for a legend: It may not be today or tomorrow, but sooner or later the Russians will water their horses on the shores of Lough Erne and Lough Neagh.

The socially inclusive acknowledgement of violence, humorously grudging here (‘my people’), perhaps as a way of ribbing the Heaney of North, Part II, is central to this volume’s concluding para-narrative, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’. One can see it, for instance, when Gallogly’s preamble to cunnilingus while kneeling in a cow-pat (‘gingerish’) is rhymingly juxtaposed with the kind of graveyard scene (‘fresh / grave-mud’) only too common in 1980s Northern Ireland: A country man kneels on his cap beside his neighbour’s fresh grave-mud as Gallogly kneels to lap the primrose-yellow custard.

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The knees of his hand-me-down duds are gingerish. (P, 136)

Again, all the elements of the cult identification with ‘archaic man’ fail to equate ‘more Eros’ with ‘less strife’ the way Brown wants them to. This may be because the rhyming which here gives coherence to Muldoon’s pastoral black comedy also subverts any easy ideological stance. In Life Against Death Brown pins his hopes for civilization on (among other signs of a resurgence of innocence) an outlook in which ‘shame and repression of anality [do] not exist’; but he has difficulty himself in keeping a straight face when he tries to recruit Swift (as poet) to his cause: the age of innocence, ‘The golden Age, to Gold unknown,’ had another kind of gold. The golden age still survives among the Swains of Northern Ireland – Whose Off’rings plac’t in golden Ranks, Adorn our Chrystal River’s Banks. But the perspectives now opening up are too vast for Swift or for us.24

The play of poetic language is similarly subversive in the first stanza of ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, where the Yeatsian resonances given to the particular ‘excremental magic’ of a ‘self-renewing gold-black dragon’ are undercut by the sly demotic ribaldry (beneath the surface meaning) of ‘load of horse manure’: The rain comes flapping through the yard like a tablecloth that she hand-embroidered. My mother has left it on the line. It is sodden with rain. The mushroom shed is windowless, wide, its high-stacked wooden trays hosed down with formaldehyde. And my father has opened the Gates of Troy to that first load of horse manure. Barley straw. Gypsum. Dried blood. Ammonia. Wagon after wagon blusters in, a self-renewing gold-black dragon we push to the back of the mind. We have taken our pitchforks to the wind. (P, 105)

Metaphors for male creative activity are given considerable forward momentum by the full rhymes here (‘wide / formaldehyde’; ‘wagon / dragon’). But insidious and unsettling half-rhymes undercut the heroic possibility

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(‘trays / Troy’) and suggest its accompanying repression (‘mind / wind’), the tone ruling out in the latter case the archaic visual full rhyme that Yeats might have retained. This rhyming subversiveness can be traced back to the first four lines (‘the yard / embroidered’; line / rain’) where it intensified our sense of the frustrated and circular feminine creative activity expressed in the almost redundant simile. The book’s epigraph (which immediately precedes this poem) sees creativity as a self-managed sexchange operation and seems to necessitate a realignment of this uneasily gendered past situation in the poem’s present. So does the depiction of the protagonists ‘like girls in long dresses’ as they ignore both the destructive (male) violence of the IRA and its aesthetic (female) repudiation by ‘Elizabeth McCrum’: We might have been thinking of the fire-bomb that sent Malone House sky-high and its priceless collection of linen sky-high. We might have wept with Elizabeth McCrum. We were thinking only of psilocybin. You sang of the maid you met on the dewy grass— And she stooped so low gave me to know it was mushrooms she was gathering O.

Here the same-word rhyme, ‘sky-high’, carried by a pointedly short line, superimposes the fate of the ‘priceless collection of linen’ on that of the ‘tablecloth that she hand-embroidered’ to exemplify something valuable but ineffectual, rather as did the monosyllabic ‘once’ of May in ‘Cuba’. As elsewhere in Quoof, however, Muldoon’s sensitivity to gender issues does not inhibit the innovative quest which moves the poem forward: the bravura rhyming of ‘psilocybin’ with ‘linen’ dramatizes a momentary advantage over feminised culture, reinforced by a traditional ballad rhyme to render the submissive, traditional, but certainly ‘polymorphous’ perversity of the ‘maid’ who figures in Ciaran Carson’s song. This gendered power-shift seems to restore almost archetypal dignity to the father-figure of the poem, something secured by a steady triumph of full rhyme over half-rhyme throughout the next stanza; though the final flourish is not without a little subversion early in the line (‘and so on and so forth’): We’ll have taken him unawares and stand behind him, slightly to one side. He is one of those ancient warriors before the rising tide.

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He’ll glance back from under his peaked cap without breaking rhythm: his coaxing a mushroom – a flat or a cup – the nick against his right thumb; the bucket then, the punnet to left or right, and so on and so forth till kingdom come.

As elsewhere in Muldoon, the revitalization in his memory of the patriarchal presence seems to close all avenues forward for the protagonist. The initiative and the point of view shift to his more assertive ‘companion’ (Carson) in a much less obtrusively rhymed fourth stanza. One can read the reduction of formal line-end patterning as a correlative for the disintegrative immersion in drug culture, a gesture towards free verse simulating the native American ritual use of ‘peyote, the mushroom, morning-glory seeds’ or ‘Jimson-weed’ to further a ‘solitary vision quest’ from which the speaker returns with ‘a protective animal spirit, a secret song’.25 Muldoon was certainly interested in such practices and these details (from a Gary Snyder essay influentially republished in The Poetics of the New American Poetry in 1973) might suggest that the final italicized stanza of the poem is such a ‘secret song’. On the other hand, the protagonist’s reappearance with a horse’s head coincides with the sharp resurfacing of rhyme (or, at least, half-rhyme) to formally announce an ‘Envoi’: my head had grown into the head of a horse that shook its dirty-fair mane and spoke this verse […]

And while horses have been emblematically male in Muldoon’s symbology from early on this could be a Houyhnhnm head, partially disqualifying the speaker of the final lines and those he represents: Your only hope is to come back. If sing you must, let your song tell of treading your own dung, let straw and dung give a spring to your step. If we never live to see the day we leap into our true domain, lie down with us now and wrap yourself in the soiled grey blanket of Irish rain that will, one day, bleach itself white. Lie down with us and wait.

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 :  

There is here, then, an intersection of two poetics and two cultures to negotiate between assertive and deferential (intransigent and peaceable?) attitudes to political and gender issues. The ‘rain’ relates back to the opening lines where it is associated with ‘[m]y mother’. ‘[T]rue domain’ is distance-rhymed back to ‘Barnett’s fair demesne’, a piece of ‘planted’ Irish territory where the bomb-outrage took place. And the ‘excremental magic’ attributed to the IRA ‘dirty protest’ does seem, as compared to that in the Armagh jail sequence of ‘The More a Man Has’, to some extent redemptive. Nevertheless the crucial factor in this final rapprochement of opposing attitudes seems to me to be the restoration of rhyme and the series of falling pararhymes (‘song / dung.’; ‘step / leap / wrap’; ‘white / wait’) which fashion the not entirely reconciling cadence of the poem’s close. With ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ we come to a kind of hiatus. On the socio-political front the poem meets some of the challenges of its place and time but its Oedipal irresolution sits waiting for the sequence of poems which elegize Muldoon’s father in the next two books and for the almost self-annihilating juxtaposition of ‘Incantata’, ‘Yarrow’ and the Dorothy Aoife poems in The Annals of Chile (1994). In the interim, the whole experience of migration and cultural assimilation to the United States will need to be absorbed into Muldoon’s personal and creative identity before he can elaborate his Künstlerroman sufficiently to confront the peace issue again, at least as it directly affects Northern Ireland. The neo-imperial pull of America has always influenced Muldoon’s sense of cultural power: ‘Europe had no more say / When America left her’ says the deserted ‘Grass Widow’ in New Weather (P, 28). His destination seemed already pretty certain when a poem called ‘Making the Move’ appeared in Why Brownlee Left. And inasmuch as poetry is ‘a rhythm made intelligible by syntax’ and the poet ‘follows the instinct for rhythms that has chosen him’ (Kristeva),26 there are migratory tremors when rhyme falters in response to native American mushroom-magic in Quoof and reasserts itself to a clearly Irish chorus of ‘Come back to us’. So it is not surprising that Foley, the fully Americanized alter ego of ‘The Key’, had little time for the immigrant Muldoon-figure’s deliberations about rhythm, rhyme and the Irish connection: ‘Still defending that same old patch of turf?’; or that that figure’s dream-like reflections on the power of his cultural inheritance also enunciate the basic principle of rhyme: ‘These past six months I’ve sometimes run a little ahead of myself, but mostly I lag behind, my footfalls already pre-empted by their echoes’ (P, 198). A few pages later, in what, like Clair Wills,27 I take to be an allusion to

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Charles Olson’s vaunted ‘Open Form’,28 the Muldoon persona pursues his American entrepreneurial opportunity determinedly clutching his Heaneyesque29 eelskin briefcase (which contains ‘the first/ inkling of this poem’): for fear it might slink into a culvert and strike out along the East River for the sea. By which I mean the ‘open’ sea. (P, 202)

‘This poem’ could be self-referential or, reading ‘this’ a different way, it could be any current Muldoon poem (and, most likely, the expansive ‘Madoc’ which immediately follows). What is important is the way that final line of the sonnet (ending in ‘open sea’) is distance-rhymed with its first line, ‘I held the briefcase at arm’s length from me’. Muldoon was thus in no doubt that despite the precedent of his admired Robert Frost, he was entering a literary milieu where rhyme did not carry the premium it retained in Ireland. The tradition of Whitman in the late twentieth century, whether in the versions expounded by the Western or the Eastern American avant-garde, is hostile to the practice of ‘a convention within which or against which the poet orders his individual poetic movement’ (Robert Duncan).30 Like Olson, Duncan sees rhyme as inviting ‘a mistrust […] of free movements’,31 and Kenneth Koch finds value only in ‘the other kinds of form there are in the rhymed poem’.32 For aesthetic as much as ideological reasons (though the latter are important), the national poetic chooses this way of minimizing the distance between the structures of art and the flow of living. As Hay will conclusively demonstrate, Muldoon shares the latter overall objective. And it is possible to see the amplitude of his larger poetic ventures from ‘Madoc’ on as reflecting the demotic openness of his adopted nation. But his technical response to such imperatives, like that of other ‘transplanted poets brought up on metrical forms’ (Helen Vendler),33 will continue to be within rather than outside the project of rhyme. Indeed, there seems to be something almost countersuggestible about the way Muldoon’s growing interest in experimentation at this time is channelled into the elaboration of rhyme. ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ was spurred into existence by the postmodern panache of Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’,34 but Mahon’s rhyming there is more intermittent and oblique than Muldoon’s. From Quoof on there is a steady infiltration of the text by avant-garde exemplars, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Jackson Pollock, for instance, in ‘The More a Man Has’ (the last-named, admittedly, in the context of artistically ‘squiggled’ excremental inscriptions

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in a prison cell). The international exiles who crowd ‘7, Middagh Street’ in Muldoon’s next book, Meeting the British, are obviously there not only to emblematize the prospect of Muldoon’s own envisaged perch on transatlantic shores but also to suggest the degree of sophistication he can bring with him. But the first place where this shows is in the line-end rhyming, which comes to have some of the anti-naturalist specificity and surrealist resonance that the book’s final para-narrative discovers in Dali’s lobsters and oysters: When your lobster was lifted out of the tank to be weighed I thought of woad […] (P, 173)

(the semantic disparity between the rhyme-words here in ‘Sushi’ almost persuades us that ‘woad’ is the past tense of ‘weighed’); ‘You won’t even talk…’ On the sidewalk a woman in a leotard with a real leopard in tow.

Congruent spelling in the two rhyme-words enforces a playful threesyllable reading of the second, lee-oh-pard, and produces a verbal effect that is at once three-dimensional and visually erotic. There seems little doubt that such writing is in conscious contention with the indigenous tradition of Muldoon’s newly chosen milieu. The cultural tensions are mirrored in ‘7, Middagh Street’ when the two European sophisticates, Auden and MacNeice, challenged by the native tradition as embodied in a line from Whitman, pay attention not to the old frontiersman himself, but to the tribute paid him by another European sophisticate, the surrealist Lorca (P, 179). Another indicator that there could be an element of Old World resistance in Muldoon’s increasingly playful line-ends is his first unilateral New York publication, an edition of Byron which gives prominence to that author’s gift for extended comic narrative.35 The influence can be seen in Madoc, published a year later. There is clearly something in common between a rhyme of ‘mahogany’ and ‘philogyny’, for instance – (He was a Turk, the colour of mahogany; And Laura saw him, and at first was glad, Because the Turks so much admire philogyny.)36

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– and one in ‘Capercaillies’ between ‘polygamy’ and ‘notably gamey’: ‘Paul? Was it you put the pol in polygamy or was it somebody else?’ While their flesh is notably gamey […] (P, 199)

or, in ‘The Panther’, between ‘conundrum’ and ‘Cowan from Antrim’: (The house itself is something of a conundrum, built as it was by an Ephraim Cowan from Antrim.) (P, 200)

As W.K. Wimsatt says about the Byron example, the humour resides in ‘the wide disparity in meaning between the [rhyme] words’.37 And as Muldoon’s continental displacement takes hold he amplifies that wide disparity to more diverse international proportions with experiments in rhyming from languages other than his own two (for instance French and later Spanish). This is crucial when he constructs a surrogate for himself in the native American speaker of ‘Meeting the British’ (whose gift with languages and career as an interpreter seem to have originated in the midst of imperialist perfidy): As for the unusual scent when the Colonel shook out his handkerchief: C’est la lavande, une fleur mauve comme le ciel. (P, 160–61)

What is exposed is the delusive semantic intoxication beneath which such perfidy comes about. Rhyming ‘ciel’ back to ‘unusual’ dramatizes the Colonel’s unscrupulous pointing of attention away from the sinister evidence of betrayal. It also furthers our sense of the speaker’s naïve but promising linguistic susceptibility both in the past (‘no less strange, / myself calling out in French’) and in the present, where his first words, ‘the sky was lavender’, show us precisely what he has learned. And the other two-language rhyme confirms the duplicity: the nasal syllable in ‘lavande’ throws our attention back onto the sturdy English ‘a’ in ‘hand-’, so dissipating the echo of ‘shake hands’ into a foppish gesture of betrayal. Of course the immediate subject of the poem reflects Muldoon’s incipient change of place. But even if the next two poems in Meeting the British had not dwelt on Welsh perfidy (‘Crossing the Line’) and Welsh and English perfidy (in ‘peace’ talks at Hillsborough Castle) (‘Bechbretha’), Muldoon’s further internationalizing of Irish issues here would be clear enough. And the poem is particularly sardonic in the way it puts into the speaker’s mind an image of traumatic cultural change (‘two streams coming together /

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(both were frozen over’)) which could represent an Irish case as delusively as it does his own. Assimilated now into the American literary-academic community, Muldoon draws on its theoretically sophisticated ethos to subsume his native Ulster into a panoramic postcolonial universe. Cult neo-Freudianism in the United States had moved on by the 1980s to equate repression in the personal life with colonialism in the political: ‘the new earth’, say Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorialisations that arrest the process [desire] or assign it goals’.38 Muldoon, of course, does not commit himself to the utopian thrust of such doctrines. But he dramatizes terms such as ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’ in poems from Meeting the British much as his Berkeley friend since 1987, David Lloyd, uses them academically, ‘in a more literal sense than do Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’.39 Both Muldoon and Lloyd see such things as ‘a decoding of the primitive relation […] to their territory’ of the colonized people.40 Muldoon, however, shares the more inward emphasis of the two neo-Freudians, whose title, Anti-Oedipus, chimes with his own preoccupations. In ‘Madoc’, while recognizing the effect of colonization on the native Americans, he also targets precisely the ‘neurotic or perverse’ components of the reterritorializing role in both the transplanted English poets and the colonizers of the new republic. (His natives are still sufficiently resistant to provide him with representatives of ‘archaic man’.) His mockery of the Pantisocrats undoubtedly reflects on their repressed sexual conservatism (and perhaps, as a way of empowering his own poetic independence, on that of one or two senior Ulster poets also); and he makes mischievous satiric use of the modulation of halfrhyme into full rhyme to display this when the ‘white woman’ who is ‘being rogered by one Seneca’ sapsips a second. Coleridge turns away, sickened, snaps shut the telescope and fumbles for his pony’s halter-rope. (P, 242–43)

There is no doubt that Coleridge is being ribbed from a hypothetical perspective that is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, ‘defamiliarising, deoedipalising, decastrating’:41 the rhythmical mimesis of ‘sap- / sips / a second’, when set against the more pointed rhyming that follows, makes it

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clear that, in Coleridge’s voyeuristic imagination at least, the woman is a consenting adult or even a ‘libidinal’ revolutionary.42 Something of the range of rhyming devices to which Muldoon’s experimentalism since the mid-1980s has given him access can be seen in the closing stanzas of a shorter poem (‘Cows’, from The Annals of Chile): Enough of Colette and Céline, Céline and Paul Celan: enough of whether Nabokov taught at Wellesley or Wesleyan. Now let us talk of slaughter and the slain, the helicopter gun-ship, the mighty Kalashnikov: let’s rest for a while in a place where a cow has lain. (P, 346)

The delicate play on French vowels and consonants in the first line here is by no means a simple put-down. The shift away from literary chit-chat seems to hinge on the cross-stanza rhyming on ponderous Slavonic polysyllables, obviously to raise the question (about which Muldoon has been notoriously agnostic elsewhere) as to whether the pen may or may not be ‘mightier’ than the sword. If verbal extravagance (whether Nabokov’s or Muldoon’s) is at once celebrated and debunked by one set of rhymes then a complementary dubiety is thrown over contrasting simple moral values by the pre-1914 ring of the ‘slain / lain’ rhyme (its tenor reinforced by ‘slaughter’ and ‘mighty’). The Irish landscape of the last stanza is made postcolonial by the turn of the conversation: but the subversive play of rhyme warns us against identifying it too readily with the ‘immanent unity of the earth’ prior to that ‘first great movement of deterritorialisation’43 which Deleuze and Guattari sometimes seem to hanker after. At the same time, ‘Cows’ is like ‘Yggdrasil’ in that it does not repudiate entirely an identification with ‘archaic man’ (and even a touch of ‘excremental magic’, the tell-tale cow-pat): it partially shares the surreal vision of Dermot Seymour (to whom it is dedicated and one of whose bovine portraits decks the cover of Annals). Indeed the speculative (or mischievous) long-term politics of its key rhyme are clarified by the allusive title of a Seymour picture: ‘The Russians will water their Horses on the Shores of Lough Neagh’. (There are cows in the picture and a ‘helicopter gun-ship’.) ‘More Eros’ and ‘less strife’. The question of whether these are connected has been on Muldoon’s mind from very early on: the new tranquillity and wisdom with which he asks it in a piece such as ‘Cows’ are consequent upon the immense leap forward in his long poems between ‘Madoc’ and the two that dominate Annals. This leap was both formal and

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thematic, but I propose to concentrate first on its thematic dimension, leaving until later the equally crucial (and to some extent inextricable) question of formal development. Coleridge’s Utopian enterprise in the New World is inseparable from his quest for the lost wife/mother, but this only takes on full meaning after the coupling of ‘Incantata’ and ‘Yarrow’ in Annals. Deleuze and Guattari say that the Oedipal triangle ‘is always colonisation pursued by other means, it is the interior colony’,44 and when Muldoon’s deepest conflicts begin to surface, the para-narrative dimension of ‘Yarrow’ (now inextricable from the Künstlerroman) is constantly embroidering this parallelism. Thus the poem cunningly locates a comicbook, anti-colonialist booby-trap on the next-door farm of the narrator’s childhood: I hear McParland’s cattle low as they plumb their murky bath for a respite from their cattle-sorrow: they’re not to notice, taped to the trough, an aerial and a battery-pack. (P, 351)

This wryly echoes his lament for (human) maternal security in an elongating double rhyme (‘cattle low / cattle-sorrow’). The internationalfreedom-fighting, sexually liberated super-heroine, S—, who planted the bomb, is the alter-ego (in the speaker’s fantasy world) of his mother, Brigid Regan. Varieties of rhythm and rhyme simulate the fluctuations between memories, fantasies and television images (the TV ‘zapper’ could detonate the imagined device), so that it is through the interplay of rhyme and half-rhyme that his enveloping desire for his dead mother is deflected onto the grief of the filmed ‘Spanish Lear’ (P, 349) for Cordelia: in a conventional envoy, her voice would be ever soft, gentle and low and the chrism of milfoil might overflow as the great wheel came full circle; here a bittern’s bibulous ‘Orinochone O’ (P, 391)

The short-lived full-rhyme (low / flow) projects an elegiac intensity of meaning back onto the vowel shift from ‘ever’ to ‘over’: this anodyne comfort for the speaker is then harshly challenged in the full-rhymed switch to Gaelic, the memory of his mother’s singing still marginally ironized by the contrasting English literary allusion.

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Establishing the exact place of the father in what is indubitably the mother’s book45 is a delicate task, especially when the interpenetration of the personal and the ideological is so important. In ‘Milkweed and Monarch’, the Russian connection again seems to masculinize the hidden life of Muldoon’s Künstlerroman: a troubled rhyme of ‘palaver’ with ‘father’ is lifted towards closure when it is capped with ‘samovar’ (the latter unexpectedly decorating the Muldoon parents’ grave) and, again, ‘father’: He looked about. Cow’s-parsley in a samovar. He’d mistaken his mother’s name, ‘Regan’, for ‘Anger’: as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father he could barely tell one from the other. (P, 330)

On the female side of the Oedipal equation in the same poem, the young woman onto whom the speaker’s filial/erotic feelings are deflected is identified with the outrageous S— from ‘Yarrow’ in a move to integrate the volume’s contrasting components: As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father the taste of dill, or tarragon – he could barely tell one from the other – filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother. Why should he be stricken with grief, not for his mother and father, but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter in Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon – he could barely tell one from the other – and why should he now savour the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin, as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

The most complex rhymes here either exoticize (‘tarragon / Oregon’) or affectionately demean (‘stricken / gherkin’) the polymorphous sexuality which the cult thinking of Muldoon’s generation had seen as helping ‘to circumvent repression and make the unconscious conscious’.46 Playing against them there is a reductive patterning heavily dependent on sameword rhyme: on the one hand a number of shifts between full rhyme (at first internal) and same-word rhyme (‘mother / other / smother / other’); on the other hand, a run of same-word rhymes with only one half-rhyming palliative: ‘father / father / savour / father’. Admittedly that palliative is what brings the speaker over to the father’s potentially adventurous gender-

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position. But then, the whole poem was set in motion by its initial unsettling of conventional gender decorum (I: father; II: mother) together with the special post-de Beauvoir meaning of ‘other’ which accrues to the word’s use in the poem (‘For “mother” read “other”’, Muldoon will say later, in ‘Errata’ [P, 445]). We know that we are heading towards the traditional villanelle closure which will bring together the first and third lines here. What remains in question is whether this will vindicate the new generation’s parental awareness as it is theorized by Deleuze and Guattari: ‘the father and the mother exist only as fragments’; or sustain the Oedipal effort to ‘engage in a symbolic foreclosure (the father as an empty position)’.47 The circularity of a form dependent upon same-word rhyme simulates the bafflement and the pain of such questions. The formal and thematic integration of Annals, the sense of varieties of rhyming vitality all modifying each other, is withdrawn in Hay (1998). If Annals was centripetal, Hay is centrifugal, its components flying off in all directions. At one extreme there is the opening poem, ‘The Mud Room’, which turns out to be a bravura performance releasing many of the kinds of linguistic extravagance Muldoon has developed since the mid-1980s: The journey is a self-delighting trek through the poet’s own mental landscape, a place shaped by puns, unlikely juxtapositions, by the machinations of rhyme through which one sound can generate another and send them off in a different direction (‘Haggadah / haggaday’, ‘brink / skating-rink’, ‘corridor / ordure’, ‘cardboard-box / Ultravox’).48

The speaker is the ‘familial’ Muldoon, a persona that was already in place in The O-O’s Party (1980, a children’s poem dedicated to Becky, Dan and Sarah Longley),49 but now able to indulge a linguistic exuberance which is more like Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear than either Byron or Nabokov. The poem is actually addressed to a wife, but a child-presence (like that in one of the ‘Dorothy Aoife’ poems, ‘The Birth’) is suggested by the tone as well as by the mode of narrative – an adventure tour of a domestic interior like Alice Through the Looking Glass or Cyril Beaumont’s The Wonderful Journey. The final poem of Hay, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, picks up not only the gastronomical drive of ‘The Mud Room’ (the ‘quest’ there is finally for a piece of cheese) but the whole extravert comic mode, its attempts to pull the book’s diversity together hilariously ineffectual. But at various points in the book this affectionately manic clowning is countered with powerful, bitter and reductive exercises which refine the penchant for same-word rhyme we saw in ‘Milkweed and Monarch’. Identical rhyme-words, as W.K. Wimsatt says, ‘can scarcely appear in a

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context without showing some difference of meaning’:50 She was such a dab hand, my mother. Such a dab hand at raising her hand to a child. At bringing a cane down across my hand in such a seemingly off-hand manner I almost have to hand it to her. ‘Many hands,’ she would say, ‘spoil the broth.’ My father took no hand in this. He washed his hands of the matter. He sat on his hands. (P, 442)

Bathos here in ‘They that Wash on Thursday’ is close to pain in as many ways as there are line-endings, while Muldoon tests out yet again ‘the father as an empty position’. Or a sardonic challenge is thrown down in ‘Rune’ for the critic who might try to improve on Muldoon’s Künstlerroman version of himself: What can I tell you? Though your quarry lies exhausted at the bottom of an exhausted quarry, to follow that lure will almost certainly end in failure. While I did indeed sink like a stone among bottles, cans, a fridge, a sink, a slab of marble granite or slate I’m not. (P, 450)

The dead-weight rhymes, ‘quarry / quarry’ and ‘sink / sink’, intensified by the repetition of ‘exhausted’, render a charge of frustration and dissatisfaction that the unwary reader may want to follow back into the ‘life’ behind the poetry, the ‘experience’ which animates ‘Incantata’. The ‘lure’ in question is a passage from ‘Mary Farl Powers: Pink Spotted Torso’ in Quoof: You saw through that flooded granite quarry to the wreckage of an Oldsmobile, saw, never more clearly, him unmanacle himself from buckled steel, from the weight of symbol, only to be fettered by an ankle. (P, 113–14)

But ‘Rune’ itself sidesteps such a memorial fixation (the artist, as Kristeva says, ‘does not divert his gaze from the infernal night that swallows Euridice,

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but still does not disappear himself’51). What the intertextual allusion supplies (its irony confirmed in the phrase ‘the weight of symbol’) is a potent image of ‘impure’ art which has failed to emerge free and clear from the life of the artist. Despite the insinuations of artistic narcissism or moral failure which are heightened by the line-end enervation – By the window of an All-Nite Café or a 24-Hour Bank I, too, stretched as if on a flowery bank and admired my shiny, former self, a self even then mired in the idea that what you saw was what you got […]

– there is no such aesthetic ‘impurity’ in the case of the ‘getaway car’52 which gives this poem its governing image. (Indeed all the intimations of creative drought or inertia in this volume are remarkable for the simultaneous rush of language to reassure.) As Nicholas Jenkins says, ‘the car or persona is ruthlessly used and then ditched in order to allow the crime or poem to happen’.53 Over and over again in this book the forms which rely on same-word rhyme, sestina, villanelle and refrain, paradoxically reinforce the feeling of circumferentiality, of propulsion away from any centre. One is reminded of Melville’s Ishmael (with whom the Muldoon protagonist identified in ‘Yarrow’), ‘not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern’ (Moby-Dick, chapter 96). In ‘The Little Black Book’ the sly, self-aware and wittily vindicated roving eroticist of Quoof can be ‘ruthlessly […] ditched’ by way of a blatant line-end refrain: It was Orla, as luck would have it, who introduced me to Roisin. The bramble-patch. The rosehip between her legs. What ever became of Sile? Sile, who led me to horse-worship between her legs. As for Janet from the Shankill, who sometimes went by ‘Sinead,’ I practiced my double back-flip between her legs. (P, 444)

All the difference of meaning that Wimsatt sees as possible in same-word rhyming has been withdrawn. The flexibility has to be ours as we read varieties of sexual behaviour, some of them polymorphous, into the schoolboy formula of the refrain. The result is reductive, bitter, bleak and

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anti-heroic in contrast to the jaunty picaresque treatment of such matters in Quoof. The bathos of the form allows no grace or favour to any of the poem’s participants, though the closure concedes the moral victory to Una: ‘I fluttered, like an erratum slip, between her legs’. Is rhyme being used here to vindicate a new persona, in line with the retrospective view of ‘the wild and wicked poems in Quoof’ (P, 413) ventured in ‘Sleeve Notes’? The latter sequence ends with the narrator saluting the Rolling Stones, who can make ‘a “Thou shalt” / of a “Thou Shalt Not”’, as he himself drives ‘home to my wife and child’ (P, 418). And there is no doubt that some of the excitement of Muldoon’s poetry up to and including ‘Yarrow’ hinged on his ambiguous engagement with the same kind of moral reversal he attributes to the Stones: The vision of a non-repressive culture, which we have lifted from a marginal trend in mythology and philosophy, aims at a new relation between instincts and reason, the civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations – they generate a new reality principle. (Herbert Marcuse)54

Do we, in consequence, have to see repression reinstated in Muldoon’s poetry? (As Anna Freud defines her father’s concept, its end result is that ‘primitive impulses are transformed, inhibited in their aims, and the drive energies belonging to them deflected to moral, ethical or socially higher aims’.55) As with any such question in reading Muldoon the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The difference is that in Hay, rather than the two answers occurring simultaneously, they seem sometimes to emerge separately at different points on the book’s trajectory. The fine marital love-poem, ‘Long Finish’, for instance, cannot be said to deflect its energies ‘to moral, ethical or socially higher aims’. The fact that the couple are caught eating ‘marchpane’ (a word for marzipan that Muldoon’s edition of the OED says was ‘superseded’ in 1494) together with the formal decision to combine, as Clair Wills says, ‘two intercut ballades’,56 hints at something consciously archaic. The two refrain rhymes are inclusive and accept their meaning from the context; but while one exploits the vernacular to this end, the other is traditional and ornate: Even now, as you turn away from me with your one bare shoulder, the veer of your neckline, I glimpse the all-but-cleared-up eczema patch on your spine

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and it brings to mind not the Schloss that stands, transitory, tra la, Triestine, between longing and loss but a crude hip-trench in a field, covered with pine boughs, in which two men in masks and hoods who have themselves taken vows wait for a farmer to break a bale for his cows before opening fire with semiautomatics, cutting him off slightly above the eyebrows, and then some. (P, 439–40)

The tinge of ironic medievalism makes full rhyme acceptable as a vehicle to explore the relationship between male aggressivity and sexual desire (one of Muldoon’s darker themes). But it can always be undercut by the same-word rhyming of the refrain. The ‘boughs / vows’ rhyme emerges because pine-boughs earlier graced the wedding ceremony, implicating violence not only in personal but in institutional gender relations. This reinforces the shock with which the apparent authority of the insistent full rhyme is exploded by the grotesque half-rhyme, ‘semi- / some’ with its grim recognition of complicity. The latter effect is further heightened by the half-sinister ‘tra la’ (see MacNeice’s ‘The Taxis’) in the corresponding line of the previous stanza. Similar multiple points of view emerge in relation to the peace issue. (‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself’ says Whitman, as unconcerned as Muldoon.) The traumatic resolving energies released in Annals seem to have been politicized by the sense of aftermath felt in Muldoon’s native province after the ceasefires of 1994. And while a comparison of his poem, ‘Aftermath’ (P, 448), with one of its sources, an early Longley poem called ‘Remembrance Day’,57 suggests a continued capacity to react against the redemptive vision of an older generation, his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’, looks back in spirit to Heaney’s ‘The Other Side’, written before the latter’s perspective on such issues diverged from Longley’s in North. At the climax of Muldoon’s poem, the servant-boy Patrick Muldoon (Muldoon père), caught on the brink of sleep, is imaginatively identified with an octogenarian Orange Grand Master to draw the shifting textures of Hay towards a powerful gesture of reconciliation at a number of different levels: For an instant it seems no one else might scale such a parapet of meadow cat’s-tail, lucerne, red and white clovers, not even the line of chafers and cheeselips

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that overthrow as they undermine when, light in the head, unsteady on his pegs as Anketell Moutray, he squints through a blindfold of clegs from his grass-capped, thistle-strewn vantage point, the point where two hay-ropes cross, where Cummins and his crew have left him, in a straw hat with a fraying brim, while they’ve moved on to mark out the next haycock. (P, 454)

At first, while picking up one or two internal rhymes which increase the momentum, we seem to be reading magnificent free verse. One can’t help being aware, along with the title, of the contextualizing epigraph which reflects on inferior grass-seed imported to the United States from what is now the United Kingdom: You made some mistake when you intended to favor me with some of the new valuable grass seed… for what you gave me… proves mere timothy.

By means of this snippet from ‘[a] letter from Benjamin Franklin to Jared Eliot’ the immigrant poet is deferentially claiming his place in the American tradition which grew out of Leaves of Grass; he does this in response not just to the Harvard occasion at which this poem would be performed but also to its genesis in a creative phase in which surrogate versions of himself and his family are presented as ‘brave Americans all’ (P, 443). The lines do display an expansive stylistic assurance to compete with Whitman’s or, say, Ashbery’s. But the note of apology to the American tradition and its tenets reminds us first that the assurance of ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’ would not have been possible without the long-poem stretch and stride of ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Incantata’, and secondly that this makes it dependent on a quite different (and alien) poetic. Looking back, such long lines could not lift as they do towards line-end, could not move with such confidence and energy of tone, such conviction and nonchalance of rhythm, without that rhyming master-plan about which Tim Kendall58 and Clair Wills59 have written so well. Unlike Whitman and his modern disciples, Muldoon is operating with the help of precisely what Robert Duncan deplored, ‘a convention within which and against which the poet orders his individual poetic movement’. Significantly, in ‘Yarrow’, where the template of 90 end-rhymes is in process of construction, the rhyming can be blatant, the cadence it sustains almost operatic, as my earlier examples make clear: the two passages I quote are 40 pages apart in the poem’s circling structure, yet are palpably orchestrated by an extended system of end-rhyming (‘low / sorrow’; ‘low / flow / O’). (‘Operatic’ is not a derogatory epithet, of course, once one has Whitman in mind – and his

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challenge is visible again in the long parallel clauses with which Muldoon brings his lament for Mary Farl Powers to its climactic close.) With ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’, however, the template (the rhyme-scheme of ‘Yarrow’) has become a semi-insulated past event, so that its activating stresses and strains in the new poem are almost invisible. This means that while we enjoy the sustaining rhythmical effect of the rhyme-scheme we have to ask whether its details, like those of Yeats’s A Vision, are more important for the writer than for the reader. Here again is the one-sentence stanza in question: For an instant it seems no one else might scale such a parapet of meadow cat’s-tail, lucerne, red and white clovers, not even the line of chafers and cheeselips that overthrow as they undermine when, light in the head, unsteady on his pegs as Anketell Moutray, he squints through a blindfold of clegs from his grass-capped, thistle-strewn vantage point, the point where two hay-ropes cross, where Cummins and his crew have left him, in a straw hat with a fraying brim, while they’ve moved on to mark out the next haycock.

Syntactically it falls into three parts: the last five lines render a kind of stasis preparing for the pre-creative vision (reminiscent of the end of ‘The Dead’) with which the poem concludes; the initial clauses anticipate the stanza’s main tension between siege and security by means of the lines ending respectively ‘scale’ (A) and ‘clovers’ (B); the central momentum then hinges on the claustrophobic threat implicit in the line ending ‘cheeselips’ (C) and the vulnerable yet spirited awareness in line 5 (which names Anketell Moutray) (E). These key line-ends each have a valency determined by the cumulative force of the predecessor rhymes in the template set up by ‘Yarrow’ (and in the previous stanzas of the new poem itself). I list at the end of the essay the predictive force of previous rhymewords in both the anticipatory and the central syntactic remits of the stanza (a force which has increased in urgency as one approaches the passage quoted). And in each of these related topoi of rhythmical activity it is clear that the rhymes are significantly gendered by their antecedents. The labial consonant ending of Rhyme A, with its active and artisan suggestiveness, sets out to dominate the yielding rhotacized possibilities of Rhyme B; but the implications of male grandiosity, vitality and aggressivity in Rhyme E waver under the unresolved pressure carried forward by Rhyme C from a vulnerable same-word echo through Lear’s (and to some

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extent the ‘Yarrow’ protagonist’s) heart-rending, ‘Look on her. Look, her lips’ (P, 387). (Significantly too, the creatures mounting young Patrick’s bed-frame ‘to overthrow as they undermine’ have crawled out of a picture by Mary Farl Powers given a powerful emblematic place in ‘Incantata’ [P, 334]). The powerful feminine resonances experienced at a musical and alogical level surface in the inviting yet dead figure of ‘Lizzie, / Hardy’s last servant girl’ in the poem’s final stanza, but they have already contributed to the superimposition of Moutray upon Muldoon as father-figure, something at once subjective, public and reconciliatory. What I am suggesting about ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’ is that the speaker’s extension of filial identification beyond his own family and community is rhythmically ratified from within the post-Oedipal remit of Annals. That remit had national as well as personal implications since, as Clair Wills points out, the poetic breakthrough in ‘Yarrow’ was prompted by a return from his new home to Ireland in 1992.60 And shrewdly, she puts her finger on the formal correlate of this fact for ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’: ‘since the rhyme scheme originated in “Yarrow”, we could say that a kind of ghostly maternal template is now structuring Muldoon’s work – the mother is an invisible frame or presence, even in poems which are ostensibly about the father’.61 Her comment on the rhyming chimes with an aperçu of Kristeva which sees the integration of the subject in terms of a series which will conclude (temporarily, never completely) in the metaphorical movement of identification with the imaginary Father which Freud calls ‘primary identification’ and which is the degree zero of the autonomy of the subject. As in Christian agape, this identification comes to us from above, from a third party (who, for the analyst, is the object of maternal love).62

And while I have emphasized the infinite delay which might be expected textually over any integration in the persona of the Muldoon Künstlerroman, Kristeva’s subsequent switch from the clinical to the critical, to thoughts about the semiotic threshold where rhyme begins, is illuminating: A hardy explorer of the same psychic landscapes, the artist pours or spends the identificatory symptom into original discourse: into style […]. He constantly produces multiple identifications, but he speaks them. Hypothesis: because more than any other he is in the grip of the ‘father in the individual prehistory’. Contrary to the widespread myth of the artist subject to the desire of his mother, or rather in order to defend himself against this desire, he takes himself […] for this ghost, the third party to which the mother aspires, for the loving version of the third party, for a pre-Oedipal father ‘who loved you first’ (say the Gospels), a conglomerate of both sexes (suggests Freud) …. ‘God is Agape’.63

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Table 1: Predictive force of previous rhyme-words

A

(Scale/) wheel/ oil/ overalls/ coal/ peel/ foil/ ale/ wall/ kael/ aerial/ oil/ seal/ talc/ wall/ skull/ ideal/ oil/ pail/ grail/ Martingdale/ ariel/ oil/ keel/ O’Neill/ ale/ oilc/ foil/ nightingale/ Parnell/ gale/ oriel/ oyl/ reel/ peel/ foil/ haol/ awl/ McCall/ skill/ coil/ deal/ oil/ school/ Cole/ rail/ haol/ keel/ hydrofoils/ reel/ voile/ gael/ howl/ O’Neill/ Martingale/ well/ ill/ reel/ phóil/ aureoles/ coal/ et.al/ hal/ mhaol/ fáil/ cochineal/ uriel/ cool/ Pall Mall/ wall/ dalk/ heel/ oil/ oriol/ cowl/ all/râle foil/ wheals/ wheel/ quails/ fields/ …*** carnteel/0il/ stalls/ charcoal/ Royal/ revealed/ hold/ scale/ …

B

(Clovers) aorta/ ad major/ jars/ senators/ coulter/ so rare/ Schaefer/ over/ caesura/ Excalibur/ saviour/ over/ Guinevere/ chivers/ Dover/ covers/ handover/ Gualqivir/ vamos a ver/ Severus/ quiver/ silver/ Emer/ Hanover/ oven/ reven/ never/ whosoever/ clabber/ scaevola/ kiowas/ ever/ over/ …*** barrier/ order/ char/ Killeter/ chafers/ collabor …/ clovers/ …

C

(Cheeselips) tarp/ scrap/ metacarp-/ slip/ arps/ slope/ slip/ slip/ R.P./ slip/ slip/ earp; slip/ slip/ scripps/ clipper/ slip/ crop/ arp/ slips/ slips/ herp-/ scarp/ lips/ tarp/ bib/ …*** turps/ scraps/ cheeselips/ …

E

(Moutray) moy/ Rob Roy/ Pomeroy/ Myrna Loy/ Loy/ Popeye/ Mountjoy/ Pomeroy/ corderoy/ tooralooralay/ Terdelaschoye/ Monterey/ Ballantrae/ Aughnacloy /Tray/ Lorelei/ …*** servantboy/ Moutray/ …

Notes 1 Paul Muldoon in a personal interview with Clair Wills, quoted by the latter in her Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 202. 2 Julia Kristeva, ‘A Question of Subjectivity – An Interview’ (reprinted from Women’s Review, 12, 1986, pp. 19–21), in Modern Literary Theory, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, 1989), p. 131. 3 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 24.

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4 Kristeva, Revolution, p. 65. 5 W.K. Wimsatt, ‘One Relation of Rhyme to Reason’, in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (New York : Noonday Press, 1962), pp. 153, 165. 6 Paul Muldoon, ‘The Key’, in Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 197. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 7 Bothy […] [Obscurely rel. to Ir., Gael. both, bothan, perh. cogn. w. BOOTH.] Booth […] [ME. bo (cf AL. botha, bothus […]) […]] Bathy– […] [mod. L., f. Gr. βαθυς […]] Whether or not Muldoon brought his ‘bow along with [him]’ as he promised to do in Why Brownlee Left (P, 91), he certainly did take with him across the Atlantic his much-used two-volume ‘reset version of the Shorter Oxford’, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) (here, p. v). 8 ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 4. 9 Edna Longley, ‘Northern Ireland: Poetry and Peace’, in The Dolphin, 29: Ireland: Towards New Identities (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1998), pp. 103–19. 10 W.B. Yeats, ‘To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’, in Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 208. 11 See Revolution, pp. 72–106 and 208–13. See also Raman Selden, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 83–84: ‘Sometimes she considers that modernist poetry actually prefigures a social revolution which in the distant future will come about when society has evolved a more complex form. However, at other times she fears that bourgeois ideology will simply recuperate this poetic revolution by treating it as a safety valve for the repressed impulses it denies in society.’ 12 Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 147. 13 ‘Northern Ireland : Poetry and Peace’, p. 105. 14 John Ashbery, ‘And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name’, in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 235. 15 Seamus Heaney, Field Work (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 58. 16 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (London: Routledge, 1959), pp. 48, 322. 17 Maureen Alden (Homer Beside Himself: Para-narratives in the Iliad [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]) uses this term for secondary narratives which reflect the thematic preoccupations of the primary narrative. 18 Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 204–12. 19 Brown, Life Against Death, p. 48. 20 Brown, Life Against Death, p. 322. 21 Brown, Life Against Death, p. 299. 22 Paul Muldoon, Quoof (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), p. 6. 23 See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 207: ‘– The soul is born, [Stephen] said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body.’ 24 Life Against Death, pp. 200–201. The poem quoted, ‘A Panegyric on the Dean’, is like

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‘The More a Man Has’ in having a County Armagh setting. 25 Gary Snyder, ‘Passage to More than India’ (from Earth House Hold, 1969), in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tullman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 410. 26 Revolution, p. 30. 27 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 144. 28 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 239. 29 See Michael Allen, ‘The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969–1987’, Southern Review, 31.3 (July 1995), pp. 736–38. 30 ‘Ideas of the Meaning of Form’, in Robert Duncan: A Selected Prose, ed. Robert J. Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1995), p. 25. 31 ‘Ideas of the Meaning of Form’, p. 29. 32 Kenneth Koch, The Art of Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 111. 33 Helen Vendler, ‘Anglo-Celtic Attitudes’, New York Review of Books, 6 November 1997, p. 57. 34 In a quite adversarial contribution to discussion of the Mahon poem with Medbh McGuckian and myself in 1983, Muldoon referred to ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ as ‘my mushroom poem’. (Textual arguments could obviously be adduced for the proposed relationship between the two poems.) 35 Paul Muldoon, ed., The Essential Byron (New York: Ecco Press, 1989). 36 The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 631. 37 The Verbal Icon, p. 165. 38 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p. 382. 39 David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), p. 38. 40 Lloyd, Anomalous States, p. 16. 41 Anti-Oedipus, p. 381. 42 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 348. 43 Anti-Oedipus, p. 146. 44 Anti-Oedipus, p. 170. 45 See the dedication: ‘In Memory of Brigid Regan (1920–1974)’. 46 Brown, Life Against Death, p. 321. 47 Anti-Oedipus, pp. 97, 171. 48 Peter Sirr, ‘The Poet at Play’, Irish Times, 24 October 1998, Weekend Review, p. 11. 49 The O-O’s Party, New Year’s Eve (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1980). 50 The Verbal Icon, p. 156. 51 Julia Kristeva, ‘Identification and the Real’, trans. Shaun Whiteside, in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 173. 52 See the ‘Acknowledgements’ pages of Hay. 53 Nicholas Jenkins, ‘For “Mother” Read “Other”: The Finely Spun Web of Muldoon’s Middle Years’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 January 1999, p. 9. 54 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (London: Sphere Books, 1973), p. 142.

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55 Sigmund Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Anna Freud (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 521. 56 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 193. 57 Michael Longley, No Continuing City (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 44. 58 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), pp. 227–30. 59 Reading Paul Muldoon, pp. 180–83, 207–209. 60 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 173. 61 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 208. 62 ‘Identification and the Real’, p. 170. To pursue Kristeva’s allusions to Freud in this and the next quotation see The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 452–61. 63 ‘Identification and the Real’, pp. 171–72.

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Muldoon and Pragmatism JOHN REDMOND

In this essay I want to look at the way Paul Muldoon, following Robert Frost, complicates the reading experience in a particular way, and I want to relate this complicating process, and the desire on behalf of both poets to activate it, to the influence of American pragmatism, particularly the influence on Frost of William James, and of Frost in turn on Muldoon. This complicating process, as I call it, settles on how both writers make it possible for the reader to read them quickly, while at the same hinting that a slower reading might be preferable, or even that a combination of slow and quick readings might be the most desirable. For Frost and Muldoon, the question of the time we spend with their poetry and the time we spend away from their poetry is an important one. If a writer makes the surface of his or her poetry look smooth (perhaps encouraging the reader to skate over thin ice), it means that he or she takes the superficial level of the poetry seriously. To quote Charles Simic quoting Paul Valéry: ‘We understand each other according to the speed with which we pass over words.’1 Frost and Muldoon often write poems which it is possible to read quickly, but this possibility goes along with, indeed reinforces, the impossibility of understanding them quickly. Muldoon’s debt to Frost is one that he has always been happy to acknowledge in interview: ‘I don’t say it idly that Frost is a big influence on me – though there are other influences. But I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m close to him.’2 Several of his poems include quotations from, and allusions to, the American’s work. One early example from Mules, and one which illustrates the centrality of slow and quick readings, is ‘The Country Club’. This includes seven lines from Frost’s poem ‘The Mountain’: ‘But what would interest you about the brook, It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter.’ ‘Warm in December, cold in June, you say?’ Doc Pinkerton was a great one for chapter and verse.

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‘I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all. You and I know enough to know it’s warm Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm, But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.’3

‘The Mountain’ features a colourful rural encounter of the kind we often find in Frost’s work – a passing stranger asks a local man about a nearby mountain which supposedly has a brook on its side. The obliging local describes the brook in suspiciously elaborate detail. Richard Poirier comments on this poem: The freedom of imagination has the qualities of a country tall-tale, and is a clue to a later admission of fact – the old man has never seen the brook. Neither apparently has anyone else though everyone is sure that it exists, including, by the end, the interlocutor, who can now be treated as if he were willing to join himself in a community mirage.4

The mirage is generated by language – ‘all the fun’s in how you say a thing’. Muldoon uses this poem in ‘The Country Club’ to lie beneath what might have been – but is not quite – a tale of marital infidelity. On a first reading, there seems not to be much to Muldoon’s poem. The narrator gets drunk with a woman whose husband is out of town. He drops her home then watches the dawn come up on his own. Later he learns from Doc Pinkerton that the mistakenly jealous husband has taken a shot at her. Reading the two poems together, however, other correspondences start to emerge. Both involve tales about what might have been but is not. Doc Pinkerton, who has perhaps been telling tales, ends the poem with the observation that he ‘can’t make head nor tail of it’. There are, in particular, correspondences between the woman in ‘The Country Club’ and the imaginary brook in ‘The Mountain’. She is ‘wearing a kiss-curl something like Veronica Lake’s’ and she kisses the narrator ‘wetly on the chin’ (my emphases). Their villa is on ‘the Heights’ (my emphasis). The ‘head’ of The Country Club, the initially puzzling opening with lines by Frost, is therefore subtly connected to the ‘tail’. In Frost’s poem the eponymous mountain is called, according to the local, ‘Hor’, and he identifies its boundaries with those of the township: ‘Hor is the township, and the township’s Hor’. Thanks to someone telling tales, which turn out to be false, the woman in ‘The Country Club’ has been misidentified as ‘the township’s whore’. At whatever speed we choose to read him, there is little doubt that

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Muldoon wants us to be able to read his poetry quickly, even if this is not the only way he wants us to read him. But this is something we are likely to gather from what he says about his work, rather than from the work itself – for instance, in two interviews with respect to the obviously difficult poem, ‘Madoc’. In the first, Muldoon remarks that ‘difficulty for its own sake is anathema to me. My aim was to write something that you could zoom through, rapidly turning the pages. I don’t want to create work for the reader – I’m not an employment agency’.5 In a later, more forthcoming interview, Muldoon referred, with great enthusiasm, to a bellhop he met in Wisconsin who had read ‘Madoc’ in one sitting.6 When the interviewer then asked him what he would think of anyone who chose to read the poem slowly, diligently looking up words and tracking down allusions, Muldoon, who described this (rather colourlessly) as pursuing ‘the other thing’, made a somewhat more sober reply: if I were advising someone how to read this book, I would say, ‘Start there, and go with it. Read it as a ripping yarn. Don’t too get too concerned about the other thing. If you want to get involved in the other thing, you can. And in fact there is a lot of it there. If you don’t know who Burr or Blennerhasset is, well, you may have to go and find out. But that’s okay. There are lots of things we have to go and find out. We have to go and find out, what red, what wheel and barrow are, at some level.’7

Muldoon’s emphasis on reading quickly presupposes different levels of understanding, and, in what seems an unusual move for such an obviously sophisticated artist, fails to privilege the deeper level. The fact that he takes someone as unpretentiously employed as a bellhop to be his ideal reader (and that employment should be – however flippantly – on his mind) gives us some idea of his attitude to this poem’s reception. Writing and reading are forms of work for Muldoon but they are not privileged forms of work – we shouldn’t insist that they detain a bellhop for too long. At the same time, we should not see them as less privileged forms of work. It is work which is the privilege. This is a point on which I believe Muldoon and Frost closely agree and on which I want to enlarge with respect to the influence on both of American pragmatism. At first glance, Frost’s poems direct us away from books to outdoors rural America, to a world of manual labour, a no-nonsense, practical world subject to queer and terrifying pressures. Because Frost can combine the windswept wisdom of an Old Testament prophet with the down-home charm of a Good Ole Boy, this hard world remains approachable. Frost is careful not to intimidate his more unsuspecting readers and that is why he

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has what Randall Jarrell calls his ‘easy’ side, a side which, as Louis MacNeice points out, makes him ‘a poet whom it is easy to read too fast’.8 Muldoon, unsurprisingly, is well aware of this quality in the American and has drawn attention to it. Of what is probably Frost’s best-known poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, for example, he has remarked that ‘the complexity is astounding, and yet it just flies off the page’.9 Frost’s double-edged populism is closely related to American pragmatism, particularly as it finds expression in the philosophy of another populist by temperament, William James. In 1898, full of admiration for such examples of James’s work as The Will To Believe, Frost had intended to study philosophy and psychology with the older man at Harvard – although he was to be denied the chance, owing to James’s fragile health.10 For Frost, as for James, reading is just another way of making sense of being in the world. Life, as they figure it, is a fight which requires our effort; truth is a quality, like health or strength, which must be renewed by continuous activity. So work is the essential metaphor of Frost’s poetry. Richard Poirier, in Poetry and Pragmatism, observes that for James, as for Emerson, ‘literature is a metaphor for work with language, work which might just possibly begin to help change existing realities, and only then if the work is carried on endlessly’.11 This work of imaginative effort is naturally a matter for the reader as for the writer. As a form of thinking about philosophy and poetry it steers clear of formulaic procedures and solutions, it evades rigid thinking. It is worth considering Muldoon’s poetics, which he has begun to outline in recent years, in this context. Muldoon has stated how concerned he is to avoid ready-made solutions for existential problems: ‘What I resist very strenuously is the superimposing of any particular world-picture, any kind of ism […]. I’m antipresciptive.’12 In To Ireland, I, this attitude is aligned with an examination of Irish poetic history by means of a seemingly facetious A–Z (beginning with Amergin and ending with Zozimus). This process, of course, is similar to the mock-investigation of philosophical history in ‘Madoc’. In each case, Muldoon seems to be gesturing away from a rigidly academic approach to knowledge, undermining the accepted procedures and categories. But Muldoon is doing more than being mischievous. He associates a ‘cryptic urge’ in the mythical Irish poet, Amergin, with that poet’s ‘tireless reinvention of himself as stag or flood or wind or tear or hawk’.13 Muldoon, like Frost, constantly brings us back to the activity of invention, an activity which is as essential for reading as it is for writing.

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As Cornel West describes it, American pragmatism, with Emerson as its father figure, ‘evades’ modern philosophy by refusing its ‘quest for certainty’ and its ‘search for foundations’.14 The philosophy of William James recognizes, in a way appealing to many poets, the importance of ‘vagueness’ to our thinking. As William Joseph Gavin observes, James distrusted all-embracing forms of rationalism, believing that a universe with possibility is one that is always likely to surprise us, to provide fresh problems: ‘To the end, James remained an advocate of the thesis that the human being can experience more than he or she can intellectually conceptualize, and that this “more” is important, and fundamentally so.’15 As Poirier points out, Frost’s verse is full of ‘vague conjecturals’ (‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’ [‘For Once, Then, Something’]).16 It is no accident that such conjecturals are also favoured by Muldoon. In Muldoon’s ‘Something Else’, for instance, the process of rhyming creates an arbitrary thread of meaning which reminds the narrator of Nerval walking a pet lobster ‘on a gossamer thread’. This in turn brings to mind how Nerval died hanging himself by a chain from a lamp-post: which made me think of something else, then something else again. (P, 173)

Now take the beginning of Frost’s ‘The Cow in Apple-Time’: Something inspires the only cow of late To make no more of a wall than an open gate And think no more of wall-builders than fools.17

Again we find the word ‘something’ but also a use of the construction ‘no more’. This too is a formulation of the vague to which Muldoon has resorted on many occasions, as in the following two examples from ‘Yarrow’: there’s no more relief, no more respite than when I scurried, click, down McParland’s lane […] (P, 392) For that bobolink was no more your common oriole than was Barton Booth your common blatherskite […] (P, 386)

Using these ‘no more […] than’ constructions helps Muldoon to create an air of conversational evasiveness. Instead of a precise, definite answer, we are given some, but only some, idea of whatever is in question. As in Frost the idiomatic, conversational style creates an impression of transparency,

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an impression which proves false as soon as the reader slows down and thinks carefully. Muldoon is surely inspired by the anti-systematic element in Frost’s poetry, which is expressed, at its most fundamental, in conversational vagueness, the pausing, wavering, rural voices which resist easy identification and keep the reader on the move. Hence the ‘serious’ playfulness of their work, which encourages the reader to expect surprises. James’s philosophy, after all, teaches us to anticipate that our ideas about the world will be overturned (so we must always be prepared to revise them). As Olaf Hansen puts it: The result of James’s effort to demystify the idea of truth was to keep alive the ability to adapt the new, to incorporate the unexpected, and in this sense too James’s opinions about life are very close to the repeated assertion of Thoreau that life only made sense being alive. The emphasis is on the activity, on the work involved, on the idea in other words, that in order to live our lives consciously we have to make sense!18

Frost’s ‘The Most of It’ is a representative attempt to capture this experience of newness and surprise. The poem opens with a lonely thinker, a melancholy Adam in an American Eden, who is seeking some response from the universe by throwing his voice across a lake. As the poem develops, something is returned from the cliff-face on the other side, something does come back but it is not what he expects: Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush – and that was all.19

This is tricky in a manner typical of Frost. As we follow the buck through the concluding lines, the speed of the poem increases in order to express his energy and violence. The last three lines are perfectly iambic and we exit the poem like a whizzing pinball. But, if we are alert, the caesura in the final line flips us back into the poem’s cunning angles. Now, reading more slowly, we look again at that poker-faced final phrase: ‘And that was all’? ‘All’, in what sense? Well, there are several plausible alternatives. Given a light stress on ‘all’ the concluding phrase could be taken as meaning that the buck, or the situation, was not of much significance.

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 :  

Given a heavy stress on ‘all’ it could be taken as meaning that the buck, or the situation, was all, ‘all that was of any significance’. A further possibility is to alter the iambic reading of the last three lines and to put the stress, in the final phrase, on ‘was’. In that case, the narrator would be assuring us that there was nothing more to be said, that we could pass on, quick interpreters that we are, to other poems. Taken on their own, any of these interpretations is relatively straightforward. But taken together, they cut against the colloquial, throwaway force of the phrase. Significantly different interpretations are possible depending on how the voice is manipulated. As in so many of his poems, Frost leaves us with an apparently simple message which is, in turn, a multilayered message about appearance and simplicity. In Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’, this cunning poem by Frost is cunningly considered. Muldoon suddenly drops a discussion of Frost’s poem (as he also drops a discussion of Plath’s last poem ‘Edge’) into a wild, narrative fantasy about his own life: in Frost’s great poem, ‘The Most of It’, the ‘talus’ refers not to a heel, of course, but the cliff-face or scarp up which his moose or eland will so memorably rear – ‘rare’, my da would have said […] (P, 385–86)

This digression into ‘literary criticism’ is no more surprising than many other twists in ‘Yarrow’ – in any case this is just the kind of surprise we would expect from Muldoon’s ‘pragmatic’ poetry. ‘Talus’ attracts Muldoon’s attention because it is probably the most unusual word in Frost’s poem and also because it chimes with, and anticipates, Frost’s conclusion: ‘that was all’. Having taken that point, we might be inclined to press on into Muldoon’s helter-skelter narrative, overlooking in the process his (probably deliberate) mistake. Frost’s buck ‘rears up’ out of the water on the narrator’s side of the lake. The cliff’s talus is on the other side. Now Muldoon obviously knows Frost’s poetry very well, and ‘The Most of It’ is one of Frost’s better-known poems, so what is the point of this mistake? As the phrase ‘of course’ is meant to indicate, Muldoon’s voice in this short digression is apparently assured, authoritative, like that of the professional critic. And yet despite borrowing the critic’s tone, he cannot decide between ‘cliff-face’ or ‘scarp’, ‘moose’ or ‘eland’, ‘rear’ or ‘rare’. This tonal indeterminacy is also a feature of the pragmatist heritage, distrusting

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intellectualist uses of words in favour of elusive tones and phrases. It is a practice which Richard Poirier places squarely within the American tradition: I want my readings of Stevens and of Frost […] to be coherent with an American pragmatist heritage that goes back to Emerson, a philosophical heritage that is unique for the privileges it accords to casual, extemporised, ordinary idiom, to uses of language that translate into little more than sound. The sounds reveal human presence that barely manage, and only then by virtue of their unobtrusiveness to frustrate any excluding, incipiently deconstructive forces that lurk in the more obdurate or, as James might say, intellectualist uses of words.20

Muldoon, then, in the passage from ‘Yarrow’, effectively asks us to choose between his version of ‘events’ or Frost’s. Reading this passage more slowly we realize that there is a deliberate vagueness at work, a vagueness that is quite consistent with other habits in Muldoon’s work. He sets up a duality in colloquial language which then undermines itself. This kind of process is well seen in an earlier poem in The Annals Of Chile, the villanelle ‘Milkweed and Monarch’, where the poet kneeling ‘at the grave of his mother and father’ can ‘barely tell one from the other’ (P, 329). Indeed, this colloquial elision of ‘one’ and ‘other’ is one of Muldoon’s signatures, evident in such poems as ‘Our Lady of Ardboe’ (‘I walk waist-deep among purples and golds / With one arm as long as the other’ [P, 51]) and ‘Identities’ (‘I have been wandering since, back up the streams / That had once flowed simply one into the other’ [P, 12]). As a poem such as ‘The Boundary Commission’ shows, this language of ‘one’ side and the ‘other’ responds to and embodies the political rigidities of Muldoon’s homeland: You remember that village where the border ran Down the middle of the street, With the butcher and baker in different states? Today he remarked how a shower of rain Had stopped so cleanly across Golightly’s lane It might have been a wall of glass That had toppled over. He stood there, for ages, To wonder which side, if any, he should be on. (P, 80)

In his use of this and other colloquial expressions of dualism, such as ‘this or that’ and ‘which is which’, Muldoon saturates his poetry with an impressive-sounding indecisiveness, constantly pointing out the danger of framing concepts too rigidly. In reply to Frost’s poem, where the buck struggles up one side of the lake, he creates a poem where the buck

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 :  

(moose? eland?) rears up the other side, but we can only see that he is doing this if we know one poem from the other, and only then if we read him quickly and slowly. Rural labour is an inescapably central metaphor in Frost and Muldoon (and, of course, in Heaney). As such it is to be respected but not idealized. Work itself can become stale and mechanical, a matter of mere efficiency rather than of fresh invention. ‘Out, Out –’ is perhaps Frost’s most memorable statement about the dangers of efficiency. A boy is sacrificed to a monotonous, mechanical form of labour when a chainsaw cuts his hand clean off: Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside them in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out of the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!21

Frost plays with the colloquial expression ‘to give a hand’, a metaphor for work and a working metaphor, a subtlety which, like the boy’s hand, is vulnerable to excessive speed. Clearing the American landscape with the primeval zeal characteristic of frontier culture, the labourers simply work too fast. They have no time for long conversations or quiet reflection and they let the snarling, rattling buzzsaw do most of the talking. The boy’s sister uses just one word, ‘Supper’, and the boy becomes supper for the saw. For a poet who regarded the sentence and not the word as the basic unit of sense, the sister’s unnatural terseness was naturally fatal. Images of losing a hand or an arm frequently occur in Paul Muldoon’s poetry, and the idea of the disembodied hand or arm is especially obvious in perhaps his finest long poem, ‘Yarrow’. The poem opens in a Frostian rural setting, with an image reminiscent of ‘Out, Out –’: Little by little it dawned on us that the row of kale would shortly be overwhelmed by these pink and cream blooms, that all of us would be overwhelmed, that even if my da were to lose an arm or a leg to the fly-wheel

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of a combine and be laid out on a tarp in a pool of blood and oil and my ma were to make one of her increasingly rare appeals to some higher power, some Deo this or that, all would be swept away by the stream that fanned across the land. (P, 346–47)

Later in the poem, Muldoon invokes the ‘pugilist-poet, Arthur Cravan’ whose arm appears enshrined on a wall (P, 353). The loss of anybody who commits suicide, such as Sylvia Plath, is one of the most pressing concerns in ‘Yarrow’, a concern which Muldoon expresses in a telltale colloquialism: ‘I’m thinking of those who have died by their own hands’ (P, 353). A further effect of this motif is to deepen the meaning of the plangent mysterious lines which, after an extraordinary sequence of cadences, conclude ‘Yarrow’: ‘it has to do with a trireme, laden with ravensara / that was lost with all hands between Ireland and Montevideo’ (P, 392; my emphasis). This repeated motif, with its unavoidable Frostian associations, is a good example of how Muldoon complicates the reading process, and how such complications are often bound up with the metaphor of work. Another example of this process is with respect to the question of home, which is related to the motif of hands. Home is connected to the task of work, of working to make oneself at home, and the work is connected to what one does with one’s hands. In Frost, that work, which is usually hard, manual labour, takes place under pressure, from moment to moment. In a discussion of the poem ‘Mowing’, Frank Lentricchia oulines what this sense of urgency means for Frost’s poetry: The didactic point of Frost’s difficult penultimate line [in ‘Mowing’, ‘The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows’] becomes clear and sharp against the background of the huge cultural claims for poetic function made by traditional theories of poetry from Aristotle to Wordsworth. The role of poetry for a poet who is constrained by inescapable labor is perhaps a diminished thing in the light of those earlier claims. But perhaps poetic function is newly enhanced, after all, in this kind of modern setting of work. Poetry now is a pragmatic personal urgency, an aid to getting by in a social setting which, for Frost (in this he is representative of the modern American writer), doesn’t make getting by very easy.22

But this urgency, this speed in Frost’s poetry is not a matter of mere efficiency – as ‘Out, Out –’ demonstrates. The speed of reading, or working,

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 :  

as Frost’s ‘The Master Speed’ expresses it, cannot be effective in the long run unless it can be arrested: No speed of wind or water rushing by But you have speed far greater. You can climb Back up a stream of radiance to the sky, And back through history up the stream of time. And you were given this swiftness, not for haste Nor chiefly that you may go where you will, But in the rush of everything to waste, That you may have the power of standing still –23

For Frost the most intimate relationship one can have to objects is to be possessed by them, the point, as I take of it, of his patriotic poem, ‘The Gift Outright’ (‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’).24 The intimacy of such possession is naturally a matter of work, a matter of making oneself at home, a matter of clearing forests, damming rivers and erecting houses, but it is harder to see that it is also a matter of being rejected and reversed, of being arrested and turned away. This, under the shadow of the meaning of the word ‘home’, is what Frost reflects on in ‘The Death of the Hired Man’. There a husband and wife consider whether or not to take in one of their old hired hands who has returned to die. The husband is more sceptical than the wife as to whether or not the farm that once hired him constitutes home for the labourer: ‘Home’, he mocked gently. ‘Yes, what else but home? It all depends on what you mean by home. Of course he’s nothing to us, any more Than was the hound that came a stranger to us Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.’ ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’ ‘I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’25

Such questions of what can be called home are particularly urgent in the context of Northern Irish poetry. Linguistic crossing-over in Northern Ireland, where accent and dialect are still all-important signs of identity, has also been represented, by poets, in terms of shibboleths. The bestknown example of this is Seamus Heaney’s ‘Broagh’, where the pronunciation of the eponymous place-name includes ‘that last / gh the strangers

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found / difficult to manage’.26 In turn, Muldoon parodies this shibboleth in the long poem ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, where the fantastic shapeshifter ‘Gallogly’ finds he is having the same difficulty as the Ephraimites: Sheugh, he says. Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage. (P, 135)

In Northern Irish poetry the right of way, the path variously termed a ‘loaning’, a ‘kesh’, a ‘causey’ and a ‘causeway’, has frequently been used as a metaphor for travelling (not necessarily in an entirely benevolent manner) across divisions – the fact that there are many terms for the right of way is itself an occasion of shibboleth (‘A kesh could mean the track some called a causey’27). In ‘Yarrow’, Muldoon prefers the word ‘loaning’, the meaning of which, as the OED indicates, has a sense of fair transaction. In ‘Cows’, the poem which immediately precedes ‘Yarrow’ in The Annals of Chile, Muldoon uses the Irish word for lane, ‘boreen’ – a word which has entered the English language – as his central metaphor. This word too is a potential shibboleth and Muldoon helpfully glosses it: (a diminutive form of the Gaelic bóthar, ‘a road’, from bó, ‘a cow’, and thar meaning, in this case, something like ‘athwart’, ‘boreen’ has entered English ‘through the air’ despite the protestations of the O.E.D.) […] (P, 345)

Frost’s cow in apple-time, which ‘makes no more of a wall than an open gate’, lies down, here, to make a ‘wall’ on an open track. The Irish for ‘cow’ lies across the front of a word in the OED as if to bar admittance to linguistic outsiders. As the narrator wanders along this boreen, towards the kind of lonely rural encounter we might expect in a Frost poem, he spies a truck which, he thinks, might be up to something sinister – somebody perhaps is smuggling hi-fis, or even smuggling arms. The narrator’s somewhat academic speculations, which had included such obviously exotic words as ‘emphysemantiphon’, ‘metaphysicattle’ and ‘oscaraboscarabinary’, are cut short. This is where pragmatic urgency overcomes the desire for literary game-playing, as Muldoon has himself commented on the poem: One of the things ‘Cows’ is saying is forget that world, forget about the meaning of ‘oscaraboscarabinary’. It is saying that is completely by the way,

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 :  

that is irrelevant compared to the reality of standing on a road on a dark night and not knowing what is going to happen next.28

As in such poems as ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’ (‘“You ought to get down to something true, / Something a little nearer home”’ [P, 41, my emphasis]) and ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, the narrator’s ‘high-fidelity’ voice gives way to a gruff, yet complicated, parody of IRA shibboleths: Enough of Colette and Céline, Céline and Paul Celan: enough of whether Nabokov taught at Wellesley or Wesleyan. Now let us talk of slaughter and the slain, the helicopter gun-ship, the mighty Kalashnikov: let’s rest for a while in a place where a cow has lain. (P, 346)

Céline is juxtaposed with Celan, because of the obvious phonetic similarities. But Céline, a writer who was (like Ezra Pound, like Francis Stuart) for a period sympathetic to Fascism, is tensely juxtaposed (to say the least) with Celan (who is so tellingly rhymed with slain). The vigour and gravity of this faux-Republican voice undermines itself – to talk of Céline and Celan, Celan the suicide, is to ‘talk of slaughter and the slain’. The voice is eventually arrested in the colloquial indecisiveness of the last line with its homely Frostian monosyllables. Throughout all this, the image of disembodied arms in ‘Yarrow’ is given its military spin where there is a suggestion of smuggling arms for cash, of an ‘arms-cache’, a transaction on the ‘kesh’, hence the appearance of the ‘Kalashnikov’, a word as exotically arresting as a word favoured by Celan, ‘Kaddisch’. It is this ‘rest’ in the final line, the ‘rest’ which the boy might have taken in ‘Out, Out –’, which gives us the chance to think back on the poem and tease out these implications. When we stop in our reading of ‘Cows’, when it arrests us, we start to understand it.

Notes 1 Charles Simic, Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 92. 2 ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 10. 3 Paul Muldoon, ‘The Country Club’, in Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), pp. 64–65. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 4 Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 111.

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5 ‘Way on Down the Susquehana’, interview by Blake Morrison, The Independent on Sunday, 28 October 1990. 6 ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature 35.1, pp. 1–29, at p. 12. 7 Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 14. 8 Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), p. 36; Louis MacNeice, Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 245. 9 Muldoon in John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 130–42, at p. 133. 10 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years 1874–1915 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 238. 11 Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 95. 12 Keller, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 8. 13 Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 5. 14 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 36. 15 William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), p. 45. 16 Poetry and Pragmatism, p. 145. 17 In The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), p. 124. 18 Olaf Hansen, Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, and James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 182. 19 In The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 338. 20 Poetry and Pragmatism, p. 166. 21 In The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 136. 22 Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 101. 23 In The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 300. 24 In The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 348. 25 In The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 38. 26 In Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 27. 27 Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. 90. 28 Redmond, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 14.

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‘All That’: Muldoon and the Vanity of Interpretation JOHN LYON

I could really make nothing of the business; it proved a dead loss. After all I had always […] liked him: and what now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn’t even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less […]. It was humiliating, but I could bear it – they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion – perversely, I allow – by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose. Henry James1 We’re not beginning to… to… mean something? Samuel Beckett2

In but one of so many Muldoonian tricks and twists, ‘A Trifle’ from the collection Quoof puts the issue of significance, of meaning, overtly in question, from its title onwards: A TRIFLE I had been meaning to work through lunch the day before yesterday. Our office block is the tallest in Belfast; when the Tannoy sounds another bomb alert we take four or five minutes to run down the thirty-odd flights of steps to street level. I had been trying to get past a woman who held, at arm’s length, a tray, and on the tray the remains of her dessert—

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a plate of blue-pink trifle or jelly sponge, with a dollop of whipped cream on top.3

All critics agree that this sonnet is about insignificance, but all critics are intent on revealing the significance of such insignificance. For one reader, the routine mundanity of Belfast bomb alerts is momentarily relieved by the small wonder of a trifle in a vicariously erotic moment, an encounter with a vaguely mammary dessert. But for the same reader, the poem attains altogether greater significance when seen in dialogue with Seamus Heaney who, in comparable though not identical circumstances as bombs exploded in Belfast, decided to abandon a poetry recording. Heaney’s subsequent ponderings of such an abandonment are diagnosed by the Muldoon poem as the indulgent self-regarding posturings of a dilettante, posturings which those leading their everyday lives in troubled Belfast cannot afford. Where our first reader finds the trifle itself wonderful, a second finds it absurd and politically ugly, signifying, as it does, in the fading, merging colours of blue and pink and white, the Union Jack – or, more accurately, the Union Flag. Thus the poem, now immediately political and presumably Republican in sympathy, is an exposé of the tenacity and perfidy of the monolithic British state, and the poet is right in his frustrated eagerness to get past it. Moreover, the second reader appears to take up the mammary suggestions of the first, yet finds the trifle not erotic, but signifying the tit of imperial subsidy which Northern Ireland receives from Westminster. A third reader also begins analysis of the poem with an overt political emphasis, seeing the poet on hunger strike (working through lunch), presumably – unless this is merely a remarkably tasteless joke – in sympathy with Republican prisoners on hunger strike at a time contemporary with the poem itself. Yet, like our first reader, our third deems the trifle itself to be a small treasure, something to be saved and savoured in the midst of chaos. A fourth reader finds neither redemption nor political commitment, but dark irony: concentrating on the dessert the woman carries, attending to all the words of its description – ‘blue-pink’, ‘trifle’, ‘jelly’, ‘sponge’ and to that disarraying, disordering ‘or’, this reader finds in the poem a hallucinatory prevision of the other remains, the human remains, to which this incident might so easily lead. On this reading, the poem is very far from trifling, in any sense. And finally, in another discussion, our first reader returns to elaborate that first reading, to insist on the monotony and routine of bomb alerts, and to insist that trifles redeem life and make it worth living: a politically unjust dessert has become sacramental.4

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 :  

What are we to make of these triflings with terrors? It seems unlikely that we will convict any of our interpreters of actual errors, though various details in the poem put some strain on each reading. (Confronting the obscure and arcane in Muldoon, critics typically reach for erudition: much is to be said for a prior precise attention, an initial literal-mindedness.) If this bomb alert is so mundane and routine, why is the poet in such a hurry to get out, unchivalrously trying to ignore the familiar injunction about women and children first? And how – unless with the knowledge of hindsight which, in such cases, is no knowledge at all – are we to be sure that this is merely another alert and not the prelude to an explosion? How vague can breasts be and still resemble breasts? (In turn, the dark reading which fearfully anticipates human remains renders this a ghastly question.) Is the poet going hungry? (Many a working lunch extends to a sandwich at the desk or indeed to much more elaborate fare.) Contrariwise, if the poet is hungry, does this alter his relation to that trifle, his interest arising from an appetite simpler than the sexual? The colours of the Union Flag must fade (as they do), and the flag itself must lose shape (as it can) to sustain a plausible presence in the poem. Do such interpretive divergences matter? Doubtless we can generously acknowledge that each reading is not without plausibility and we can acknowledge, as readers of readers, that some readings typically prove more attractive to us personally. But more puzzlingly, some of these readings are incompatible with each other. In particular, these readings are at odds over the attitude to, and the value to be placed on, the trifle itself. For some, the trifle and the preserving of the trifle are triumphs, albeit small triumphs. For others the trifle and its preservation represent an ugly absurdity, worthy only of contempt (indeed, there is a little quarrel between religion and politics going on here). The puzzle grows when we recognize that the interpretative discrepancies arise from readers writing at much the same time, in much the same academic and journalistic circumstances, and publishing in similar ways and similar places. Perhaps we have learned with Stanley Fish to stop worrying and love interpretations, however diverse and mutually contradictory, and perhaps such terms as ‘postmodern’ and ‘poststructuralist’ – and the hermeneutical theories which accompany them – might be deployed to solve our problem. But this would be to move away from the particular case, and I submit that most readers, academic and otherwise, will remain dissatisfied here and remain uncomfortable with the reminder, yet again, of the half-truism that interpretations tell us so much more about the interpreter than about the work being read.

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‘A Trifle’ seems to provide some support for any of the readings above. But the poem might also be said to resist all interpretations. So other oddities about the poem may be remarked. First, with regard to the value to be placed on the trifle itself, the poem, like so many Muldoon poems, is attitudinally neutral or blank, and thus the various divergent valuings are the critics’, not the poet’s. Moreover, here ‘four or five minutes’ and ‘thirty-odd flights of steps’ are examples of a typical Muldoonian trait – a trait which critics repeatedly claim makes for a scrupulous accuracy – but which in fact brings play and imprecision to the poem, a loosening of specificity. Time too appears vague: set ‘the day before yesterday’, the poem plays odd games with verb tenses, beginning octave and sestet with the pluperfect, moving in the octave to the present, and in the sestet to the past. The poem’s location in time is unstable and its place in history, in this minor way, unfixed. Because of the instability of verb tenses, the narrative interrelations between the three sentences which make up the poem are also loosened. Most oddly, perhaps, the final two lines of the sonnet introduce, with an ‘or’ which, however throwaway, is exclusive rather than inclusive, a final alternative which undoes the poem, renders the title a misnomer and may entirely remove that contentious trifle from the field of interpretation. A final trick may wrest the poem away from any of the many meanings which its critics have been endeavouring to find in it: the poem then appears in flight, not from any particular meanings, but from meaning generally. With a final seemingly generous garnish of whipped cream, the poem, in effect, disappears, leaving readers caught between pointlessness and self-regard. It is a good joke, played and replayed with dazzling variations throughout Muldoon’s verse. But it is also a cruel joke since it is indiscriminate, catching all readers, however attentive or casual or partisan. And it is a drastic joke, since it involves the removal of so much of Muldoon’s verse, not merely from the political arena as is sometimes supposed, but from the semantic field in its entirety. It is not for nothing – or, more precisely, it is for nothing – that Muldoon’s poem ‘Quoof’ appears as the final entry in The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry. As Hugh Haughton, the editor of that anthology, points out, nonsense poetry has many rich formal pleasures, patternings for the ear (and eye) to savour, pleasures particularly associated with the world of childhood and the child-like, and with childhood’s freedoms and playfulnesses. Something similar can be said and has been said very well of Muldoon’s verse. But, as Haughton also points out, nonsense verse also has its serious side: indeed nothing may be more

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 :  

serious than imagining nonsense as ‘a liberating way of dealing with the intolerable’.5 Here again the invitation to set up analogies with a poet born in troubled Northern Ireland is tempting. The strength of Muldoon’s poetry – though it is not clear whether the poet, particularly in his academic manifestations, always takes this view – lies in its extraordinarily inventive capacities to resist or elude interpretation and thus to mock its interpreters. His verse is at its best and most characteristic when it resists interpretation, and something less than that when it accommodates, or indeed, solicits, interpretative richness. As a reader, unless one is in thrall to narcissistic musing, one is persuaded of the worthwhile nature of one’s own responses only if one senses that one is, in some way or other, engaging in a meeting with another mind. And Muldoon often reassures one of that other mindful, controlling presence in the oddest and most extreme way possible – by finally and entirely removing the object of attention from one’s scrutiny. So, as the epigraph above suggests, Henry James’s masterpiece ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, itself much interpreted, offers an apposite and viciously comic commentary on the reception of Muldoon’s verse. In that story, we are invited to puzzle, with our narrator and his fellow readers, over the writings of the celebrated novelist, Hugh Vereker, writings which are entirely – and in this case, literally – withheld from us. The critical mayhem which ensues is truly ghastly. The interpreters within the tale are nightmarish reflections of ourselves as readers: they turn the world upside down in their obsessive pursuit of literary meaning. Life’s large events – marriages, engagements, illnesses, and deaths – are subordinate, merely a means to interpretative fulfilment. Particularly apposite to the experience of reading Muldoon is James’s wonderful account of the instability of pleasure and frustration in the reading process, of the tension in the works studied between the buried and profound, and the jokey and posed. In writing of the disjunction, indeed the opposition, between the ‘subordinate intentions’ devoured in the process of reading and the overarching ‘general intention’ James provides a precise analogue for the enticing yet resisting writing of Muldoon. This is the Muldoon whose poetry, according to Peter McDonald, ‘begins by courting the interpretations it will finally reject’,6 the poet about whose works Sean O’Brien writes of ‘the Chinese-food feel of these poems: they’re more-ish but afterwards you wonder what or whether you’ve eaten’.7 This is Muldoon as adolescent escapologist who himself admits, Of course I sometimes make little jokes and I do, quite often, engage in leading people on, gently, into little situations by assuring them that all’s well

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and then – this sounds awfully manipulative, but part of writing is about manipulation – leaving them high and dry, in some corner of a terrible party, where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window.8

But this is a very odd position to be in, since it puts severe limitations on critical interpretation. What can be said quickly becomes vain, yet Muldoon’s critics seem reluctant to recognize that the party is so soon over.9 A brief excursion into contemporary literary theory and the examination of two uncharacteristic moments in Muldoon’s verse allow us to take the measure of Muldoon’s resistance to meaningfulness. The Barthesian celebration of the role of the reader, and deconstruction more generally, might seem to have eliminated the authority of the writer, but if Henry Staten in his study Wittgenstein and Derrida is to be believed, the notion of authorial intention is less damaged than we might have thought: Derrida does not deny intention or the possibility of communicating an intended meaning; what he denies is the possibility of saturation of language by intention, the possibility that meaning can be absolutely full in the sense of the precise correspondence […], an absolutely perfect sort of fit between intention and expression.10

Although such saturation may (or may not) be an ideal, we can recognize it as the aim of much writing, writing more conventional than Muldoon’s. Moreover, as readers of verse, we commonly diagnose weak writing, writing not under the poet’s control, by identifying apposite but unintended meaning in play in the writing. Certainly, T.S. Eliot was interested in the perhaps impossible ideal of semantic saturation, famously writing of the seventeenth-century sermonist Lancelot Andrewes that ‘Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess’.11 And it is now difficult to read such a description without the example of the contemporary poet, Geoffrey Hill, and of Hill’s characteristic relation to language, springing immediately to mind. In this, as in so many other ways, Hill proves to be Muldoon’s antithesis. And, in contrast, one can never be sure of the appositeness of what springs to mind in the case of Muldoon’s verse. But is, perhaps, this notion of a full juice of meaning invoked and mocked in Muldoon’s tongue-in-cheek offer of nouvelle cuisine at the end of ‘The Frog’? There is, surely, in this story a moral. A moral for our times. What if I put him to my head

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 :  

and squeezed it out of him, like the juice of freshly squeezed limes, or a lemon sorbet? (P, 120)

Again we have the end of another poem in Quoof but not its closure, since Muldoon is reluctant to come to rest in any formulation, and, as in ‘A Trifle’, a final culinary doubling introduces an alternative, a refusal to be pinned down. (Moreover, as in the discussion of ‘A Trifle’ above, one could easily gather a range of critics offering diverse explanations of the significance of that refusal of significance.) Muldoon’s words rarely come back on themselves; they typically mutate into something else and establish a connection, for example, by way of sound, a connection which typically resists any easy or persuasive discursive elaboration. It is interesting, therefore, to examine two uncharacteristic moments in Muldoon, two anomalous moments of meaningfulness which make the poet’s more usual, fugitive relation to sense clearer by juxtaposition. These two moments focus on, and return to, individual words and attempt a saturation of their meanings. It is no accident that these words are ‘certain’ and ‘determined’; that they involve the master of style and lover of chance and serendipity in some untypical laboured writing, as though this way of thinking of words and meaning is alien to him; or that they come from poems which true aficionados are reluctant to see at the centre of the Muldoonian canon. Momentarily and locally anomalous though it may be, ‘7, Middagh Street’ is in its larger structure typical of Muldoon: the poet’s own voice is absent from seven ventriloquized and interlinked monologues, and the poem, having a corona-like form, has its tail in its mouth, with its final line returning, slightly altered, to its first. Addressing the relation of art and politics, the issue which dominated the twentieth century, the poem thus does not allow us to recover Muldoon’s own position on that large matter. In the first section of the poem, voiced by ‘Wystan’, the Auden of ‘poetry makes nothing happen’12 interrogates Yeats and finds him wanting in having failed, to borrow the terms of Muldoon in discursive mode, to ‘take into account […] all possible readings of [his] poem’:13 As for his crass, rhetorical posturings, ‘Did that play of mine send out certain men (certain men?) the English shot…?’ the answer is ‘Certainly not.’

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If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead Would certain men have stayed in bed? (P, 178)

Here ‘certain’ is made fully alive in its diversity of meanings, in rebuke of the inattentive Yeats: some men, particular and known yet here coyly unnamed men, men of conviction. In particular, it is the suggestion that Yeats’s writing was addressed to men already long since committed and convinced which declares the redundancy, coming too late, of Yeats’s poetry as political intervention, and so does so much damage to Yeats’s posturing anxiety over his political influence. But the somewhat laboured repetitions – ‘certain’, ‘certain’, ‘Certainly not’, ‘certain’ – and the resort to italicizing emphasis suggest that Muldoon, ventriloquizing Auden here, is finding himself in unfamiliar territory. (The poetry is more characteristic of Muldoon in the way that the subsequent rhyme of ‘pencil-lead’ and ‘bed’ quickly puts lead in its pencil-sketch of the camp Auden.) And where do the ironies end? The apolitical Auden is arguing for the certainty of poetry’s political irrelevance or irresponsibility by calling attention to poetry’s responsibilities to language. Are we to see here an endorsement of Auden’s separation of politics and the notion of ‘writing well’?14 Or a critique of Auden’s perhaps too easy segregation of political and linguistic responsibility, an exposure of the way Auden may merely be replacing one false certainty with an opposite and equally false certainty? But Muldoon’s poetry does not pause long over this moment of linguistic intensity in order to further such questions, since ‘7, Middagh Street’ has formal certainties of its own to fulfil, including a further, unMuldoonian certainty in a later assertion by ‘Louis’ (Louis MacNeice) that poetry ‘must’ make things happen (P, 192). The second example of meaningfulness again finds Muldoon unsure and uncharacteristically spelling it out by way of an italicized prefix. Approaching the dead centre of ‘Incantata’, Muldoon’s elegy for Mary Farl Powers, the poet snags on a word and turns back on his own use of language in a moment of linguistic attention of a kind unusual in Muldoon: To use the word ‘might’ is to betray you once too often, to betray your notion that nothing’s random, nothing arbitrary: the gelignite weeps, the hands fly by on the alarm clock, the ‘Enterprise’ goes clackety-clack as they all must; even the car hijacked that morning in the Cross, that was preordained, its owner spread on the bonnet before being gagged and bound or bound and gagged, that was fixed like the stars of the Southern Cross.

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 :  

The fact that you were determined to cut yourself off in your prime because it was pre-determined has my eyes abrim […] (P, 336)

Again a word attains to a difficult, indeed contradictory fullness of meaning: in ‘determined’ as both ‘fated’ and ‘willed’, Muldoon realizes the intolerable impasse of tragedy as inevitability, something inescapable, and tragedy as waste, something all too easily avoided. Even here Muldoon manages what Michael Allen has called ‘a wry inversion’,15 a Muldoonian double, where the voice stages its own frail protest in the face of such intolerable realization, describing the hijack victim as ‘gagged and bound or bound / and gagged’. Again, as with Auden on Yeats’s ‘certain’ above, the way with words which Muldoon encounters here is not his own, but Mary Farl Powers’. Confronted by this prison-house of language, in a context which, as in ‘A Trifle’, is again potentially explosive and intensely aware of the passage of time, Muldoon’s own response is again to seek to escape, or at least to hide: I crouch with Belacqua and Lucky and Pozzo in the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry, trying to make sense of the ‘quaquaqua’ of that potato-mouth; that mouth as prim and proper as it’s full of opprobrium, with its ‘quaquaqua’, with its ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq’. (P, 336)

Muldoon’s own preference is to wrestle with nonsense, with the elusive yet allusive (here to Beckett and Joyce). At the centre of this verbosely eloquent elegy, Muldoon chooses ‘sound alone’.16 We have seen Muldoon as escapologist, resisting meaning, but there are other Muldoons. If an author is, as Foucault has it,17 the principle of thrift in a poem’s meanings, then Muldoon as author is at once extraordinarily profligate and remarkably miserly: anything goes and, as we have seen, nothing goes. One problem is that, in comments on his own work, both discursive and poetic, Muldoon gives himself and his readers so many getout-of-jail-free cards that it is difficult to see what kind of game or games we are playing, and to see what constitute effective moves in the playing of such games. Muldoon’s poetry is superabundantly self-conscious and selfcritical. Like the hero of his own poem, ‘Twice’, Muldoon, never content with one when two (or more) will do, has Mary Farl Powers accuse him, pre-emptively, in ‘Incantata’ of being ‘“Polyester” or “Polyurethane”’ (P, 334). The doubled self-accusation is there again in ‘Who gives a toss / about your tossing off?’18 and Muldoon might seem to get to the bottom

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of things not once but twice as voices within the poems diagnose a tendency to self-regarding elusiveness: S—’s accusation, ‘your head’s so far up your own fat butt / you’ve pretty much disappeared’ (P, 383), redoubles the self-protection involved in an account which had already found Muldoon merely engaged in an ‘inept / attempt to cover [his] arse’.19 But the stubborn fact remains that overt self-awareness does not cancel the games which the verse plays. In discursive commentary, Muldoon is remarkably accommodating, pursuing an inclusiveness of declarations which is not shy of what may be described, kindly as paradox, cruelly as contradiction. On occasion he locates meaning with the author: I think that the writer should be alert to all these possible readings. And alert to the curtailing of possible readings that are not productive. And I don’t care what people say, it’s the writer who does that. And the points at which he doesn’t do it are the points at which there is confusion […]20

More fully, more paradoxically, and perhaps more subtly: So. What can I tell you? You have before you a person who (1) argues for the primacy of unknowing yet insists on almost total knowingness on the part of the poet as first reader […]. To those of you whom I hear mutter, ‘Get over yourself’, I can merely suggest, however feeble it sounds, that it is partly out of this muddle of contradictions that I continue to try to make ‘a ware’. Go figure.21

But, on another occasion, author as reader loses his primacy, and authorial aggression gives way to coy self-deprecation: I thought I’d try this afternoon to make some sense of a long poem in my new book. This long poem is called ‘Yarrow’, and I’ll be reading from it and several other poems within its planetary system for most of the next hour. As you know, though I was the medium through which this poem was written, I’m now just another poor, dear reader trying to find the appropriate angle of entry of its atmosphere. You’ll notice that I used the term ‘entry’, rather than ‘re-entry’: it must have been at that very moment my space-shuttle metaphor broke down.22

And then Muldoon can play the all-licensing mystic, locating the poetic impulse that makes conceits, not in the mind of the poet, but in the world or in the language: ‘I immediately see a connection. Put more graphically, a connection sees me.’23 Even more unguardedly: I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they’re not imposed, somehow, on the language. They are inherent in the

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 :  

language. Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. I believe… I was almost going to say ‘I accept the universe!’ I believe in the serendipity of all that, of giving oneself over to that. It’s only one way of looking at it of course. I’m certainly not saying that’s the only way one can write poems. It’s the way I happen to write poems at this moment. That might change.24

Go figure? Or don’t go there? It all coheres yet retains the freedom to change, to be open to chance. Certainly, the way (or at least one of the ways in this slippery passage) of thinking of language here is markedly alien to contemporary critical approaches, and it is for others, more immediately persuaded of Muldoon’s acuity here, to pursue and elaborate these matters. What is more immediately depressing is that the diverse plurality of Muldoonian pronouncements might all too easily be taken to license an interpretive free-for-all whereby a sleight of hand allows Muldoon to remain, ostensibly at least, as valorized author amidst endlessly proliferating readerly musings: anyone and everyone is a player, but it is unclear which game is being played, and who or what is organizing ‘all that’. There is, then, a Muldoon who is prepared to party, to forfeit the role of adolescent escapee for that of aspiring philosopher, and whose writings are flattered by, rather than resistant to, the exegetical attentions of the critics. Some of the poetry neither disappears nor aims for the saturation of meaning in the ways described above, but offers an open-ended suggestiveness, an invitation to the profound, the precocious and the precious. This is a Muldoon who, like the goats in his poem ‘The Mudroom’, and with heavy-handed enjambment, ‘delight[s] to tread upon the brink / of meaning’ (P, 395) – although a literalist must insist, against the extraordinary semantic licence which Muldoon allows himself, that, while the anthropomorphized goats of mythology and Muldoon himself may do so if they choose, goats do not so delight. Particularly in the recent collection, Hay, where we find ‘The Mudroom’, the resisting author seems to be giving way to the irresistible author. Muldoon is in the odd position as author of deliberately seeking to open his writing up to the linguistic space which more usually has attracted the attentions of deconstructive critics, the margins in discourse usually lying beyond the saturation of meaning which more conventional authors strive for. In apparent recompense for such semantic loosening or openness, Muldoon replaces semantic control with a formal control which is now attaining monstrous proportions: thus, for example, the long poems in Hay ‘rhyme’ with the long poems in

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the earlier collection, The Annals of Chile, affording the critics yet more opportunities for ‘discovering’ semantic and thematic connections. Moreover, this formal structuring places the poet in the odd position of cultivating the intertextual and of eroding the autonomy of the individual text in ways more familiar to us from the writings of anti-authorial, deconstructive critics. So Nicholas Jenkins writes: One effect of this massive broadening via ‘rhyme’ of the structure of Muldoon’s poems is to question the notion of the free-standing, autonomous poem, or even, since poems ‘rhyme’ across books, the separateness of one book from another. The well-wrought urn has been replaced by something that looks like a finely spun (and potentially endless) web.25

Muldoon’s extraordinary formal masteries command admiration in much the same way as the more unusual feats recorded in the Guinness Book of Records do, yet they have already found – and doubtless will continue to find – critics willing to make ‘sense’ of such patternings. So, in what is undoubtedly the finest sympathetic account of Hay we have, Clair Wills, noting that the poems in Hay mirror the rhyme words of ‘Yarrow’, Muldoon’s earlier oblique elegy for his mother, argues that ‘[in] one sense […] we could say that a kind of ghostly maternal template is now structuring Muldoon’s work – the mother is an invisible frame or presence, even in poems which are ostensibly about the father’.26 Indeed we could, though some would prefer not to: rhymes may, on occasion, be feminine but they have yet to be maternal. And, to be fair to Wills, she then goes on to describe, tout court, ‘an increasing obsession on Muldoon’s part with arbitrary formal constraint as such […], releasing him from the tyranny of established plot expectations, liberating him from dependence on reality, and the psychological control of meaning’.27 (But again, even here, the critic is importing something of herself, the contemporary language of (textual) political liberation altogether more Willsian than Muldoonian.) The trope of elusive alternatives which this essay has described in Muldoon’s earlier verse remains much in evidence in Hay: the volume’s title is a typical misnomer, and it remains uncertain which hay or Hay, which grass or which river, the collection addresses. But, challenging this, is a new habit of connection and equation: Muldoon’s writing now seems to want all and nothing, coherence and disappearance. The evading ‘or’ gives way to the implied ‘and’ and to the overt imperative ‘read’. This is seen most concentratedly in the new delight Muldoon takes in errata, not merely in the poem so named but throughout the collection. Moreover, given Muldoon’s freedom with rhyme, it is difficult to be persuaded that

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 :  

even a formal constraint is operating on this habit. Some of these errata are blush-making love letters to the current critical establishment: ‘For “mother” read “other”’; ‘For “religion” read “region”’ (P, 445). Some trail the coat of Joycean influence: ‘For “loom” read “bloom”’ (P, 446)… and ‘gloom’? All are invitations to unconstrained critical ingenuity. And these errata are merely the overt adumbration of the rhyming method of hetereogeneous yoking which now dominates Muldoon’s writing in Hay and, as we have seen, beyond. For ‘conceit’ read ‘metaphysical’? Muldoon himself, and many of his critics, claim a venerable heritage for Muldoon’s poetic method in the Metaphysical poets, and in particular, in Dr Johnson’s celebrated (or notorious) characterization of the metaphysical conceit as a violent yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. But if Muldoon’s is Metaphysical verse it is so only in a much reduced sense. It usually leaves the ideas to its interpreters. Moreover, while Metaphysical verse is so much more than its conceits – most particularly it is among the most argumentative and argued styles in the canon – Muldoon’s style, whether poetic or discursive, is characterized by charm rather than dialectics. For ‘poacher’ read ‘gamekeeper’? If, as I am suggesting, there is a change coming over Muldoon’s verse, is that change manifested particularly in his relationship to his readers, particularly his academic readership? Certainly it is remarkable how easily a new cultural establishment has come into being, Muldoon and the academy assimilated effortlessly one to another. So, for example, in 1998 the much acclaimed delivery of the Clarendon Lectures (subsequently published as To Ireland, I) before the Oxford English Faculty led to the election of Paul Muldoon, already a Princeton professor, unopposed, as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Somehow the larger comedy has been lost amidst the many, many jokes of To Ireland, I – a work, oddly enough, most likely to be read through and relished by readers without a sense of humour. This is some evidence – though less than many, so very many, presently need to believe – that poetic talent can survive in, and survive, the academy. But the possibility that Muldoon’s stance towards his readers has altered, moving from his writing against his interpreters in earlier collections to a later Muldoon who writes in and for the academy, is disquieting. For ‘muddle’ read ‘meaning’? Implicit in that question is the burden of this reader’s primary concern over Muldoon’s more recent verse and its present and future reception. It seems that any confidence that Muldoon’s formal patternings can simply be read off as meanings is misplaced. It is unlikely that any equation of form and content, beyond

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the most tentative and modest, can be persuasively construed. This poet’s complex intricacies and shapings cannot be merely regarded unproblematically as a spur to interpretation on the part of the critics. Yet exegesis proliferates, exegesis only rendered more prolix in its tentativeness and self-consciousness, in its pleading ‘perhaps’ and hectoring ‘surelys’, in its contextual and theoretical sophistications, as the critics all too happily make the meaning they cannot find. The poet himself now writes in a way to encourage as much. For ‘Muldoon’ read ‘Microsoft’? Following the Word spell-check programme, ‘Muldoon’ as ‘Mudroom’ advises ‘For “ludic” read “lucid”.’ (P, 445).28 There are reasons to resist ‘all that’.

Notes 1 Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, in Selected Tales, ed. John Lyon (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 293. 2 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 108. 3 Paul Muldoon, ‘A Trifle’, in Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), pp. 120–21. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 4 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), pp. 91–92; Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), pp. 171–72; Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 91; Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 68–69; Tim Kendall, ‘Paul Muldoon’s Twins’, in Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (ed.), The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe), forthcoming. 5 Hugh Haughton, ‘Introduction’, The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 8. 6 Mistaken Identities, p. 148. 7 The Deregulated Muse, p. 176. 8 ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Clair Wills, Nick Jenkins and John Lanchester, Oxford Poetry, 3.1 (Winter 1986/87), pp. 14–20, at pp. 19–20. 9 Richard Kirkland offers a de Manian account of Muldoon’s writing and its resistance to reading parallel to my argument here. See ‘Ways of Saying/Ways of Reading: Materiality, Literary Criticism and the Poetry of Paul Muldoon’ in Last before America: Irish and American Writing, ed. Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), pp. 69–79. He too is interested in the madness and folly of interpretation: ‘an aesthetic education fools us into believing that the process of non-meaning revealed by reading is something we can contain and explicate’ (p. 72). He focuses on ‘Something Else’ from Meeting the British (P, 173). However, Kirkland does not consider Muldoon’s more recent verse as I do below. 10 Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,

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1984), p. 119. 11 T.S. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 179–88, at p. 184. 12 W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1977) pp. 241–43, at p. 242. 13 Paul Muldoon, ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism, 48.2 (April 1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 120. 14 Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, p. 243. Auden writes: Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well. (pp. 242–43) 15 Michael Allen, ‘An Extended Conceit’ (review of The Annals of Chile), The Irish Review, 17–18 (Winter 1995), pp. 187–91, at p. 190. 16 McDonald, Mistaken Identities, p. 183. 17 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 101–20, at p. 118. 18 Paul Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1994), p. 40. 19 Muldoon, Prince of the Quotidian, p. 40. 20 Paul Muldoon in a personal interview with Clair Wills, quoted by the latter in her Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 202. 21 ‘Getting Round’, p. 127. 22 Paul Muldoon, ‘Between Ireland and Montevideo’ (the first Waterstone’s Lecture, delivered on 29 May 1994 at the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature), in typescript. 23 ‘Getting Round’, p. 109. 24 ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 4. 25 Nicholas Jenkins, ‘For “Mother” Read “Other”’ (review of Hay), Times Literary Supplement, 29 January 1999, pp. 9–10, at p. 10. 26 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 208. 27 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 208. 28 Is it significant, in a poet so concerned with the antipodes, that the spell-check programme renders Muldoon in his adjectival form as Australian, specifically ‘Melbournian’?

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Paul Muldoon’s Transits: Muddling Through after Madoc JOHN KERRIGAN

Making good use of the playful-plain style that characterizes his most everyday book – his verse journal for January 1992, The Prince of the Quotidian – Paul Muldoon grumbles: In the latest issue of the TLS ‘the other Seamus’, Seamus Deane, has me ‘in exile’ in Princeton: this term serves mostly to belittle the likes of Brodsky or Padilla and is not appropriate of me; certainly not of anyone who, with ‘Louisa May’ Walcott, is free to buy a ticket to his emerald isle of choice. To Deane I say, ‘I’m not “in exile”, though I can’t deny that I’ve been twice in Fintona’.1

To be fair to Deane – as Muldoon isn’t, quite – the offending TLS piece is an imaginary dialogue between Joyce and Yeats in which the two look for signs of the persistence of their favourite motifs and techniques in contemporary Irish literature. It is thus with a degree of calculated anachronism that Deane’s Yeats announces that Muldoon, Derek Mahon, John Montague and Brian Moore ‘keep up some of our most hallowed traditions. Exile, for instance.’2 The experience of exile and, even more, the idea of it, were integral to literary modernism from Ezra Pound to Basil Bunting, through the interwar Americans known as ‘the lost generation’.3 For Irish writers of this period, expatriation had special attractions. In Paris, Trieste, or the cosmopolitan circuits of diplomacy (to think of Denis Devlin), they could escape the dependency of West Britonism and the claustrophobia of cultural nationalism. Yet being elsewhere was so compatible with Irishness

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that it could also serve to confirm it. From the Flight of the Earls in 1607, through the continental exile of the eighteenth-century Catholic gentry, and the emigration of the peasantry after the Famine, the experience and idea of leaving Ireland had been integral to being Irish. Most poets would relish being mentioned in the TLS by Yeats, so why is Muldoon so tetchy? In part, no doubt, because of the politics implicit in a list of ‘exiles’ who are – in Deane’s words – ‘Northerners all’. Having just objected in The Prince to the success of Northern Irish poetry being cited as ‘proof / that all’s not rotten in the state’,4 the politically independent Muldoon now resists the insinuation that British rule has driven literature out of the Six Counties – a claim only sustainable by overlooking the many writers from the Republic (Padraic Colum to Eamon Grennan) who have worked in America. Some such impulse motivates ‘I’ve been twice in Fintona’, which makes a local joke about would-be cosmopolitanism5 while (it may be) signalling an awareness of sectarianism – the town has a history of anti-Catholic discrimination6 – the better to deny that the poet has been forced, like a victim of the eighteenth-century Penal Laws, into ‘exile’. But if Muldoon primarily objects to being co-opted by Deane’s republicanism, which would see the Irish diaspora as the result of British imperialism, his insistence that he is not ‘in exile’ connects to larger issues of importance to contemporary poetry. I want to touch on them in this essay before I explore some border zones and get into muddles. Let me step back for a moment to Deane’s other poetic exiles, Montague and Mahon. The former knows all about Fintona. As he reveals in The Dead Kingdom (1984), it was from that divided town that his maternal uncles went to fight the Black and Tans before joining, with his father, a ‘real lost generation’7 of republican exiles who left Ireland after partition. And it was to his mother’s home in Fintona that Montague was painfully not sent, though his brothers were, when she brought most of the family back from New York and sent the poet to be fostered in Garvaghey. In Montague’s haunted lyrics, Fintona links political conflict with childhood losses that go back to the mother’s inability to bond with her child after a difficult birth. Yet if Montague seems by virtue of this the epitome of exile, born into dislocation then living between America, Paris and Cork, his existence and his art have moved beyond the title of his early book, Forms of Exile (1958). A few years ago, he described the ‘forlorn note’ of his youth giving way to something more inclusive: ‘My amphibian position between North and South, my natural complicity in three cultures, American, Irish and

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French, with darts aside to Mexico, India, Italy or Canada, should seem natural enough in the late-twentieth century as man strives to reconcile local allegiances with the absolute necessity of developing a world consciousness to save us from the abyss.’8 Younger Irish poets such as Thomas McCarthy and Peter Sirr view the partly accidental internationalism of Montague’s career as exemplary. And he has explored what he has called ‘The Complex Fate of being American-Irish’ (1983),9 protesting at his exclusion from American anthologies. In 1991, he reprinted his most obviously American poems, stories and essays in a book called Born in Brooklyn and came out as a New York poet. Derek Mahon might seem a better candidate for Deane. His Ulster Protestant sense of being abandoned at the edge of empire encouraged him in the sixties and seventies to write a poetry of exile. He saw himself as Ovid at Tomis, relegated to a litter-strewn littoral. However, 1991 was a turning point for him as well as for Montague, because, as he indicates in The Hudson Letter (1995), that was when he began a transformative stay in America. The spaces of exile filled up, his lines lengthened and relaxed as he went ‘nightshopping like Frank O’Hara […] bopping / up Bleecker for juice, croissants, Perrier, ice-cream / and Gitane filtre’.10 The old form of deprived, one-way exile is represented in The Hudson Letter by ‘“To Mrs Moore at Inishannon”’, the verse-epistle of a maidservant writing back to Ireland from New York in 1895. But Bridget is a foil to Mahon’s surprisingly playful acquiescence in the pleasures of popular culture and paradoxes of virtual reality. From the outset Mahon was sensitive to the Americanization of the planet. Now it is as though the erosion of place has gone so far that exile is a hopeless conceit: if all places are interchangeable, with a McDonald’s on every corner, there is no margin left to haunt. Exile was already emptying into a posture in The Hunt by Night (1982). The exile which entailed nostalgia for a lost habitus would now itself be the object of nostalgia (and sometimes tacitly is) were the global village not so entertaining. When Mahon goes back to Dublin in The Yellow Book (1997), it is a trip from one attraction in the First World theme park to another. Home life is glossed by an epigraph from Paul Fussell’s Abroad: ‘One striking post-war phenomenon has been the transformation of numerous countries into pseudo-places whose function is simply to entice tourists’.11 The Dublin square Mahon lodges in provides scenery for coach tours. The houses have become offices devoted to image-making. With an oddness that is, on reflection, unsurprising, it is in this newly decentred Dublin, where he

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thought he would be at home, that he recovers something of his earlier exilic and chiliastic vision.12 These poets are more than symptoms of the Zeitgeist. Muldoon’s change of address had a creative logic: always interested in American, especially Native American, topics – not surprisingly since the Ireland of his childhood was more Americanized through popular culture than it had been for Montague and Mahon – he saw in Princeton an opportunity to explore this material more fully, or, rather, a chance to satisfy the appetite for new material which follows from his tangential, non-exhaustive methods. (He may also have sensed that his poetry could enjoy greater freedom to develop beyond the Faber norms exploded by Madoc [1990] in a country where Language-type experiment is acceptable to the point of being institutionalized.) Yet the ‘exiles’ listed by Deane all responded to the socio-economic changes that Montague notices in Mount Eagle (1987) when he describes ‘this strange age / of shrinking space’.13 Mahon, for reasons of age but also temperament, mostly observes what Muldoon was caught up in even before the younger poet became an American citizen (and then bought a house in Northern Ireland with the proceeds): the changed conditions of the diaspora, given that transatlantic travel is no longer one-way and necessitated by poverty but is an everyday effect of the prosperity of a Celtic tiger that is profiting (however unevenly) from tourism and globalization. Muldoon was always interested in travelling around rather than oneway emigration, in transits rather than arrivals. His early ‘Immrama’ notices the potential of junctions, however humdrum (Wigan and Crewe) and renders destinations nugatory (the Brazil where his father never drank with a hypothetical Nazi while failing to reach Argentina).14 It is characteristic that, in his Clarendon lectures, To Ireland, I (2000) he should invert the Deane–Yeats paradigm and argue that the Irish are in exile in Ireland itself, not just when they are sensitive aesthetes, like the Mahon of The Yellow Book, but generally because of a history of expropriation and insecurity. It is an idea that he finds expressed in AE’s poem ‘Exiles’, where Irish peasants are imagined as supernatural beings dropped into lives of hard labour – a vision of the proximity of faeryland which gives Irish experience, Muldoon says, a liminal aspect.15 Like the father’s projected emigration in ‘Immrama’, AE’s poem shows the impact on consciousness of a history of dislocation – a history that has arguably prepared the Irish for the rigours of globalized labour markets, and made their venture into the world economy what Fintan O’Toole calls a movement back to the future.16

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In Black Hole, Green Card (1994) and The Ex-Isle of Erin (1997) O’Toole plausibly reinterprets the hallowed tradition of exile as Ireland’s long rehearsal for participation in the new world economy. For the last century and a half, he notes, Ireland and the Irish have not coincided: ‘Ireland is something that often happens elsewhere’. And the history of Ireland as an ‘emerald isle // of choice’ is substantially a product of the elsewheres from which it has been conceived. But if Ireland was for generations something of an illusion, it finally disappeared, according to O’Toole, in the early 1990s – the very period I have been looking at – when levels of education and ease of travel made younger people globally mobile. Ireland joined postmodernity by covering itself in interpretation centres and building the Celtworld ‘experience’ at Tramore. As an experience, however, Ireland could be consumed without leaving America (or Australia or London). O’Toole cites the Tipperary Inn in Montauk: Irish in decor, Irish in atmosphere, and staffed by Irish youngsters who are virtually at home from home.17 To some extent this analysis is familiar. Field Day and Revisionism, at odds in so much else, have stressed that Irishness is a construct; like O’Toole, however, Muldoon is especially alert to the way the ‘emerald isle’ has been produced abroad. Madoc responds to the emergence of Celticism at a time of exploration, plantation and genocide in North America, by the Irish and by Welsh-speakers as well as by the pernicious English. In The Annals of Chile (1994) and even more Hay (1998), Irish experience is inextricably Irish-American and global. As in the work of such anthropologists as James Clifford, roots are less significant than routes, identity is contingent on mobility.18 In his earlier books preoccupied with Knowing my Place (the title of his first pamphlet, 1971) – though that was never a stable, monocultural, or insular enterprise – Muldoon has increasingly engaged with what Clifford calls translation, the micro-shifts and macro-dislocations of languages and cultures on the move. As you would expect from a Northern Irish poet, however, brought up in a society acutely aware of its violent past, his writing a poetry of transits does not mute his sense of history. Let me plunge into an example which sheds light on those lines I started with, about the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott being ‘free to buy a ticket to his emerald isle // of choice’. Earlier in The Prince of the Quotidian, Muldoon mentions Shining Brow, his libretto about Frank Lloyd Wright, announcing that he has written lines for Wright’s chef in the style of the ancient bard Amergin, a figure credited, in To Ireland, I,

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with setting a pattern for Irish literature. It can only have confirmed Muldoon’s interest in Wright to have learned that this black chef from Barbados, who burned down the architect’s home, Taliesin, was called Julian Carleton. The nineteenth-century Tyrone writer William Carleton attracts Muldoon (and is associated with Amergin in To Ireland, I) because he was brought up a Catholic but became a Protestant and thus wrote as a boundary-crosser, a double agent with a compound identity.19 In Shining Brow, the chef has a speaking role, which would allow the audience to relish his Irish accent when he recites his bardic lines. ‘Can it be / that all the natives of Barbados / speak with an Irish brogue?’ Frank Lloyd Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney, asks.20 Black Irish chef roasts Welsh American’s villa. It sounds like a poem by Paul Durcan, a joke designed to mock the Gael-in-exile paradigm harked back to by Seamus Deane. It would be wrong, however, to think of Carleton’s Ur-Irishness as merely parodic. It has behind it a history that began when Oliver Cromwell transported Irish Catholics to Barbados. Carleton has a brogue, in the libretto if not in biographical fact, because the ‘barbadoed’ Irish interbred with African slaves and passed on their way of speaking English. Irish intonations can still be heard among the blacks of, for example, Montserrat21 – a Caribbean destination often called ‘the emerald isle’. To labour a quip that is already tangled, you could say that Derek Walcott is able to fly to ‘his emerald isle // of choice’ not just because he has the money to buy an expensive plane-ticket but because, educated on St Lucia by Irish Redemptorist Brothers, he’s another Irishized West Indian. Muldoon’s preoccupation with cultural and racial hybridity of the Carleton sort is well established, and critics have rightly connected this with the mixed state of Northern Ireland, an entity which is articulated by a contingent and permeable border that can only constitute an edge, or double-edge, by running through the middle of things (see, for example, ‘The Boundary Commission’ [P, 80]) and creating a zone of transit (lorries with dodgy brakelights carrying even more dodgy cargoes, as in ‘Cows’ [P, 344–46]). You can take the poet out of Armagh, the border county of his childhood, but you can’t take Armagh out of the poet – as Muldoon would expect us to recognize, given his emphasis, in To Ireland, I, on liminality and the Irish imagination. When he writes about borders in America they share the psychological and linguistic ambiguity of the one bred into him. They are also a magnet for Irishness. The libretto Bandanna (1999), for instance, includes an Irish-American police captain,

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Cassidy, whose job is to stop illegal immigration across the Texan– Mexican border. Like the Irish border, this ‘zona / media’22 so permeates experience around it that hardly a scene goes by without some new aspect of liminality (perhaps too assiduously) being adduced: the no-man’s-land traversed by immigrants, the social and mortal borders confused by the Day of the Dead fiesta, the past shared by several of the characters who crossed the DMZ in Vietnam, and the ‘eerie zone, a liminal place, a place of “ghostlier demarcations” ’23 in which key sequences are sung. The capacity of the Irish border to spur invention about other transit zones is most spectacularly apparent in Vera of Las Vegas (2001). Like Shining Brow and Bandanna, Vera is a libretto, but it continues the tale of intrigue in an IRA active-service unit begun in the drama Six Honest Serving Men (1995). Motives in that play seem unfixed, as one would expect from its location on the border between Armagh and Monaghan. In Vera this instability is translated to Las Vegas airport, where two members of the IRA unit called Taco and Dumdum who are wary of immigration officials are in transit from New York to LA. Muldoon’s attraction to Las Vegas is in every sense topical. If the Tex–Mex border is a touchstone for geographers and anthropologists because it highlights the micro-transits of globalization, Las Vegas is an equally classic locus of world-shrinking postmodernity: a site of simulacra – Venice, Paris, Caesar’s Palace. After a prologue which shows Taco being interrogated ‘somewhere in Northern Ireland’, the action begins with the Provos arriving in Las Vegas and announcing that they are in the ‘centre-fold’ of America.24 It is another version of the middle border which mobilizes hybridity. The stage fills up with Pequods wearing sharp suits, plus bows and arrows, and with apparently ancient Romans playing on slot machines. In this eclectic setting, a comedy of errors unfolds. The IRA men have disgraced themselves by getting drunk and pawing the flight attendants. One of them, Doll, has arranged for her old friend Vera to meet the men in Las Vegas and fleece them. Offered an all-expenses stay, Taco and Dumdum take the bait and meet up with the black beauty Vera. The plot thickens with the appearance of a couple of secret service men, Trench and Trilby. It thickens again when Taco gropes Vera and discovers that (as in The Crying Game) she is a he. Like Oscar Wilde’s play Vera, Muldoon’s libretto tells a story of revolutionary conspiracy confused by desire. And the centre of attention, Vera, personifies veracity as flux. Her name is Loman (her Willy is concealed),25 rhymed with ‘lemon’, ‘dilemna’, and, inevitably,

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‘limen’. Her big aria, in fact, puts a border condition in the middle of things: For I, Vera of Las Vegas, am the Way, the Truth and the Light. I who seem to be on the periphery of things am, truth to tell, at the very centre.26

In Quoof (1983) truth was a solid-enough pebble of quartz, transposed from Frost’s poetry into a Native American’s briefcase (P, 128), but in Vera, ‘truth’s a business that needs a little illusion’,27 lying in the words of a gender-liminal character in a city that gambles on chance. And so we head into muddles. The opera starts with a mistake. The Provos are in Las Vegas because Dumdum (aptly punned) failed to check whether the flight to LA was direct. ‘LAX’, as Taco says, ‘Very lax’ (another pun, on an LA airport), but all too human.28 Later Dumdum reminds Taco how Dessie Gillespie was shot ‘On the road between Killyhevlin / and Swanlinbar’, but Taco (who did the shooting) says it was ‘Glangevlin’.29 What is it about these muddles? In an early, unpublished version of the libretto, after Vera remembers her uncle being shot for stealing a pineapple, Doll calls Trench and Trilby ‘the very pineapple of politeness’, and her echo of Mrs Malaprop (who coined this error, meaning ‘pinnacle’ not ‘pineapple’30) is given ‘a round of applause’.31 The draft ends with a pineapple being produced from the manila envelope and being identified as the source of the dangerous ticking. On his way to finishing Vera, then, Muldoon got too obviously interested in the links between indeterminacy and error, and in the lines of confusion that run from practical blunders into verbal inaccuracies which have explosive potential. Similar developments can be found in Bandanna, which, as I implied, shows a new seriousness about the liminal. It counts the cost of middle or muddle zones and the errors they encourage. Spurred by the rivalries and duplicities associated with control of the Tex– Mex border, the police chief Morales (too much his name) is deceived by a given-away bandanna into believing, like Othello, that his wife is having an affair with Cassidy (Cassio), and he murders her – a crime which is the more understandable given Mona’s ‘mistake’-creating32 fling with someone called…Limón. A related seriousness characterizes Hay. Its opening poem, ‘The Mud Room’, for instance – the title of which invokes the ante-rooms of American houses (where coats and muddy boots are left) but also the Multiple User Domains or Dungeons of the internet (virtual spaces in which users game

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and role-play under assumed identities), while punning on ‘mid’, ‘muddle’ and ‘Muldoon33 – is a rangingly inclusive piece about lines that run in medias res. Existentially this makes sense. If you find your way by cleaving to the liminal, borders will become your path, and Muldoon diagnoses his own self-dissolving, elusive condition – a common pursuit in his lectures – when, in To Ireland, I, he calls the Irish modernist Brian Coffey ‘a poet intent on walking the fine, liminal-narthecal line between continuity and discontinuity, location and dislocation’.34 In ‘The Mud Room’, the middleaged poet is trying to get to the fridge in the ante-room of his house, an extended narthex which allows for transits between the home and the world but which also fills with junk that can be read as an archive of life. Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Mud Vision’ is a poem about the world media coming to Ireland to watch its people glimpse but then dissipate a possible future, a consummation of the national(ist) struggle.35 The virtuality it describes is that of religious vision and its cultural geography is recognizably Irish. ‘The Mud Room’ at once domesticates and globalizes those parameters. Thoroughly post-O’Toole, Muldoon’s indoor transits leave no room in the world for exile. Global consumerism and cheap tourism bring together half a wheel of Morbier cheese from the Jura with a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce – presumably picked up in New Jersey, though there are poems in Hay about visiting Japan – plus a horsehair blanket that is said to have been purchased in Bogotá and then (but hey, travellers make mistakes) in Valparaíso. This clutter is matched by the range of poetic forms collected for use in Hay: haiku, Persian ghazal, Malayan pantun, and so on. Muldoon gets to the fridge by following an imaginary goat (he is capricious) along a narrow path. Suggested by the line of ash that runs through a Morbier cheese, separating yet joining curds made from morning and evening milk, this path is coloured by the conflicts that are compounded rather than contained by the Northern Irish border. It is called, for instance, a ‘blue-green fault [the colours of the RUC and Irish nationalism] / between the clabber [a Gaelic word] of morn and the stalwart [like a loyalist] even-clabber’.36 But it also signifies, through and beyond that, the muddles, the mistakes, the brangles – to use a Hay word – that run through the poet’s mid-life (hence half a cheese). Does the middle-transit have to be a muddle? The sequence that ends Hay, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, is introduced by an epigraph which muses on the ‘pure possibility’, the ‘unrealized plenitude’, of not being born. But it later quotes ‘unreal- // ized plenitude’ across a stanza-break to point up the

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unreal-ity of such a pure condition, preferring a life embraced flaws and all. ‘Princess of Accutane’, as the poet of Hay urges his wife, ‘let’s no more try to refine / the pure drop from the dross’ (P, 441). The moral would be trite if it simply counselled acceptance. But Muldoon has always relished the approximations and picky qualifications generated by a respect for accuracy,37 and Hay is elaborately interested in correcting mistakes. Its title-poem, in fact, describes meeting another beat-up Volvo carrying a load of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne on the roof rack, a bale of lucerne or fescue or alfalfa.) (P, 418)

So the poem is less about hay than the receding subvarieties thereof, and the book is named inter alia after an inaccuracy corrected by honest doubts.38 Meanwhile, ‘The Point’ assures us that O’Clery rammed his pencil into the schoolboy Muldoon’s ‘thigh / (not, as the chronicles have it, my calf)’. We are told that ‘the Japanese nightingale’s not a nightingale / but a Persian bulbul’. More alphabetically a fawn wants to correct ‘Pleiades’ to ‘Perseids’, and the poet’s father insists that he is from ‘Killeeshill’ not ‘Killeter’ (P, 400, 400–401, 420, 452). Mistake-correcting structures of the ‘not x’ variety go back to Muldoon’s earliest full-length book, New Weather (P, 5), but the textual bibliographical note that emerges in ‘Madoc’ (‘Not “CROATAN”, not “CROATOAN”, but “CROTONA”’ [P, 320]) is often struck in Hay. There are clues here to quite large changes – beyond the modally and syntactically elusive, but in terms of diction simple, manner of such lyrics as ‘Blemish’ (in Mules), and the lexically more promiscuous, dynamic idiom of ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ (Quoof ), into a style that can in parts of The Annals and Hay seem lexically fixated, designed to foreground a highly eclectic, even contaminated or damaged vocabulary. This does not necessarily imply a divorce between poetry and the conditions of life. Once keen to use verbal glissades and recurrent, slowly distorted names to extend and interconnect meanings,39 Muldoon has become attentive to literals as human lapses, to morphology as a site of muddle. By niggling at such mistakes he can grapple with the tacitly existential claim, quoted in ‘Now, Now’, ‘that life is indeed no more than “a misprint / in the sentence of death”’ (P, 407). In Shining Brow Carleton’s Irish brogue contributes to a particularly

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rich confusion. Addressing Mamah Cheney he calls her ‘Ma’am’ and is rebuked for using her first name, pronounced May-mah – a peculiarity announced in an earlier, parallel episode, where Wright himself calls her ‘Mah-mah’.40 It is the mother (mama) complex writ slant, not for the last time in the libretto – a perplexity that matters to Muldoon, who lost his mother to cancer and who has taken a long time to forgive himself, if he has, for the strained relations recorded in the long poem that ends The Annals of Chile, ‘Yarrow’. Whatever its implications for the capital-m Muldoon, M-m is heavily worked in the oeuvre. In Bandanna an M drops off the backwards neon sign of the Motel where Morales kills Mona. In Annals, the poem ‘Milkweed and Monarch’ describes and enacts a confusion which makes the poet ‘mistake’ his mother’s surname ‘Regan’ for its anagram ‘Anger’. And in ‘Yarrow’, the mother’s malapropristic tendencies contribute to the muddle which almost leads the young Muldoon to order ‘yarrow’ rather than ‘marrow’ seed. The significance of such confusions is explored in To Ireland, I with reference to the bard Amergin whose style Carleton matches in the opera. Muldoon starts this book by quoting an alphabet poem by Amergin in a celebrated translation that crosses the old Irish verse with lines attributed to the Welsh bard Taliesin (who gave his name to Frank Lloyd Wright’s house). Picking out the line ‘I am the grave: of every hope’, Muldoon detects an autobiographical signature: ‘The “grave” in the last line of that translation gives a clue to its provenance. This version of the poem is offered by Robert Graves’.41 It is a bizarre suggestion that Graves would write himself in in such a way, however Muldoon would graft himself into ‘Motel’ – or rather, since the sign is reversed, ‘letoM’, which, when it loses its ‘M’, becomes ‘leto’, a goddess important to Muldoon (see P, 135 and 325), and if it is scrabbled reveals ‘le Mot’ – the word, lexis itself. It is, though, consistent with a procedure which Muddledoon finds in Amergin (as later in Joyce). The Irish poem shows ‘an urge’, he says, towards what Graves called the ‘esoteric’ or ‘pied’. I assume he’s using the word ‘pied’ in the sense given by the OED of a ‘mass of type mingled indiscriminately or in confusion, such as results from the breaking down of a forme of type’. That’s to say, the urge towards the cryptic, the encoded, the runic, the virtually unintelligible.42

Muldoon will later point out – as though with the Las Vegas IRA in mind – that ‘pied’ words flourish among clandestine cells, secret societies.43 But he more immediately and elaborately sees the poet as the agent of the ‘pied’, translating and muddling language, producing promiscuously

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hybrid formations, especially as they shift between cultural zones. Hence his use of words such as ‘boreen’ that have been smuggled into English without the sanction of the OED, or ‘emphysemantiphon’ and ‘Oscaraboscarabinary’ – both, like ‘boreen’, used in ‘Cows’, that poem about illicit Irish border-traffic, and both grafts of Muldoon’s own invention: almost-private language, like the family word for hot-water bottle that is the title of Quoof. The near intelligibilities of later Muldoon – ‘again I heard Oglalagalagool’s / cackackle-Kiowas’ and the like, and the problems of enunciation in speech acts which overextend the middle of such terms as ‘emmmmmmmmmmmmphasize’ and disrupt the beginning of such words as ‘al-al-al-al-aleatory’ (an instance I’ll return to) (P, 389, 314, 466) – cannot be rationalized under a single umbrella doctrine (this is not the sort of Language poetry which hopes to bring down capitalism by subverting the signifier), but they have much to do with the liminalizing Amergin impulse to garble and encode. Aware of the human cost of mistakes, Muldoon does not muddle words without a sense of potential damage. When he talks in To Ireland, I of ‘the slip and slop of language, a disregard for the line between sense and nonsense’44 we can think from the mother’s malapropisms in ‘Yarrow’ to her destructively censorious attitude to minor slips in behaviour: Mother o’mine. Mother o’mine. That silver-haired mother o’mine. With what conviction did she hold that a single lapse—from lapsus, a slip or stumble—would have a body cast into the outer dark. (P, 362)

The archly laboured translation of lapsus is calculated to underline ‘slip’, a word which figures so variously in ‘Yarrow’ that it scarcely needs the cue of To Ireland, I for its importance to be noted. The order for seeds, for example, was recorded on a ‘slip’, kept by the poet in a quiver reserved for the arrows that marrows and yarrows have in common: It was thirty years till I reached back for the quiver in which I’d hidden the carbon-slip from Tohill’s of the Moy: (P, 376)

In the days before xerox machines, a carbon copy was the best way of replicating a piece of writing. But the ‘slip’ on which the carbon did its copying is here the scene or slur of a shift – ‘marrow’ becoming ‘yarrow’. The lapsus that seems to be manifest in more than the name of this paper

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can ‘slip’ into meaning ‘mistake’, and in other uses – the ‘slip // of a girl’, for instance, who comes to the poet in a dream that his mother could hardly approve (P, 366) – it contributes to what will become an obsession in ‘Yarrow’ with mistakes. This impacts on verse-style, blocking a frequently frustrated flow of recollection. When he writes about his mother’s cancer, or as it may be Sylvia Plath, the poet gets things wrong, he slips, and has to correct: ‘Ovarian,’ did I write? Uterine. Salah-ed-din would slice through in his De Havilland Mosquito. ‘American,’ did I write? British. (P, 388)

In Hay the topic is signalled by ‘Errata’, a list-poem which makes hay with blunders and typos. For readers much of the fun lies in working out how the mistakes were made, whether they can be found in Muldoon’s own work, and whether they were mistakes when written or have subsequently become so (‘For “married” read “marred”’?), but the poem stirs larger thoughts – which resonate through The Annals and Hay – about whether poetry has a privileged ability to put mistakes right, to achieve one of the effects that Heaney calls redress.45 ‘Errata’ is alert to the expressive, Joycean side of mistakes, and to the psychoanalytical view of them as cryptically loaded.46 Yet it is also comically aware that, as psychologists of error tell us, many mistakes are reversions to the norm in contexts that do not require it,47 are tricks of the usual rather than manifestations of the repressed. If errata, from this perspective, lose something of the impacted significance claimed for them by Freud, they remain poetic in their ability to register the complex implication of speaker and situation in statement: as one psychologist writes, ‘Slips are exquisitely sensitive to the many factors that shape normal speech and action.’48 Meanwhile ‘Errata’ stirs thought about the relationship between rhyming and error. Since errors often rhyme, is the rhyming mind prone to error – Plato might assent – and poetry a medium of mistakes? And thus the poem begins: For ‘Antrim’ read ‘Armagh’. For ‘mother’ read ‘other’. For ‘harm’ read ‘farm’. For ‘feather’ read ‘father’. (P, 445)

No alert reader of Muldoon could get even this far and think the poem simple, however slight. While the first line flags the substantial differences between almost adjacent places, it also raises the possibility that the poet’s border obsessions might throw errata into reverse and make him mistakenly correct what is for him the less familiar reading. And all the lines in the

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poem, in fact, are capable of being read as invitations to introduce as well as to remove mistakes, which consequently become alternatives. Certainly, ‘mother’ emended to ‘other’, and through that rhymed with ‘father’, around the ‘harm’ of trying to run a ‘farm’, uses the same keywords as, and concentrates the psychodrama of, ‘Milkweed and Monarch’ and much of the stuff of The Annals of Chile. For ‘Moncrieff’ read ‘Monteith’. For ‘Beal Fierste’ read ‘Beal Feirste’. For ‘brave’ read ‘grave’.

– wicked irony, that – For ‘revered’ read ‘reversed’. For ‘married’ read ‘marred’. For ‘pull’ read ‘pall’. For ‘ban’ read ‘bar’. For ‘smell’ read ‘small’.

‘Errata’ does go on. Is there no end to error? It is a difficult poem to read aloud, syntactically inert after a text such as ‘The Mud Room’ and entirely, if apologetically, imperative. It might be related to Hay’s experiments with concrete poetry, in ‘The Plot’ and ‘A Half-Door near Cluny’, where language is more seen than heard (though both frame interlingual puns). ‘Errata’ is obviously not so pictorial, and it makes an issue of rhyme, but it still presents language as writing – a postmodernist effect curiously achieved by reinscribing the apparatus of determinate reading – because an ‘Errata’ list is an index to a printed text, an invitation to cross words or just letters out and write others in. One thought raised is whether all errors matter, except to Muldoon’s mother. To reverse the ‘ei’ in ‘Feirste’ wouldn’t strictly mislead, and in most cases, presumably, we’d notice that ‘smell’ should be ‘small’ without having the error pointed out. But then, degrees of context matter acutely to errata. Typos are seen as such only in the setting of a word, so that ‘Errata’ of the ‘Fierste’ variety make one recognize that, as Louis Zukofsky put it, ‘each word is itself an arrangement’.49 And words are shown to be – strictly speaking, are made – erroneous by the environments in which they are arranged. In some settings, for sure, ‘smell’ is not a small mistake, and because such settings are never merely textual, ‘small’ errors can say much about the cultures that produce them. Thus scale can be misleading. Extensive mistakes may hardly count (as when the entire first edition of

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New Weather was misprinted in italics), but literals can be crucial in a conflicted society such as that of Northern Ireland which fetishes minor differences. In ‘Yarrow’, for instance, the distinction between republican and loyalist manifestations of one figure comes down to an ‘i’, a letter designed not to spell a word but to show how it is pronounced (Taigs and Prods, we remember, say ‘haitch’/‘aitch’ differently – so the literal is ultimately theological): not Milady Clark, who helped the U.D.A. run a shipment of Aramis into Kilkeel but Milady Clarik, whose great-great-grandfather led the I.R.B. invasion of Canada […] (P, 360)

‘Errata’ goes on and on: For ‘spike’ read ‘spoke’. For ‘lost’ read ‘last’. For ‘Steinbeck’ read ‘Steenbeck’. For ‘ludic’ read ‘lucid’.

‘Lucid’ could be Muldoon’s reply to those critics who have accused him of postmodern frivolity, or a declaration of what has happened to his style, after the extravagances of Madoc and The Annals, in Hay. ‘For “religion” read “region”.’ How true of Ireland. ‘For “ode” read “code”.’ Amergin rides again. ‘For “Jane” read “Jean”’ – the name of Muldoon’s wife, whatever about Jane. ‘For “rod” read “road”’, though apparently not ‘road’ for ‘read’. And so it goes, to ‘For “loom” read “bloom”’, which takes us back to the question, is there no end of error?, because the text just stops, on an alternate pararhyme but with no demonstrable conclusion. ‘Errata’ raises the topic of rhyme not simply because it happens to be written in rhymed and half-rhymed quatrains, nor because the listed mistakes would in many cases pass as rhymes in a Muldoon poem, but because, in consequence, the corrections at the end of lines might be corrections of each other (‘For “other” read “father”. For “pall” read “small”’). This up-and-down, criss-cross interaction (like scanning ‘The Plot’ and ‘A Half-Door’ again50) works because Muldoon’s rhymes are usually oblique. As ‘The Mud Room’ beautifully demonstrates, pararhyme is a valuable resource in a poetry of transits because it maximizes the possibilities of movement, increases the number of end-of-line options for semantic detours. In their mixed literals the rhymes are like the blue-

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green conjunctions of a border which constitutes a path. Especially since, in Hay, pararhyme words are often macaronic, nodes of transit in themselves between cultures. At this point one might think of rhymes as more largely a border language, markers of limits which are in the thick of things. They are at the edge of the poem, but of course their consequences, or prequences, knock back into the line and determine much about it: the rhyme-word that you head for shapes how you get there, just as the conditions of a border tend to define what lies nearer the centre (try Portadown). Like borders, rhymes are zones of muddle, points where words are scrambled and compounded because their acoustic or visual properties force the reader to engage in a double reading, following a poem’s syntax through and noticing how, say, verbs follow distant nouns or which nouns lie behind pronouns at a line-break or enjambing moment, but at the same time requiring a vertical response, up and down the right-hand margin, aware of this other ribbon of meaning (a semantic overdetermination of the border). I take it to be significant that, although Amergin is pronounced ‘A-ver-yin’ in Irish, on a page of more or less English his name is a pied version of a merging or a margin. In ‘The Mud Room’, and most of Hay, that would be an Amer- (as in Amer-ican) merging. On the evocative side of garbling, such poems as ‘The Bangle’ show how rhyme words thicken verse’s border into a muddle. The poet is like an emu lured by lexical gems or bits of tinfoil, placing, mostly at line-ends, words like ‘doodah’, ‘doodlebob’, ‘harum-scarum’, ‘kerplink’ and ‘Conlon Nancarrow’ – a composer of fanatically organized cacophony (P, 401– 402). It is not to be imagined that Muldoon reaches for these phonetically overplus words because otherwise stuck for a rhyme. He is a master at finding rhymes, and anyway claims so much freedom that he is willing to rhyme ‘English’ with ‘language’ (P, 112). In ‘The Bangle’ we are tantalized with words out at the edge in every sense (edge of poem, of common use, of English verging into other tongues, language turning into nonsense). It is the muddle of error, error that embraces mistakes, which interests me more, however, than the enjoyable petticoat kicked up around the hem of ‘The Bangle’. Consider the ‘Hopewell Haiku’ in Hay – poems about Muldoon’s life near Princeton: II A muddle of mice. Their shit looks like caraway but smells like allspice.

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III From whin-bright Cave Hill a blackbird might… will give thanks with his whin-bright bill. (P, 421)

Perception is enriched in II by homing in on muddle and correcting an initial impression by introducing another sense. III is more virtuosic in relating error to consonance, since the perfect internal rhyme of ‘whinbright’ with ‘whin-bright’ is strengthened by the middling ‘might’, only for the correction of ‘might’ to ‘will’, which seems to spoil the pattern, to reinforce it by relating the end-rhymes (already de trop in a haiku) ‘Hill’ and ‘bill’.51 It is a fine example at the technical level of muddle and errata producing a harmonious verse. Perfect rhymes – i.e. repetitions – of the ‘whin-bright’ sort are intriguing in relation to transits because, although it seems as though they should freeze poems up, not deflect them into innovative swerves, Muldoon destabilizes them by means of the up-and-down vertical reading that goes on at the right-hand margin. The explanation is that, whereas pararhymed words are drawn together in the mind by resemblance, perfect rhyme throws semantic difference into relief, because when you encounter the second usage you still have the first in mind and are thus wrong-footed, mis-take the word – the word, at its most extreme, seeming an error in one position or the other. It is a good example of a carbon-slip, of a replication that somehow differs. Then the poem makes you aware that mistakes of this sort are what give life to language, because they prevent the mechanical denotation of one word per thing, and allow bleeding or what Muldoon has called ‘imarrhage’ (haemorrhage, marriage, with a suggestion of immram, or ‘voyaging about’) in poetry.52 In Hay, ‘Between Takes’, which I won’t stop to unpack, has several lively instances. A mistake in poetry confirms that the poet is in control. If there were no evidence of there being room for error then everything in the text would merely be just so, with no sense of the potential slippage between intention and effect – an evolving array of intentions, at least of imputed intentions – that, despite what purists say, is a common and vital part of the experience of reading verse. Where does this leave a poet who writes in his own muddles, creates his own errata? In one direction it squares with the megalomaniac side of Muldoon, who claims full control of the meaning of his poems.53 To invent his own mistakes is a form of lunatic mimesis of the usual sort of poem in which mistakes will or can always happen (putting Cortez rather than Balbóa silent on that peak in Darien).54

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In practice, however, Muldoon deals with others’ mistakes and his own with a tolerant, though sometimes distressed, humility, willing in verse to intimate that, despite the formal guarantees – the rules of rhyme, or alphabetical order, or sonnet form – that he espouses, there is always the imminence of imperfection. He is aware, as he puts it in an interview, that writing to rigorous schemes (villanelles, sestinas, but now entire sequences and parts of books reproducing the same rhymes55) is always ‘very borderline’, and that you can only make breakthroughs by being ‘wedded’ to those constraints56 – I hardly need point out the resonance of the words he uses there to describe the dynamics of composition, given the ethos of marriage in Hay. The humility ought to be there, because the published works of Muldoon are inevitably ‘marred’ by errata. Some are routine typos,57 but others are more embarrassing, like the ‘Littlebitofbreadandnocheese’ attributed to a hedge-sparrow in Quoof that any reader with a bird-watching past knows to be the call of a yellowhammer (P, 134).58 At times it hardly needs psychoanalysis to diagnose conflict. In a section of To Ireland, I that is destined to be cited by many, because calculated to correct the poet’s reputation for keeping politics out of literature, Muldoon notes how Michael Furey, in Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, was prosaically employed in the gasworks before he died, young and romantic. ‘This “Eriny”’, he writes, which we shouldn’t fail to miss on this occasion, is yet another device used by Joyce to ensure that ‘The Dead’ is indeed a story of ‘public life’, in which Joyce undercuts the rhetoric of cultural nationalism, revelling in the very thing he repudiates, […] It’s a brilliantly effective way of addressing an issue raised by Gabriel, confronted by Miss Ivors, when ‘he wanted to say that literature was above politics’. Joyce knows that literature is never above politics […].59

Muldoon’s identification with the attitudes of Joyce, rather than with those of his character Gabriel Conroy, is hindered as well as helped by the way ‘we shouldn’t fail to miss’ (‘For “miss” read “notice”’) repudiates what it revels in, leaving the reader uncertain how confident the poet is in what he convincingly but he knows simplistically asserts. Sometimes error is the result of neglect. The Contents list of the Ecco Selected Poems, for example, calls the book about the hot-water bottle ‘Quoff’ instead of ‘Quoof’;60 not, presumably, a page that the author got round to prouf-reading. But then, in my copy of Why Brownlee Left, the line ‘To King Kong on tht Empire State building’ has been reset and the error remains – one correction or revision (interestingly entangled motives)

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leaving, or more likely introducing, another. The tendency of correction itself to produce errata is familiar to anyone who has published – anyone who has lived – and Muldoon has some to regret, though one can obviously get too fine-spun. In the Faber page proofs of Hay, for instance, which I was sent to review and never did (an error I’m now trying to put right), when ‘The Mud Room’ describes the horse-hair blanket that muddlingly comes from both ‘Bogotá’ and ‘Valparaiso’, there is an accent only on the former. In the finished edition, ‘Valparaíso’ is hyper-correctly given an accent too. Fine, except that this makes a mistake out of ‘Valparaiso’ in ‘Yarrow’.61 It is worth remembering at this point that Muldoon’s relatively tolerant acceptance of even other people’s errata62 is not the only possible reaction. Geoffrey Hill provides a clarifying contrast. Long intrigued by the absurd, potential awesomeness of mistakes (‘There are ways of getting absolved for murder; there are no ways of getting absolved for upsetting the soup’63), he stages, in The Triumph of Love, a punitive comedy of errors in which the self-satirizing persona, quoting a music-hall catchphrase, mocks the critical misrepresentation of Hill’s work using the very formula that Muldoon (coincidentally, I’m sure) uses in Hay: XL For wordly, read worldly; for in equity, inequity; for religious read religiose; for distinction detestation. Take accessible to mean acceptable, accommodating, openly servile. Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don’t care what I say, do I? XLI For iconic priesthood, read worldly pique and ambition. Change insightfully caring to pruriently intrusive. Delete chastened and humbled. Insert humiliated. Interpret slain in the spirit as browbeaten to exhaustion. For hardness of heart read costly dislike of cant.64

Like ‘Errata’ this exploits the paradoxical possibilities of reversal, but to tellingly different effect. At first it looks as though the instability arises from the persona’s toppling over his own sense of being done down; how ‘chastened and humbled’, rather than ‘humiliated’, is someone who has just defensively called himself ‘insightfully caring’? By the last line there has to be an inversion, the anticipated instruction to delete becoming one to substitute; but this is a way of testing readers, of seeing that they are on-

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side: the poem puts them through the indignity of checking that they know that ‘costly dislike of cant’ should be preferred to ‘hardness of heart’. The reversal-test finely mixes sardonic wit with knowing self-pity, an effect more than matched when Hill – recalling the murder of Cinna the poet by the mob in Julius Caesar, in mistake for Cinna the conspirator – writes, ‘For Cinna the Poet, see under errata’.65 Paul Muldoon’s books usually have thematic and technical preoccupations that extend beyond particular poems. In Hay, the mid-life crisis about mistakes and how endless it would be to correct them is widespread, even structural, and especially prominent in the concluding sonnet sequence, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’. This intriguing work crosses an account of the fall of Troy, as described by Virgil, with both a lavish meal in a Paris restaurant which the poet is unable to pay for, and the imaginary voyage, or non-existent exile, of his father and another man to Australia. It is there that we meet, for the first time, the real Hay: there’s many a slip twixt what one supposedly determines and the al-al-al-al-aleatory where a cow-pony gives up on the slopes of Mount Isa or the Hay’s meanderings come to mean nothing on the border of Queensland and the Northern Territory. (P, 466– 67)

It is typical that this philosophical flurry should turn on the idea of a slip, and find a correlative for indeterminacy in the reinforcing disruption of the word ‘aleatory’. Taken pretentiously, the passage says that Muldoon is only in the world as a result of the chance that his father did not go to Australia, but more evocatively it imagines a zone of semantic esemplasticity, where the River Hay’s ‘meanderings’ (with a misprint-style pun on ‘meanings’) come to nothing – as any good map will confirm – on a border which sounds like the one that separates the old Queen’s County in Ireland from the Northern Territory still under the crown (a sort of Antipodean River Moy). Whatever one makes of the perplexing narratives of ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, in which poetic quality is at times harder to establish than a fascination with lexical muddle, the sequence keeps revisiting Muldoon poems within and previous to Hay, and thus earlier stages of his life, and so revisits errors, some apparently the poet’s. The process explicitly starts with a return to the idiom of ‘Errata’ and an affirmation of the centrality

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of transatlantic transits to poetry, including that of Heaney – author of ‘The Flight Path’:66 ‘For “pith” read “flight path”’ (P, 470). Virgil, in fact, emerges, as an epic poet of errata: ‘For “demain”,’ Virgil began to sing with a rowley-powley gammon, ‘read “de Main”. For “firse” read “frise”.’ (P, 474)

The sense that everything is up for correction, even correction itself, ushers in a grand final page, which ends up in places which can be found on a map but which seem more literal than geographical: ‘For “errata”,’ Virgil smiled, ‘read “corrigenda”.’ He looked straight through me to Lysander and Hermia. ‘For “Mathilda” read “Matilda”. For “lass” read “less”. Time nor tide wait for a wink from the aura of Ailsa Crag. For “Menalaus” read “Menelaus”. For “dinkum” read “dink”. For “Wooroonooran”, my darlings, read “Wirra Wirra”.’ (P, 475–76)

It could hardly be more apparent that muddles now fascinate Muldoon. But the passage only succeeds because it concludes a book that is frequently much more subtle in its implication of poetry in error. The title of ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, for instance, is disturbed by the proximity of that ‘Mud Room’ word ‘brangle’ – is its title, in fact, a typo?67 – and in ‘BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: The River’, the shortest transit-poem in Hay, a ‘For x’ substituting-structure is folded into the statement: So it was I gave up the Oona for the Susquehanna, the Shannon for the Shenandoah. (P, 414)

This is a good poem to finish with, because Seamus Deane could say that giving up the Oona sounds like going into exile. Yet the texture of the verse, with its cat’s-cradle of end and middle half-rhymes, refuses to seal off (as exile must) one place from another. ‘For “Shannon” read “Shenandoah”.’ If the writing attests to a certain weightlessness attendant on mobility, it does so by letting the words keep connections open, by edging into a literal muddle and implying the possibility of mistakes. The impulse to see life as a misprint is poetically high-risk. In ‘Yarrow’ and some of Hay it produces lexical congestions that are by no means

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always alleviated by Muldoon’s long-proven ability to combine uncertainties of perspective with a lyrical lucidity. Beyond the obvious danger that his poetry might be sapped by a species of philological or self-editing pedantry, Muldoon has evidently been tempted to let the idea that life is a muddle become quasi-ideological, an enabling tenet, interesting himself more in the proliferation than the valency of error, and making a record of its ubiquity displace the other kinds of witness and truth-telling that, in parts of The Annals and Hay, he is willing to venture. Yet his pied and selfcorrected verse is often humanely accurate about damage and the desire to put it right. In ‘The River’, and much recent work, there is an affecting willingness to acknowledge that even success is impure, muddles through, gives things up, and a correspondingly impressive torque in the literally minute plotting of major life-transits.

Notes 1 Paul Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1994), p. 36. 2 Seamus Deane, ‘In the Republic of Letters: A Dialogue between W.B. Yeats and James Joyce on the Occasion of their Reincarnation on the Expiry of Copyright’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1992, p. 12. 3 The label was successfully attached by Malcolm Cowley in Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 [1951]). 4 The Prince of the Quotidian, p. 35. 5 I grateful to Peter McDonald and Edna Longley for clarifying and confirming that, in some parts of Ulster, ‘He’s been twice in Fintona’ is an undercutting, though not uncordial, comment on a person’s pretensions to cosmopolitanism. 6 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 166. 7 John Montague, ‘Molly Bawn’, in The Dead Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 64–65, at p. 64. 8 John Montague, ‘The Figure in the Cave’, in The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput, 1989), pp. 1–19, at pp. 18–19. 9 John Montague, Born in Brooklyn: John Montague’s America, ed. David Lampe (Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1991), pp. 32–36. 10 Derek Mahon, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, in The Hudson Letter (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1995), pp. 65–66, at p. 65. 11 Derek Mahon, ‘Night Thoughts’, in The Yellow Book (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1997), pp. 12–13, at p. 12. 12 This comes through even when, as in ‘America Deserta’, he is looking back to New York. For a trenchant analysis of the aesthetic ideology of exile which Mahon partly inherits from modernism, and which defines itself against tourism – an elitist set of assumptions that sustains some of the strongest writing in The Yellow Book – see Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), chapter 1.

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13 John Montague, ‘She Cries’, in Mount Eagle (Dublin: Gallery, 1988), p. 48. 14 In Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 85. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 15 Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6. 16 Fintan O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of a Global Ireland (Dublin: New Island Books, 1997), p. 134. 17 Fintan O’Toole, Black Hole, Green Card: The Disappearance of Ireland (Dublin: New Island Books, 1994), pp. 27, 22, 51. 18 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 19 To Ireland, I, p. 25. 20 Paul Muldoon, Shining Brow (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 62 – though the question is one of many passages that did not make it from libretto into Daron Aric Hagen’s opera. 21 See Peadar Kirby, Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (Blackrock: Trocaire; Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992), chapters 7–8, and Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (London: Hutchinson, 2000), chapter 8, both reporting among other sources the comments of the Montserrat poet E.A. Markham during his term as writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1991. Compare the illusory Welsh ‘brogue’ detected among the Mandan Indians in ‘Madoc’. 22 Paul Muldoon, Bandanna (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 15. 23 Bandanna, p. 19. 24 Paul Muldoon, Vera of Las Vegas (Oldcastle: Gallery, 2001), pp. 9–10. 25 Compare the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, or come to that, Trench, identified by Vera as Norma Capote (p. 48) – not quite Normal and not a Tru(e)man. 26 Vera of Las Vegas, p. 45. 27 Vera of Las Vegas, p. 45. 28 Vera of Las Vegas, pp. 1–2. 29 Vera of Las Vegas, pp. 49–50. 30 The Rivals III.iii, in Sheridan: Plays, ed. Cecil Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 19–20. 31 I am grateful to Paul Muldoon for permission to cite this informally circulated typescript (fol. 66). 32 Bandanna, p. 38. 33 ‘The’ is sometimes used in Irish names to claim the headship of a sept or family (very much the poet’s role in this book), making the full quibble ‘The Muldoon’; compare, for example, ‘The O’Rahilly’ (P, 360). For related convolutions see ‘a remake of The Hoodlum Priest’ (Muldoon backwards) in ‘The Key’ (P, 197); ‘“Ready when you are, Mr DeMilledoon”’, in ‘BLONDIE: Parallel Lines’ (P, 414); and the detection of Imram Curaig Máile Dúin in the Christian name of Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver (To Ireland, I, p. 128). 34 To Ireland, I, p. 27. 35 In Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 48–49. 36 Compare ‘where they wallow in whiskey and bainne clabair’ (a traditional dish of

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thick, sour milk) and ‘Buy stalwart plants from a stalwart Prod, albeit a dissenter’, in ‘Yarrow’ (P, 349, 358). Even when his poem is ‘A Trifle’ he will punctiliously record taking ‘four or five minutes to run down / the thirty-odd flights of steps’ (P, 120; my italics). See the confusion of meadow-plants in the epigraph to ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’, ‘You made some mistake when you intended to favor me with some of the new valuable grass seed… for what you gave me… proves mere timothy’, or the ‘ragweedrevels’ and goldfinch-supporting ‘thistles’ of ‘Hopewell Haiku’ (P, 451, 426, 430). See John Kerrigan, ‘Ulster Ovids’, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran (Bridgend: Seren, 1992), pp. 237–69, at pp. 250–51. Shining Brow, pp. 62, 5. To Ireland, I, p. 4. To Ireland, I, p. 5. On Joyce’s hermetic self-naming see p. 83. To Ireland, I, p. 103. To Ireland, I, p. 107. See the title-lecture of his The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), and contrast Muldoon’s comments in ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism, 48.2 (April 1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 126. For a stimulating, psychoanalytically informed discussion of Muldoon’s wordscrambling up to Annals, see Guinn Batten, ‘“He Could Barely Tell One from the Other”: The Borderline Disorders of Paul Muldoon’s Poetry’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 95.1 (Winter 1996), pp. 171–204. See, for example, James Reason, ‘Lapses of Attention in Everyday Life’, in Varieties of Attention, ed. Raja Parasuraman and D.R. Davies (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), pp. 515–49, and numerous other papers, leading to his Human Error (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Bernard J. Baars, ‘The Many Uses of Error: Twelve Steps to a Unified Framework’, in Experimental Slips and Human Error: Exploring the Architecture of Volition, ed. Bernard J. Baars (New York: Plenum, 1992), pp. 3–34, at p. 5. Quoted in Bruce Andrews, Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 5. In the former the reader slips through ‘fal’ and ‘alf’ as he or she tracks the not-quitehay of ‘alfalfa’ both ways around – and the word is circular – ‘alpha’, which is printed at the centre of the text, while ‘blé’ (another crop not hay) is the fragment elevated to a word in the space surrounded by ‘A Half-Door’’s not stable cross-runs of ‘stable’. If the poem is read as a remake of the ninth-century Irish lyric ‘The Blackbird over Belfast Lough’ – Cave Hill overlooks Belfast – quoted with translation in To Ireland, I, pp. 10–11, the correction might be interpreted as a determinedly hopeful response to the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ of the later 1990s. ‘Getting Round’, p. 113; To Ireland, I, p. 74. See for example the interview with Clair Wills (2 June 1987), quoted in her Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 202, qualified but hardly compromised in ‘Getting Round’, p. 127. Keats’s celebrated mistake in his sonnet, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. See Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, pp. 207–208.

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56 ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 3. 57 ‘Ellmann’ (correct with two ns) followed by ‘Ellman’, ‘Whitley Strokes’ for Stokes (To Ireland, I, pp. 26, 53). 58 See Stan Smith, ‘The Acoustics of Rural England’ (letter), Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1999, p. 19. 59 To Ireland, I, p. 66. 60 Selected Poems, 1968–1986 (New York: Ecco, 1987), p. vi. I am grateful to Dillon Johnston for alerting me to this after I presented a short version of ‘Paul Muldoon’s Transits’ at the Modern Languages Association 116th Annual Convention, Washington D.C, 27–30 December, 2000. 61 The inconsistency persists in P, 371, 397 – an edition which also erroneously removes, in ‘Errata’ itself (above p. 138), the fada from ‘Béal Feirste’ (and ‘Béal Fierste’) used in Hay. 62 For example, Clough’s mistake in naming his Bothie after a Gaelic word for vagina, the 1998 Irish Almanac and Yearbook of Facts in calling C.S. rather than C. Day Lewis ‘father of actor Daniel Day Lewis’ (P, 353); see Robindra Kumar Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 264, and To Ireland, I, p. 75. 63 Quoting G.K. Chesterton, in ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, in his The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: André Deutsch, 1984), pp. 1– 18, at p. 7. See ‘Our Word is Our Bond’, pp. 138–59, for example at p. 157. 64 Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 20–21. 65 The Triumph of Love, p. 38. 66 In Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 22–26. 67 Compare, earlier in the sequence, the order of ‘ray’s wing braked // on a bed of bok choy’ followed by ‘For “braked” read “baked”’ (P, 462, 474), not to mention the astray inverted commas which – e.g. four lines below that corrigendum – trouble the Faber text.

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‘All Art is a Collaboration’: Paul Muldoon as Librettist DAVID WHEATLEY

‘All art is a collaboration’, writes John Millington Synge in his preface to The Playboy of the Western World.1 Although a trained musician, one form of collaborative art the playwright and poet never explored was opera. His colleague in the Irish Literary Revival, the notoriously tone-deaf W.B. Yeats, was no more enthusiastic. Writing as one who ‘cannot tell one tune from another’ in his essay ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, Yeats remembers his youthful impatience with setting poetry to music: when I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did their natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered, or it drowned in another music which I did not understand. What was the good of writing a love-song if the singer pronounced love ‘lo-o-o-o-o-v-e’.2

Samuel Beckett could not abide opera either. Writing on music in his 1931 monograph Proust, he declared that ‘by definition, opera is a hideous corruption of this most immaterial of all the arts: the words of a libretto are to the musical phrase that they particularize what the Vendôme Column, for example, is to the ideal perpendicular’.3 The great exception to all this is James Joyce, a passionate amateur tenor given to accompanying himself on the guitar or an out-of-tune piano to a favourite Massenet aria, but after the musical tour de force of the ‘Sirens’ chapters of Ulysses he professed himself disillusioned: ‘I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more.’4 The precedents for Paul Muldoon’s ventures into libretto-writing would not seem encouraging, in an Irish context at least. Beyond that, even so prolific a librettist as W.H. Auden has only words of caution: ‘if the librettist is a practising poet,’ he writes, ‘the most difficult problem, the place where he is most likely to go astray, is the composition of the verse.’5 A confirmed non-librettist, Philip Larkin had an uncharitable explanation for the popularity of his juvenilia with composers: ‘musicians don’t like things that mean too much’.6 However good or bad their

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musical settings, poems continue to have an existence in their own right, which is more than can be said of most libretti. In a statement quoted by Tim Kendall, one of the few critics to have written about Muldoon the librettist at any length, Craig Raine reminds us that ‘always excepting Da Ponte and Hofmannsthal, the librettist […] is essential only as a flunkey’.7 David Harsent’s view of the situation is even starker: ‘Few people speak of da Ponte’s Don Giovanni or von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier; even fewer of Kind’s Der Freischütz or, if it comes to that, the Sonnleithners’ Fidelio’.8 His advice to the writer who finds himself battling these odds is unequivocal: ‘stop it […] stop working with composers’.9 Apart from Muldoon the roll-call of contemporary poets who have made significant contributions to the genre scarcely makes up the numbers for a madrigal, let alone an operatic chorus: among the names that stand out are Raine, Harsent, Alice Goodman, J.D. McClatchy and Peter Goldsworthy. Muldoon’s gamble on libretto-writing, then, was anything but a risk-free venture. Collaboration may be dilution, to the point of loss of artistic control. For his collaborator, Wyoming-born composer Daron Aric Hagen, ‘my contract was with the opera company; Paul was my subcontractor’.10 Kendall has drawn attention to the difficulties in matching Muldoon’s rhymes and line-breaks to the rhythmic demands of the music, and of capturing the exact tonal register when Muldoon employs a device such as quotation marks (or a poet’s ‘write protect’ labels, as Paul Driver calls them11). When the fifth workman in Shining Brow talks of building on ‘“the prairie of men’s hearts”’, for instance, and repeats the phrase to his uncomprehending workmates, it would by no means be clear in performance that he is quoting a phrase of Frank Lloyd Wright. Similarly problematic is Wright’s disgusted repetition of what the press has been writing about him, which only suitable facial expressions by the singer can save from being misconstrued. David Harsent’s advice to the nervous librettist in these circumstances is once again to the point: ‘Forget your line breaks; forget your emphases; forget your stresses; and if you don’t want this to happen, don’t write for music.’12 As a librettist, Muldoon’s words are no longer his and his alone to alter, as can be seen in the various cuts and changes his texts underwent in performance. As if in response to this meeting of media the three libretti take as their theme the meetings of worlds – meetings, in all three cases, with dangerous and tragic consequences. In his ‘Author’s Note’ to Poems 1968–1998 Muldoon classes his libretti with the other ‘small, interim publications’ not to be found in that

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volume. This serves to highlight the difference between the libretti and the poetry proper, without implying a value judgement on the former. As he shows elsewhere (for example, the representation of both ‘Madoc’ and ‘Yarrow’ by a single section in New Selected Poems) the scale of representation in these portmanteau volumes is far from a reliable index to a work’s significance in the Muldoon canon. Clearly, however, the libretti represent a special case. Muldoon’s work has always been full of music, but outside his libretti opera references are thin on the ground. Among the twenty artists listed in ‘Sleeve Notes’ from Hay are Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, but not Bjorling, Gigli or McCormack. If his 1960s idols are an umbilical cord to Muldoon’s rock’n’roll youth, should we interpret his taking to opera as an upgrade to something more in keeping with middle-aged professordom? If so, it is no coincidence that his first venture into libretto came shortly after his move to the United States, with a commission in 1990 from Madison Opera in Wisconsin – one he accepted, apparently, before learning what the subject of the opera was. The subject was Frank Lloyd Wright and the opera became Shining Brow with Hagen providing the music, as he would also do for Vera of Las Vegas, set and first performed in Las Vegas in 1996, and Bandanna, commissioned in 1997 by the College Band Directors’ National Association. Shining Brow premiered at the Madison Opera in April 1993 and has since enjoyed numerous revivals and warm critical acclaim. To John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune in 1997 it was ‘one of the most important American operas of the last decade’, and to Walter Skiba of the Illinois Times ‘a masterpiece of the 90s’. In Hagen Muldoon found a flexible collaborator whose music is rooted in the tradition of Copland and Bernstein but stretches to blues, hymn and barbershop quartet and, just as artfully, parody-homages to Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky. Despite his quickness to accept the Madison commission, Muldoon confessed his wariness of opera to Lyn Keller: ‘I’m in many ways sceptical about opera […]. I hate to think of it being an elitist art form’.13 Nevertheless, the ‘sui generis’ nature of opera struck him as ‘thrilling’.14 Muldoon explained the attraction of the art form to Christopher Cook: ‘One of the great things about opera as an art form is that characters can quite happily come right up to the front of the stage and say “I feel bad”, “I feel great”, “My heart is broken”, “My hand is frozen”; and somehow the over-the-top element in it I found really very exciting.’15 For a writer who has had to weather accusations of cerebral detachment and heartlessness, the opportunity to indulge in such frank emotionalism

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can only have been invigorating. Three of the four examples Muldoon gives above indicate distress rather than exultation, and quizzing him on his portrayal of Frank Lloyd Wright in Shining Brow Lynn Keller points out ‘that [Muldoon] gave only the slimmest representation to the joys of art and artistic creation’.16 As he concedes, Shining Brow is a ‘very dark’ treatment of the great American architect’s life. For Hagen, ‘traditionally, opera has been a genre in which the words don’t matter as much as the situation the poet creates to provide a platform for the music’, and Muldoon took some trouble to find a sufficiently dramatic situation. The libretto’s prologue invokes ‘the poetry of architecture’,17 but Muldoon was keenly aware of the limited possibilities of showing Wright going about his daily business.18 Instead, drawing on Bernard Gill’s biography of Wright, Many Masks, he focuses on the period from 1903 to 1914, during which the architect’s professional and personal life underwent a series of crises. The Wright we encounter is strong-willed, successful and comfortably assured of his celebrity status, but two of the central relationships in his life are breaking down: with his wife Catherine and with his old mentor Louis Sullivan. Wright’s relationship with Sullivan in particular mirrors the preoccupation with artistic friendships explored by Muldoon around this time in ‘7, Middagh Street’ and Madoc.19 Madoc, which also dates from 1990, makes much of American-Celtic connections, including the fate of the Welsh settlers who accompanied Prince Madoc to America in the twelfth century. This is only one of the connections between that volume and Shining Brow (another is the quasioperatic surtitles of ‘Madoc’). Proud of his Celtic heritage, Frank Lloyd Wright gives the name of the Welsh bard Taliesin (‘Shining Brow’) to the house he builds for himself and Mamah Cheney. Edwin Cheney comments that Wright’s Buffalo house is ‘faintly reminiscent of a maze’ (SB, 6), as does Mamah later on (SB, 26), but one with ‘at its core a vast emptiness’ (SB, 24). Before meeting Wright or the Cheneys we are introduced to Sullivan, to the slow-moving music of the opera’s prologue with a bell tolling ominously in the background. For Sullivan his apprentice Wright was ‘“a pencil in my hand”’ (SB, 3), a phrase whose homoerotic overtones are seized on by the draughtsmen. The draughtsmen have a low view of life’s pencil-holders: ‘Some are destined to stand / with their pencils in their hands / and some are destined to rule’ (SB, 5), echoing Wright’s confident announcement that he is one of those ‘destined to rule’ (SB, 4). From his childhood he has thought of himself as an Ibsenite ‘Master Builder’ working to impress fantasy patrons such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci and

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the Lady of Shalott, and his treatment of his wife Catherine suggests that he continues to live in a fantasy world, with Mamah Cheney in line to become its latest figure of enchantment and seduction. His innuendoladen explanation of a ‘hip-roof’ to her (SB, 6) leaves no room for doubt that, for Wright, ‘the poetry of architecture’ is explicitly a form of love poetry. Alone in his study he muses on his relationship with Sullivan, and tells the story of a twin ‘ousted’ in its mother’s womb by its brother, who carries it into adulthood as a lump of ‘gristle and keratin’ ‘big as a baby’s fist’ in his chest (SB, 14). The image manages to combine rivalry and arrested development as well as hinting at the fate awaiting those who fail to get ahead in Shining Brow’s competitive world, and is used as a leitmotif throughout the libretto. Despite his former closeness to Sullivan, Wright feels he too is carrying the burden of a relationship that has shrivelled and died. Wright no longer has time for the give and take of collaboration, but must be the ‘Master Builder’ in splendid isolation. He considers Cheney’s ‘curious name’, converting its Dickensian cognomen to ‘Edwin, Edwin, Edwin … Brood’ (SB, 15). In Dickens’ novel Edwin Drood mysteriously disappears after breaking off an engagement. Wright, by implication, is brooding on how to extricate Cheney’s wife Mamah from her unhappy marriage, with her ‘brood’ of children in tow if needs be. When courting Mamah he quotes Taliesin to her, though his highminded description of the Lady of the Lake as ‘less a lover than a muse’ (SB, 25–26) disappoints the earthier Mamah. Initially he pronounces Mamah’s name ‘Mah-mah’ (SB, 5), converting her to the ‘mama’ he mentions shortly afterwards. ‘May-mah’, she corrects him, suggesting a ‘maimer’, though it is she who will end up terribly maimed. Conversely, when Mamah later rebukes the chef for calling for ‘ma’am’ – ‘Please don’t call me by my first name’ (SB, 62) – her correction masks a deeper acknowledgement that the romance has gone out of her affair with Wright; she has ended up as the domestic ‘mah-mah’ he took her for all along. For now, though, she is watching another relationship – her marriage to Edwin – shrivel and die. Edwin uses the imagery of Wright’s twin story to describe the cuckold’s horns he is sprouting (‘Can’t you feel those little nodes / of gristle and keratin’, he asks his wife [SB, 28]). His brow burns rather than shines with rage and indignation. As an artist so indifferent to the feelings of those around him, Wright does a poor job of convincing us that his architectural forms are all ‘somehow integral’ (SB, 26) and at one with their surroundings. He

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constantly invokes Native American tribes and lore in support of his theories, but succeeds only in compounding our sense of his pretentiousness and self-aggrandizement. Has he mistaken hubris for harmony? Despite his talk of Taliesin being ‘not “on”, but “of”’ its surroundings, ‘“a house that hill might marry”’ (SB, 48, 42), and of building on the ‘“prairie of men’s hearts”’, he treats the landscape as a tabula rasa on which to inscribe his own desires, much like Robert Frost in his great hymn of unconscious American political and artistic imperialism, ‘The Gift Outright’. Edwin suggests revising the motto over the Taliesin hearth to ‘For everything that’s built / something is destroyed’ (SB, 27). For Edwin too architectural form follows function, in the words of Wright’s maxim: Act 1 Scene 2 ends with him having been abandoned by his wife, standing inside the open walls of the half-built house. Just before the closing chorus the orchestra plays an interlude based on Goethe’s ‘Hymn to Nature’, as it did at the end of Scene 1, the sunny mood of the music deliberately at odds with the atmosphere of brooding disharmony that dominates the action. Muldoon supplies a further opposition by playing the Goethe references off against a very different poem, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both Goethe and Coleridge explore the pantheistic interaction, or collaboration, of nature and the divine (‘Die Menschen sind alle in ihr und sie in allen’, Mamah quotes from Goethe), but in Coleridge this interaction is fatally disturbed by an act of gratuitous malice. Edwin thinks of himself in Coleridgean terms: ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross / about my neck is hung’ (SB, 23). For many critics the central drama of the Mariner is Coleridge’s abandonment of sinful (because pagan) pantheism for a straightforward tale of Christian sin and redemption.20 Wright too trusts to a pantheistic balance between nature and his creations, only to be terribly punished for his artistic and amorous over-reaching. Hagen has referred to ‘simultaneity of events’ as ‘opera’s trump card’, a card Muldoon plays on many occasions in Shining Brow. The rapid alternation at the press conference between Wright’s prepared statement and his private thoughts reveals his inner divisions as he considers his life with Mamah. While playing the apologetic divorcé to the press, in private ‘The truth is that I feel / nothing, not the merest hint / of remorse’ (SB, 46). To Yeats in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, one of the cornerstones of a book that explores the connections between architecture and violence, ‘Many ingenious lovely things are gone’,21 and now Wright too confesses ‘I have torn down / many beautiful things’ (SB, 47). Like Gabriel in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ Wright is called on to carve the Christmas goose,

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but is too ill at ease with his guests to make a successful master of ceremonies. Mamah is not enjoying herself either, reproaching Wright for his neglect of her and mocking her chef Julian Carleton. Act 1 ends with the barbershop quartet, a bravura piece in performance, but a complex piece of writing whose resistance to the demands of operatic form has been pointed out by Tim Kendall.22 In a series of epochal events (the sinking of the Titanic, the Irish Home Rule crisis, the assassination of the Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand, all ‘going down in history’23) the world hurtles towards war in 1914, but Wright remains preoccupied with ‘going down in history’ in the heroic rather than the catastrophic manner. But something else is ‘going down’, in the colloquial American sense, as the chef begins to bristle at being called a ‘cannibal’ and a ‘nigger’ by Mamah. In their insistent first-person singular, the chef’s speech patterns resemble those of the protoIrish poet Amergin, whose ‘quite disproportionate sense of his […] own importance’ he shares.24 Made to feel like a freakish outsider, Carleton marks his distance from the other characters by having a purely speaking part. While Mamah deprecatingly refers to her translations as ‘crewelwork / on Goethe’s high-and-mighty quatrains’ (SB, 65) he is planning his own form of ‘cruel work’. Taliesin’s labyrinth has found its minotaur. One of the principal themes of Shining Brow is usurpation, artistic and emotional. Wright appropriates Native American lore but is indifferent to the feelings of an actual outsider like Carleton (whom he has sacked), builds Taliesin as a family home but allows his work to usurp the family life that Mamah craves. At the root of the problem is his relationship with Sullivan, which comes to a head in Act 2 Scene 3, a scene introduced by yet more tolling bells. Sullivan argues for a less self-centred and ornamental view of architecture, and has little time for Wright’s attempts to talk him round. Sullivan rejects Wright’s image of him as an Irish high king ‘on the ramparts of Tara’, a phrase that in his American accent sounds more like ‘ramparts of terror’. At this point Hagen intervenes in the libretto to move things along. Quoting Bernard Stanberg, he writes that in opera ‘you have to end quickly’ because of the ‘ten-thirty spot’ when audiences begin to get restless in their seats. In Shining Brow this coincides with a section of the quarrel (SB, 68–71), which Hagen reads as a cover for Wright and Sullivan’s deeper feelings about each other, excising it in favour of thirty seconds of cello lines at the end of their exchanges ‘during which the two men simply reach […] out to one another without being able to touch.’ The soothing harmonies of the cellos and French horn could not be more misleading. Edwin Cheney rushes in and reads the telegram

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announcing that Taliesin has been destroyed by fire. Mamah and the children have been killed and Carleton, the arsonist, has killed himself by drinking hydrochloric acid. Sullivan sings to the departing Wright with ‘a lump in my throat’ (SB, 76), while in the duet between Wright and Edwin that follows Wright’s own emotional control breaks down. Edwin demolishes his belief in the artist as an all-controlling God, forcing him to confront not ‘the seeming randomness of things’ but the real thing, ‘the sheer randomness of things’ (SB, 80). His farewell to Edwin, ‘Goodbye, Ed’ (SB, 81) is spoken rather than sung; Hagen shrewdly omits Edwin’s reply, leaving the last word to Wright before a chorus of ‘Out of the depths’. As Wright and Sullivan respond to the lumps in their throats, the Maid repeats the ‘lump of gristle’ image one last time to describe the lump ‘that was [Carleton’s] Adam’s apple’ (SB, 83). Unable to sing, his final act was a rejection of his powers of speech as well. Just when speech seems impossible Wright turns his ‘De Profundis’ to a ‘Kyrie Eleison’, refusing to give up on his art but putting it at the service of the overwhelming love he feels for his dead wife. His sudden emotional loquacity is quite a turnaround from the Wright we know, but even now we cannot entirely avoid the suspicion that it is based on a denial of reality (‘That Mamah’s dead and gone / is itself a grand illusion’ [SB, 85]). Before the end of the aria his confidence has evaporated, and he dismisses all his grand theories as ‘tittletattle’ (SB, 86). Except for the small cry of a bird ‘against oblivion’ the ‘prairie’ of his heart really has become a landscape of grief and despair. Not long after Shining Brow Muldoon would write ‘Incantata’, an elegy for an artist who, like Wright, held to a confidently deterministic worldview. Just as that poem ends with Muldoon flouting her iron sense of fate to imagine ‘tak[ing] in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink’ (P, 341),25 Wright pictures one last embrace with Mamah: ‘Would that she might take me in her arms. / Would that I might fill the grave myself’ (SB, 85). His renewed artistic confidence may or may not be a regression to the hubristic Wright of yore, but even if only for the brief period while he tries to make sense of catastrophe Wright becomes a figure of genuine tragic intensity, and one of the finest character studies in Muldoon’s whole oeuvre. The second of Muldoon’s libretti, though the third to be published, is Vera of Las Vegas. Among the libretto’s themes is illegal immigration, as it will be in Bandanna; the immigrants in this case are two fugitive IRA men, Dumdum and Taco. Names are rarely neutral in Muldoon: a ‘dumdum’ is a soft-nosed bullet that expands on impact (as Taco notes on the last page of

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the libretto), while ‘Taco’ adds a whiff of Mexican flavour to proceedings. Taco and Dumdum are based in New York but find themselves detained in Las Vegas through Dumdum’s incompetence in booking their flights. The setting is central to the mood and style of both music and text. Hagen’s preference is for the opera to be staged ‘in a nightclub or cabaret setting, with at least some of the audience seated at small cocktail tables’. The orchestra too sits on stage, in big band formation, with the drummer on a raised platform in the centre of the stage. Of the three operas, Vera is the most musically experimental. Its use of muzak-like background effects, faux-naïf choruses of strippers and dancers (incorporating references to Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas), electric guitar, and smoky cabaret style at the opening of Vera’s song in Scene 14 all combine to create just the right spirit of knowing vulgarity. Taco and Dumdum too are mindful of their whereabouts. When Taco describes U2’s album The Joshua Tree as ‘an attack on the soft centre / of contemporary America’,26 he is no doubt thinking of the Las Vegas setting of the video for ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. The libretto is in fact full of musical references, though, again, these are to rock music and the blues rather than opera, with an allusion to the rhinestone-clad king of 1970s Vegas, Elvis, thrown in for good measure. A musical pun is also at work in the name of the libretto’s heroine. Echoing the allusions to the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson in ‘Immram’, Vera toys with the word ‘lemon’: Taco sings ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’ by Robert Johnson, with its mischievous invitation to ‘Baby, squeeze my lemon / […] till the juice runs down my leg’ (V, 11) and calls ‘Lemon’ on U2’s Zooropa album ‘total crap’ (V, 21). Vera’s surname is Leman, though her androgynous appearance leaves Dumdum unable to decide whether she is a whorish ‘leman’ or a ‘Low-man’ in drag (V, 37) like Dil in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, a film that forms a running joke in Vera of Las Vegas.27 Doll tells Vera, ‘I’ll be with you in the squeezing of a lemon’ (V, 30) and Dumdum worries about the effect on Trench and Trilby of discovering they have been ‘sold a lemon’ (V, 51). On their arrival in Vegas, Taco and Dumdum engage in lewd banter about the flight attendants and the attractiveness of women in uniforms. Tailing them is Doll, an undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service whom Dumdum has already been groping on the flight from La Guardia.28 The comic potential of terrorists in an American airport may seem ‘changed utterly’ in the aftermath of the events of September 2001, but the truth is that, whatever crimes they may have

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committed, Dumdum and Taco give little outer sign of remaining active terrorists.29 Events from their past weigh heavily on their minds, however. The cover of the Gallery Press edition of Muldoon’s 1995 play Six Honest Serving Men features a Dermot Seymour painting of a blindfolded naked man with his hands behind his back, as if undergoing interrogation; and Vera of Las Vegas begins and ends with Taco ‘in what must be an interrogation centre, somewhere in Northern Ireland’ (V, 9). In the ‘Prologue’ the intelligence agents Trench and Trilby take turns to slap Taco’s face, creating a juddering sound in his ears which ‘crossfades into the shudder of a plane landing’ (V, 9). The libretto is dotted with references to characters from Six Honest Serving Men,30 for whose deaths Dumdum and Taco may have been responsible. In that play suspicion falls on Taco, Dumdum and one Dessie Gillespie when they go missing after the assassination of ‘The Chief’. Shortly afterwards they are picked up by soldiers in a bar and interrogated, but ‘no / sooner / arrested and placed under detention / than they were out again’,31 fuelling suspicions that they have turned informers. The libretto’s heroine has problems of her own to contend with. Again like Dil in The Crying Game, Vera attracts unwanted and thuggish male (or apparently male) attention. The rogue British agents Trench and Trilby who are pursuing her have been sent by one of her assignations, a corrupt judge against whom she is bringing a case for assault (The Crying Game also contains a sexually corrupt judge). ‘They’ve / been trying to get me to draw in my horns’, she explains (V, 31). Coming after Taco’s coarse suggestion ‘Come blow my horn’ (V, 11) and Dumdum’s comparison of their predicament to being on ‘“the horns / of a dilemma”’ (V, 20), the double entendre is blatant: she refuses to conform to feminine type and draw in the phallic ‘horn’ that Taco will later encounter. When Vera attempts to give Trench and Trilby the slip she makes for a strip club, traditionally a place of male power over the exposed female form, but calling to mind the baring of the transvestite phallus in The Crying Game. Doll also refers to the ‘Gate of Horn and the Gate of Ivory’ of classical myth (V, 26); only the former preserves the dreams of those who have travelled to the underworld. If Vera is the ‘Gate of Horn’ who will bring her friends through their ordeal, it may be because she combines the masculine qualities of her ‘horn’ and the more feminine-sounding ‘Gate of Horn’. As a gambling capital Las Vegas is a perfect setting for meditations on high-risk strategies of tempting fate. Scene 8 takes place around the casino’s gaming tables and slot machines, with the chorus girls singing of

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slot machine payouts in the nursery-rhyme terms of ‘oranges and lemons’. Collecting her winnings from a slot machine, Vera considers the strange dialectic of chance and cunning being played out around her: Only the likes of Vera can truly show and tell what lies at the epicentre of Las Vegas while those that most covet imagine they must be caught up in schemes and scams and strategies and the so-called ‘study of form.’ (V, 29)

In the previous scene Vera has quoted Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ to Dumdum, a poem that pointedly invites us to learn from the ‘study of form’. While the phrase has gambling connotations as well as literary ones, it also covers the ogling of the female form at which Dumdum and Taco are so adept. In the 1998 recording of the opera Taco quaveringly sings Vera’s name (V, 15) when he first hears it, like a sentimental Irish tenor (another musical concession to gallantry is the softening of the Irishmen’s preferred swear-word to ‘fricking’ throughout). He is love- or lust-struck the moment he sees her: ‘I wouldn’t / mind throwing the leg / over this one’ (V, 25). But after an intimate clinch he has news of an unexpected discovery: ‘Dumdum, when I had a feel of / little Lady Day / she had this huge fucking horn’ (V, 36). They make an odd couple, but if an audience watching Taco’s infatuation expect the opera to turn on Taco’s revulsion on learning the truth about Vera, they are in for a surprise. He refuses to be put off, and when Vera (now ‘he’) begins to unbutton his fly he does nothing to resist (‘I didn’t stop him, Dumdum. I just / didn’t have the heart’ [V, 38]). In The Crying Game the IRA man Fergus’s shock when Dil is revealed to be a man gives way to acceptance and affection, culminating in an act of self-sacrifice when he goes to prison on Dil’s behalf for the murder of the vixenish Jude. In his introduction to the screenplay of the film Neil Jordan writes: ‘for the lovers, it was the irony of what divided them that allowed them to smile’.32 In this way, Jordan massages difference (political, racial, sexual) into a symbol of pure reconciliation; pure because, with Fergus in prison at the end of the film, the question of whether he and Dil will go on to have a homosexual relationship need not arise. As David Lloyd notes: ‘Titillating in its play with gender identity, the film is finally reassuring in enacting the most stringent taboos on queer identity.’33 The shock and disgust felt by Fergus in The Crying Game contrast sharply with

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Taco’s blithe consent to Vera’s lovemaking, even if it remains unclear how far exactly his tolerance stretches. But Muldoon in not in the business of providing a cosy tale of love triumphant across the psychosexual barricades. Neither Taco nor Dumdum comes close to Fergus as an example of that Troubles trash cliché, the terrorist with a heart of gold, and it is hard to feel very involved in the relationship between Vera and Taco. Dumdum and Taco’s verbal flights of fancy, Hagen comments, show their capacity for ‘entertaining themselves in order not to have to face the fact they [a]re dead inside’, while for John Redmond the characters of Taco and Dumdum are ‘little developed’.34 The end of the libretto brings not epiphany or development but further violence and dissolution. After their sensational exposure as women Trench and Trilby make their escape. Taco is left alone on stage, and we hear ‘the judder of the blood and the shudder of a plane taking off’ (V, 53). The time-sequence is unclear: is this still the past or has Taco been returned to Northern Ireland? The opacity of the plot recalls Kendall’s verdict on ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ that ‘perspectives quickly become lost, motives and identities obscured, until ultimately it even becomes unclear who is killing whom, and why’.35 One thing at least is finally explained: Taco confesses to the death of Gillespie, while denying responsibility for the death of another Six Honest Serving Men character, Gilbey, for which he blames Dumdum. His monologue tails off in a weary ellipsis: ‘We may have to wait until Judgement Day / before all is revealed …’ (V, 53). His confession brings him no visible catharsis or absolution. Vera, offstage, calls his name and adds in ‘A wail’ ‘Where’s / my Taco Bell?’, but as the fadeout and the nightmarish repetition of the opening ‘judder of the blood and the shudder of a plane’ make clear, Taco is one of Muldoon’s lost souls for whom there will be no happy ending. In its final lines the typescript of Vera of Las Vegas differs significantly from the published text. In the typescript, Dumdum opens the manila envelope (originally pressed on Doll by Trench and Trilby) to reveal a pineapple. This fruit features in Vera’s song, where she mentions ‘a storekeeper in Tennessee who / shot my uncle for stealing a pineapple’ (V, 47). To Doll, the appearance of the fruit at this point is simply a malapropistic joke by Trench and Trilby, showing how they have been ‘the very pineapple of politeness’. More sinisterly, they are known to have used ‘one of these thingammies’ before to blow up an ambassador. Despite the danger there is still time for associative wordplay on the theme of fruit (though this time lemons are nowhere in sight):

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DOLL Pineapples. Grenades. Hospitality. Hospitalization. Same thing. That’s why they call the islands the Grenadas. VERA Not pineapples, Doll. Pomegranates. And the islands are the Grenadines. [DOLL has turned to DUMDUM, who holds the ‘pineapple’ to his ear.] Taco. DUMDUM Of DOLL course, Ulysses is as clear as a bell … TACO Yes, Dumdum. It’s ticking. DUMDUM [DOLL falters.] DOLL Compared to Anna Livia Plurabelle.

After Taco’s reference to Vera’s ‘horn’, it may or may not be significant (to adopt the phraseology of To Ireland, I) that in the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter of Finnegans Wake we read ‘Drop me the sound of the findhorn’s name, Mtu or Mti, sombogger was wisness’,36 though ‘findhorn’ here means nothing more suggestive than a smoked haddock. As in Shining Brown and Bandanna (not to mention the Phoenix Park incident in Finnegans Wake), sexual shame and discovery are at the heart of Vera, with the element of homosexuality only serving to heighten the tension. If Taco is a ‘findhorn’ for discovering Vera’s secret, as the transvestite and possibly homosexual ‘sombogger’ she is a potentially dangerous witness to his illegal presence in the country. The conjunction of explosive devices and fruit also has a Wakean analogue. In the Burrus and Caseous/Brutus and Cassius episode in 1.6, Shem the Penman ‘kennot tail a bomb from a painapple when he steals one’, while chapter 2.1 describes the predicament of a pair who ‘are not on terms, they twain, bartrossers, since their baffle of Whatalose when Adam Leftus and the devil took our hindmost, gegifting her with his painapple’.37 As the pineapple counts down, the taking of his hindmost by the devil cannot be far away. If late Muldoon is Finnegans Wake-like after the (comparative) lucidity of the early work, the high comedy and cinematic immediacy of Vera may look like a throwback. Whatever its place in the Muldoon oeuvre its dramatic force is undeniable: the overt kitschiness and madcap wordplay do not detract from but ultimately strengthen it as a piece of political drama. For Bernard O’Donoghue it is ‘a powerful and ultimately serious dramatisation of the dilemmas in post-Troubles Northern Ireland’.38 As the affix in ‘post-Troubles’ becomes more and more the norm, Vera of Las

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Vegas mercilessly pursues Dumdum and Taco’s twilight world to its surreal and grotesque last redoubts – or so we hope.39 Commissioned in 1997, Bandanna was first performed in March 1999 by the University of Texas Austin Theatre. Like The Annals of Chile (1994) it explores Muldoon’s fascination with Hispanic America, whose first stirrings date back to ‘Vaquero’ and ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’ in Mules (the latter receiving an honorary name-check in Bandanna). It is set in a town on the US–Mexican border, as is Orson Welles’ great film noir, Touch of Evil, though when Muldoon acknowledges Welles it is with a reference to the labour organizer as ‘Citizen Kane’ (B, 9). Of the three libretti Bandanna comes closest to Shakespearean tragedy, and with good reason: it is in many ways an overt rewriting of Othello. The date is 1968, as we learn from Kane’s allusion to Mayor Daley and the violence at the Democratic Party Congress in Chicago that year (B, 28). The town’s Latino chief of police Morales has been in Cambodia and Vietnam with Jake, just as Iago accompanied Othello on his campaigns. ‘Something snapped in you there’, Morales tells his lieutenant (B, 29), preparing him for the role of brooding revenger when Morales’ other Vietnam comrade, the Irish-American Cassidy, is promoted over Jake’s head. Their shared experiences have not brought the men closer together, whatever Morales may think; as with Sullivan and Wright in Shining Brow their rivalries are too strong. With Kane’s connivance Jake plots to convince Morales that his wife Mona is having an affair with Cassidy. The red bandanna of the title will supply the provoking rag to the bull of Morales’ jealousy, with murderous consequences. The settings of Bandanna include the wide open spaces of the borderland, but Hagen and Muldoon work to create a sense of confinement, specifying the sets as ‘minimal throughout’ and insisting that ‘under no circumstances’ should painted backdrops be used in place of illuminated blank scrims. As in Vera, musicians are placed on stage: in this case a Mariachi band and a guitar player. The band are part of the celebrations for the Day of the Dead, a feast which becomes the occasion for carnivalesque and violent licence in another important intertext for Bandanna, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Shining Brow and Vera make heavy use of leitmotif, and so does Bandanna. Among the most recurrent symbols in the libretto is the border. In ‘The Boundary Commission’ Muldoon described a town whose main street is traversed by the Irish border, leaving the poet wondering ‘which side, if any, he should be on’ (P, 80), and in Shining Brow Catherine complains to Wright of having been ‘shut out by the wall / you’ve thrown

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up round yourself’ (SB, 12). In Bandanna too the border functions as a marker of difference and danger. Considering the statement that ‘the border is a state of mind’ (what former East Germans would call die Mauer im Kopf, ‘the wall in the head’), Jake insists that ‘it’s real enough’ (B, 7). His frustration and resentment tempt him across the dividing line between good and evil, though symbolically this leaves him ‘caught’ on the very border itself: When you fall in with our parade the line between what’s true and false begins to fade. You’re caught between the two like a shade between two shades (B, 7–8)

When Kane wants to threaten Jake he insinuates that the policeman is ‘working both sides of the street’ (B, 10), a crossing of the street that may be a double-cross. After the brawl between Jake and Cassidy, Morales tells Mona and Emily (Jake’s fiancée) that ‘I put myself on the line’, while Cassidy ‘oversteps the mark’ in drawing a gun (B, 13). The line he puts himself on may be a ‘firing line’ (B, 14), just one of the many dangerous associations the word acquires: Morales remembers a ‘fateful R and R’ during which a woman in an opium den performed erotic asphyxiation on Cassidy ‘with a fishing-line’,40 while Jake is ‘feed[ing]’ Morales a ‘line’ when he talks about: how we must refine the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ into something rich and rare, how we must combine their separate strains so they intertwine into one thick skein (B, 14)

The impulse to combine (for which read corrupt) is at odds with the Manichean and separatist logic by which Bandanna is governed. With so many ‘separate strains’ at work in Morales’ line metaphors (not unlike the polysemous ‘hand’ of ‘They that Wash on Thursday’ in Hay), the chances of ‘getting things back in line’ (B, 15) and safely under control are remote. The metaphor gets into the way Hagen talks about opera too: the words and music ‘explore the liminal zone [a phrase used by Morales; cf. n. 27] between “lyrics” and “musicals” on the one hand and “poetry” and opera” on the other.’

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Another combination that colours Bandanna is that of English and Spanish and, on occasion, liturgical Latin too. The extensive use of the chorus in Bandanna recalls García Lorca’s great trilogy Bodas de Sangre, Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba, creating the backdrop of a community against which the different characters’ plights are thrown into relief. Hagen’s music works to the same end, as in Act 2 Scene 1 when the muttering wedding guests sound almost like the wingbeats of avenging birds of prey, come to rip Morales to pieces. The first chorus we encounter is the band of the dispossessed and illegal immigrants that Jake is helping to lead across the border, who speak in Spanish and Spanish-inflected English. Despite their plight the labour organizer Kane feels little sympathy for them: they are peasant ‘“mongrels”’ or “mutts”’ who ‘worship Quetzalcoatl / or some shithead’ (B, 26) on the Day of the Dead with acts of grotesque self-mutilation. The townspeople prefer to see their celebrations in terms of renewal and rebirth, ‘come to life again’ once they have been ‘carried across / the threshold of pain’ (B, 5).41 Emily is also crossing the threshold of pain, but at the hands of her abusive husband: quizzed by Mona about whether Jake has ‘forced … [her] again’, she hints darkly of her ‘flimsy membrane’ (B, 6), refusing to cross the line of decency and say what she has done. Jake is more compassionate than Kane towards the dispossessed, but his nocturnal absences have aroused Morales and his wife’s suspicions. After the street-brawl he secretes Mona’s red bandanna to use against his boss as a reminder that ‘he, too, was dispossessed’ (B, 18). The best way to remind Morales of his inferior origins, he decides, is to dispossess him of the happiness he has found with Mona. As ‘lines that once seemed so secure / begin to blur’ (B, 7), Muldoon makes extensive use of colour and racial imagery to feed the characters’ jealousy and insecurity. The newly promoted Cassidy indulges his prejudice against his boss by grudgingly allowing, ‘I guess that every dago has his day’ (B, 8). Jake’s poisonous nature makes ‘Agent Orange / seem like a cure’ (B, 30), his reference a few lines further on to Mona’s titular bandanna as a ‘sash’ lending further weight to these Orange credentials. To Morales, Mona remains his beloved ‘half-orange’, quickly declining into a ‘“rotten half-orange”’ as his violent jealousy flares up (B, 33, 48). Hay repeatedly links white with death and decay, and Bandanna offers numerous examples of its own: the worm at the bottom of Jake’s tequila bottle is ‘white as arsenic’ and ‘white-as-ash’, while Mona is ‘white trash’ (B, 22). Riddling with Desdemona, Iago associates whiteness with a pure-seeming but false exterior for a ‘black’ nature underneath: ‘“If she be black, and

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thereto have a wit, / She’ll find a white that shall her blackness fit”’ (II.i.131–2). The superficially white Desdemona finds a black ‘wight’ in whom her ‘corruption’ is mirrored. There are other Shakespearean moments, such as Morales’ confession of love ‘not despite / but because of your fouling our nest’ (B, 16), but none more so than when he calls Mona a ‘ewe in rut’ (B, 33), echoing Iago’s words to Brabantio: ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ (I.i.89–90). Mona’s imagined lechery contrasts with the ‘rut’ in which Kane’s workers end up; the fantasy figure constructed by Jake of a ‘lily-white’ Mona (B, 21) indulging her dark sexual appetites to the full represents a blending of the libretto’s Manichean extremes that is simply intolerable to Morales’ tortured imagination. In his confusion he begins to flirt with the fatalistic sentiments of the chorus: ‘To live is to sleep, / to die is to awaken?’ (B, 27). As with Iago in Othello the question of the revengers’ real motivation in Bandanna is a complex one. Jake appears more red-bloodedly jealous of Mona than Iago is of Desdemona, greeting her first appearance with an approving ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing her in the buff’ (B, 10). This comment may be for the benefit of Cassidy and Kane or a foil to the nascent homoeroticism of some of his other remarks, as when he says of Morales, ‘Now I’m forced to screw him over’ (B, 30). Kane’s hostility towards Morales is of a piece with the contempt behind his leftist rhetoric, but he too is obsessed with Morales to the exclusion of a functioning love life. When he seduces a Mexican girl at the wedding party (Act 2 Scene 2) he is disgusted by her body, pushing her away and accusing her of being a prostitute. As a much shorter opera than Shining Brow, Bandanna does not have the same problem with Hagen’s ‘ten-thirty spot’, but its pace does noticeably increase in the second act. The whirling intensity of the music at the wedding reception (Act 2 Scene 1) counterpoints the frantic intensity of Morales’ suspicions. In accordance with the mean-minded folk wisdom of the Men Guests, that a woman’s ‘little h’m-h’ms / means she knows she’s most revealing / when she reveals least’ (B, 35), Mona’s veneer of innocence is proof that she is concealing something. The samba that Cassidy dances with her at Jake’s behest turns into a genuine Totentanz, sealing her doom in her watching husband’s eyes. He has watched her flirt with other men ‘Again and again’ (B, 40), and to underline the sense of repetitive inevitability Muldoon piles on familiar motifs in the libretto’s closing pages. When the Wedding Guests ask ‘How can he let himself down / like that’ they are repeating Morales’ question in his Act 1 Scene 2

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aria, but mocking his fall at the same time. Mona retreats to the motel and protests her innocence with a promise to die ‘game’ (B, 44), something she will shortly become in an all too literal sense for her husband-turnedstalker. She launches into the beautiful aria ‘To die is to awaken’, written in short-lined quatrains not unlike the Spanish-influenced stanzas of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Pentecost Castle’. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello tells Desdemona ‘I would not have thee linger in thy pain’ (V.ii.88) but pauses to deliver a final soliloquy and interview with her before smothering her; in Bandanna, Morales simply turns up and, without a word, strangles Mona with the bandanna, which he has fashioned into a noose. Jake bursts into the room, Morales shoots both him and himself and the chorus pronounces its fatalistic verdict one last time: ‘To live is to sleep, / to die is to awaken. / Dona nobis pacem’ (B, 52). Bandanna differs from Shining Brow in lacking a character possessed of the necessary artistic vision to rise above the tragedy on which it ends, with the attendant risk that Muldoon has taken refuge in an overly schematic version of tragedy that may be closer to melodrama. But while it is not the strongest of his three libretti, there is enough in Bandanna to make it a worthwhile addition to this most productive of his ‘interim’ activities to date. There is much discussion of ‘the line’ and where to draw it in Bandanna, but the three libretti more than justify Muldoon’s belief that, where poetry may normally be inclined to observe all sorts of boundaries and proprieties, with opera he can ‘teeter on the brink – perhaps even go over the top’ and ‘the amazing thing […] is that you can get away with that.’42

Notes 1 In John Millington Synge, Plays, Poems and Prose (London: Dent, 1968), p. 107. 2 In W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 14, 20. 3 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder & Boyars, 1965), p. 92. Beckett overcame his prejudice sufficiently in 1976 to write the libretto ‘neither’ for the American composer Morton Feldman (all eleven lines of it). 4 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1982), p. 459. 5 W.H. Auden, ‘Notes on Music and Opera’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 472. Peter Porter seconds his opinion but, unfortunately for Auden, in reference to Auden himself: ‘His translations of the Mozart operas are neither good versification nor good for singing’, while his later libretti are ‘filled with fustian, with pastiche of the pastoral and even with doggerel’

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6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

(Peter Porter, ‘The Shape of Poetry and Music’, in Saving from the Wreck: Essays on Poetry [Nottingham: Trent Books, 2001], p. 51). Philip Larkin, ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, in Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Reviews (1952–1985), ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 50. Craig Raine, ‘Preface’, in The Electrification of the Soviet Union (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 9. David Harsent, ‘Toads with Women’s Breasts’, Leviathan Quarterly, 1 (September 2001), pp. 45–51, at p. 45. ‘Toads’, p. 45. Daron Hagen, ‘Singing with Paul’ (www.daronhagen.com/perspective.html, posted August 2001). All subsequent quotations from Hagen in the text are from this article. The website also features a valuable archive of material relating to all three operas, to which I also refer. Paul Driver, ‘Upstaging’, review of Shining Brow, London Review of Books, 19 August 1993, p. 23. ‘Toads’, p. 47. ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature, 35.1 (Spring 1994), pp. 3–29, at p. 4. Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 4. Interview with Christopher Cook, BBC Radio 3, 1994, quoted in Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 175. Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 6. Paul Muldoon, Shining Brow (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 2. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to SB. Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 6. Cf. Neil Corcoran, ‘A Languorous Cutting Edge: Muldoon versus Heaney?’, in Poets of Modern Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1999), pp. 121–36, for a suggestive consideration of artistic friendship (and rivalry) in the work of Muldoon and Seamus Heaney. Cf., for example, William Empson, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, Critical Quarterly, 6.4 (1964), pp. 298–319, and Camille Paglia, ‘The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge’, in Sexual Personae (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Another Ancient Mariner ingredient, a wedding feast, features in Bandanna. W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 232. The poem is from The Tower. Paul Muldoon, pp. 177–78. Muldoon uses the same phrase as one of the six elements in the sestina ‘Cauliflowers’ in Madoc (in Poems 1968–1998 [London: Faber & Faber, 2001], pp. 200–201. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P). Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 4. Coincidentally ‘Incantata’ also features hydrochloric acid, as used by Mary Farl Powers. Paul Muldoon, Vera of Las Vegas (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2001), p. 21. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to V. In Bandanna, Morales talks of beating ‘into juice’ a man called Sergio Limón with

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28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

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whom Mona has ‘played fast and loose’ (Bandanna [London: Faber & Faber, 1999], p. 15; hereafter abbreviated in the text to B), an incident he declares is ‘going to destroy / our marriage’ though he continues to long for Mona’s ‘liminal zone’ (B, 15, 38, 43). Morales’ lieutenant Kane exhorts ‘all you who grub / through lemon groves’ (B, 23), and in Shining Brow the car in which Wright and Mamah go for drives, to the scandal of their neighbours, is lemon-coloured too, the ‘Yellow Devil’. Consistent with the libretto’s theme of misidentification are Doll’s repeated references to Dumdum as ‘Devlin’ (V, 13, 26, 31, 39), a near-homonym for ‘devil’. Hearing himself so addressed, Dumdum/‘Devlin’ insists that his name is the more upstanding-sounding ‘Devine’ (V, 40). In a further grim irony, it emerged in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 that the key meetings at which the attacks had been organized took place in Las Vegas. Hagen’s opera for children The Elephant’s Child (1994) ends with a setting of the same Kipling poem that gives Muldoon’s play its name. Six Honest Serving Men (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1995), p. 35. Taco and Dumdum never actually appear in the play. A Neil Jordan Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. xiii. David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 71. John Redmond, ‘Distrusting the Self’, review of Vera of Las Vegas, Poetry Ireland Review, 71 (Winter 2001), p. 52. Kendall, Paul Muldoon, p. 117. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 204. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 167, 246. Bernard O’Donoghue, review of Vera of Las Vegas, Times Literary Supplement, 29 June 2001, p. 8. According to Hagen, Vera forms the middle part of a projected three-act opera, with Six Honest Serving Men providing the first and the third to be called Grand Avenue (email to the author, 6 October 2001). As in Shining Brow, many of the changes to the libretto in performance had the effect of regularizing the length of Muldoon’s lines and omitting awkward syllables. This aria is a case in point, with the grains ‘of opium on that fateful R and R’ trimmed down to non-specific grains ‘on that R and R’. Cf. the woman in ‘Immram’, ‘Whom I would carry over the threshold of pain / That she might come and come and come again’ (P, 98). Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 6. I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Tim Kendall and Daron Hagen in writing this essay, and to Tekla Mecsnóber and Finn Fordham for the Joycean pineapples.

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Muldoon’s Remains MATTHEW CAMPBELL

I was almost going to say, ‘I accept the Universe!’1

In a review of The Annals of Chile, Neil Corcoran puts his finger on the affective quality, the quidditas, of Paul Muldoon’s elegy, ‘The Wishbone’: ‘exiguousness’.2 An exiguous thing is scanty or small. The wishbone at the end of the poem bears scant relation to the substance – ‘a frozen chicken’ – of which it had formed a part. According to Tim Kendall, such exiguous objects appear throughout Muldoon’s poetry as ‘residuary bodies’, or, as Clair Wills puts it, the ‘remains’ of larger objects.3 In those poems Muldoon published along with ‘The Wishbone’ (in The Wishbone pamphlet, in 1984, and Meeting the British, in 1987), they stubbornly insist on presenting evidence of their origins. With often chilling exactness, the particular remains of natural and human substances are present in profusion throughout Muldoon’s later domestic and pastoral elegies. These remains persist alongside the facts of absence and death. In the sequence gathered in The Wishbone alone, places and parts of the dead, dying and deathly are contiguous with the small, scant, diminished or dismembered: a woman freezing to death in a Pennsylvania cranberrypatch, the shuttlecock lost in the bamboo growing over a Belfast cholera cemetery, a lover’s arm turned knotted and ‘phantom’ by the weight of a loved one sleeping in its ‘crook’, a butcher’s shop, a restaurant, two dead huskies, anthrax, smallpox, a ship fuelled by burning its own mast, musical instruments formed from a tree or a human bone, ‘two tiny birds, / one Pernod-sip, // one tremulous crème-de-menthe: / their tiny sobs’.4 For both the deathly and the exiguous, the poet reserves what John Kerrigan, speaking of Muldoon’s ‘exactness’ has called the ‘cascading lucidity of detail which recalls Ovid’s fluid precision’.5 Such precision can even flow into the forensic, as in ‘The Toe-Tag’ in Meeting the British, with its ‘kid-gloves’, ‘hides of stillborn calves’, ‘a month-drowned Aranman’s geansai’, and the ghastly surreal vision in a

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garden centre, ‘the orangery’s body-bags / of peat’ (P, 171). The music of the line rolls ‘orangery’s’ round the mouth, pulls us up with a shock at ‘body-bags’, and then plays across the line-ending to small relief, ‘peat’. With macabre precision, ‘The Toe-Tag’ also deals in small measures: ‘A jigger of blood on our swish organza’. The experience of apprehending detail and its import is felt in the diction of these poems like the double thrill of tiny shots of spirits (‘jigger’, ‘Pernod-sip’, ‘tremulous crème-dementhe’) which are now chilled. As the concluding tercet of ‘The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife’, tasting ‘calvados and water ice’, puts it, It’s as if someone had slipped a double-edged knife between my ribs and hit the spot exactly. (P, 157)

The sharp weapons of ‘The Point’ concern ‘What everything in me wants to articulate’, the true site of the exiguous: ‘this little bit of a scar’ which has been caused by a pencil rammed into the poet’s thigh, ‘with such force that the point was broken off’ (P, 400). The precision of the description of objects that wound is matched by the preciseness of their apprehension and their remains, as poems and perception make their exiguous point, and leave their little scar. Too much force, then the little that remains will break. ‘The Wishbone’, which Neil Corcoran calls ‘a paradigmatic Muldoon poem’, can waver around getting to its points. Those points are left at its end with the spurs of unnamed Arthurian knights and the dashes which mark the elisions on the page pointing at the empty and unresolved space which follows the exiguous elegy: ‘The wishbone like a rowelled spur / on the fibula of Sir— or Sir—’ (P, 159). So far, so Muldoonian, yet however restrained and unforceful, such effects still work to evoke the feeling that so moves a reader such as Corcoran. For him, it presents evidence that its author is ‘a great elegist, knowledgeably inheriting and transforming the classic English elegy’.6 What Muldoon offers not only to his own grief, but also to the English elegy, are these pointed remains of a set of feelings and a literary tradition, Irish as well as English, in which the remains of elegy itself are inherited and transformed in their contact with personal bereavement. For Corcoran, a poem such as ‘Yarrow’ (1994) represents a new type of elegy, which appears to desire a space of uncontaminated authenticity in which direct and memorable lyric utterance may be made […] [despite knowing] the difficulty of discovering any such space in the complex entanglements, the endlessly

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ironizing and self-ironizing technologies of representation, that constitute the postmodern condition. The poem asks, in effect, what frame your memory might isolate for contemplation when your finger is always on the remote control.7

One of the functions of elegy is to act as memorial, and memory here is both active and passive, not only temporally remote from the remembered past but spatially remote from the self doing the remembering, the finger on the remote control. The danger is of a surrender to passivity, of being overwhelmed by the plenitude of information which is presented by a boundlessly communicative ‘postmodern’ world. The information overwhelms so much that it may annihilate a self caught in a limitless present. As Clair Wills says: One of the questions Muldoon is asking is how it is possible to withstand this total disorientation of the senses, without appealing to notions of an inner stability or authenticity, or relying on ways of organising experience which could overcome its incoherences. If Enlightenment notions of technical and scientific progress have led to this jumbling of temporal and spatial relations, then a poetry which is to respond to this cultural confusion can’t simply reproduce, in its ways of returning to and retrieving the past, the narratives of progress which led to the dislocation in the first place.8

The redundant plural that Wills coins here, ‘incoherences’, is well judged, suggesting the plurality of disorganized memories and fantasies, or even memories-as-fantasy, with which ‘Yarrow’ confronts us. Whether or not memory is a matter of framing and isolation, return or retrieval, Muldoon approaches elegy in the spirit of questioning desire phrased here, seeking a frame to place against the seeming incoherence of experience, and a memory suffering under bereavement and absence. Yet in order that the product of such grieving is not in a postmodern, or even post-Enlightenment sense, merely virtual, Muldoon’s memory must cling on to the exiguous remains of the dead, both in figure and in actuality. Throughout his elegies Muldoon has known that the form has long been the literary genre most attuned to ‘framing’ incoherence, instability and the shock inflicted by bereavement on the seeming authenticity of the self. He knows that for all that his elegies may indulge in the extraordinary plenitude of memories that threatens to overwhelm them, they may also end with the hint at secrecy and control which comes in the last section of ‘Yarrow’, a sort of knowing repression of ‘something […] that I’ve either forgotten or disavowed’ (P, 392). While ‘Incantata’ and ‘Yarrow’ maintain an attachment to the ingenuities of the ‘frame’ of poetic form, these

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cannot in themselves provide ‘ways of organising experience which could overcome its incoherences’. They also seek compensation, however small, by a corresponding attachment to remains – an attachment not just to memory, but to those small things which refuse forgetting or disavowal, which refuse to accept annihilation. It is these that the Muldoon elegy retains in their pointed ‘exactness’, no matter how they suffer in the threefold challenge to which ‘the classic English elegy’ must by necessity respond, ‘The steps of Time – the shocks of Chance – / The blows of Death.’9 At the end of ‘The Soap-Pig’ (1987), Muldoon plays fondly with the jesuitical scholasticism of the friend, Michael Heffernan, who is commemorated by the poem: ‘His favourite word was quidditas’ (P, 167).10 It ends with a fiction of the actual moment and location of writing, allowing the friend to question from death – his afterlife, as it were – whether the poem is being written on a table or not: For he would deliberate on whether two six-foot boards sealed with ship’s varnish and two tea-chests (another move) on which all this rests is a table; or this merely a token of some ur-chair, or – being broken – a chair at all: the mind’s a razor on the body’s strop. And the soap-pig? It’s a bar of soap, now the soap-sliver in a flowered dish that I work each morning into a lather with my father’s wobbling-brush, then reconcile to its pool of glop on my mother’s wash-stand’s marble top. (P, 170)

Line and stanza endings and openings draw conspicuous attention to a whimsical philosophical discussion which nevertheless retains enough of the Thomist precision of the dead friend. ‘Delib- / erate’ joins in with his friend’s parody of abstruse scholastic questioning, as well as punning around a philosophical vocabulary of identity and intention. The textual opening of the artist’s hands to the work in front of him is carried out in a tone of mock-pedagoguery. He refers, in at least three ways, to the actual

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manuscript of the poem now being written, the poem’s semantic structure, and also to a facetious universalism, ‘all this’. ‘All’ is brought to a head in a riddling aphorism: ‘the mind’s a razor / on the body’s strop’. The ending of the poem, however, brings in a number of rare Muldoonian indicatives. The poem has recollected not only the course of a friendship, but also the emotional upheavals of the elegist himself. These are charted against the fate of a gift, a bar of soap in the shape of a pig. The soap travels from location to location, a remnant not only of the friendship between elegist and elegized, but also of the flux of the elegist’s rather complicated private life. In the terms of Heffernan’s scholasticism, it has substance – soap – and accident, in that it is shaped in the form of a pig. As the form changes, though, its substance does not. The codphilosophical query over whether Muldoon is writing on a table or not runs the permanent – ‘sealed’ – into the transient – ‘two tea-chests / (another move)’. Muldoon reserves the indicative, however, for a statement which answers a question, and has no wonder or doubt in it, an assertion of substance, both as essence and existence: ‘And the soap-pig? It’s a bar of soap’. In the fiction of the poem, the soap-pig is an actual bar of soap, which is at the time of writing in the writer’s bathroom. In his guise of scholastic poet, the speaker of the poem knows that all such statements are open to modification, not only in the world of terms (or ‘tokens’), but also in space and time. Thus, the statement ‘It’s a bar of soap’ is immediately qualified, refined even, to ‘soap-sliver’, to be transformed further into ‘lather’ and the bathos of its final remnants, ‘pool of glop’. The object diminishes over time, just as the memory of the lost one might. The soap-pig becomes a figure for feeling, and figure and feeling become reduced the further they travel in time from their original intimacy. The figure is rather more than a ‘conceit’, as understood by Muldoon (quoting Helen Gardner, ‘like a spark made by striking two stones together. After the flash the stones are just two stones’11), and as such the soap-pig bears a more than figurative relation to the events, feelings or loss figured. It is placed in a mode which, in a Thomist sense, might have pleased the lost one of the elegy – parable: ‘The parabolic sense is contained under the literal. Words may signify something properly or something figuratively. The literal sense of parable is not the figure itself but the object figured.’12 For St Thomas, object and figure become as one in parable. For the rather more heretical Muldoon, the soap-pig at one and the same time ‘stands in for’ the feeling and is an integral part of the feeling, a gift which is itself an object in the relationship.

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Does this ending achieve the consolation of elegy, or even, in the terms of popular therapy-speak, closure? Can the literal and the figurative be brought happily together in such a parable? The temptations must be great for the elegist, since the residual persistence of the gift might figure not just loss but presence and thus restore the lost friend in the object as well as in memory. A warning from Louis MacNeice, a poet from whom Muldoon has learnt much, might be appropriate here (the context is an objection to psychoanalytic readings of parable): Just as in a poem the manifest content, which is inseparable from the form of the poem, cannot be reduced to something in the Unconscious which occasioned it, no more, of course, in the works I am considering can the image, whether it is object or event, be reduced without residue to that of which it is an image. Whether the parabolist was unconscious of some psychological origin of his images or, as with Spenser’s historical allegory, only too conscious of a theme to be given a new body, it is this new body that counts.13

The warning against reducing form to content still holds the image apart from ‘that of which it is an image’, since the poem has become a ‘new body’. If reduction must take place, a ‘residue’ of image, like the residue of content itself, will remain. The question is now that of what ‘new body’ the elegiac poem might assume, given that it deals only with the ‘residue’ of the lost as all that is left in their absence. Writing about the final stanzas of ‘The Soap-Pig’, Clair Wills says that they debate the problem of identity and of origins. In MacNeice’s terms, these may perhaps also be those of the relation of content to the objects or events of parabolic image. In the poem, such questions are not just related to the boards and the tea-chest which may or may not add up to their current function as a table. They relate to the late arrival of the poet’s dead parents in the final stanza. For Wills, the mother in particular is ‘a monumental, unchanging presence’, and ‘[the] permanence of the marble memorial is clearly at variance with the spirit of the transient soap – particularly since Muldoon decides to use the soap-pig rather than preserve it as a memento’.14 Finding a memorial or memento, as monument or even sliver, might be what we would look for at the end of an elegy. Could this be the achieved ‘new body’ of the poem? Muldoon maintains a resolute suspicion of the monumental in his poems. A monument ‘stands in for’ the person or event memorialized; an elegy may indeed be monumental. To aid longevity of memory, it might strive to appear to be written on a permanent, marble-like material, as if the words

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themselves were engraved: say, ‘I write it out in a verse, / MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse’.15 The last line of the ‘The SoapPig’ could not be further from the generic urge to the monumental, even though it too does demand a performative slowing down of speech. ‘My mother’s wash-stand’s marble top’: the reading voice needs to avoid slurring over the sibilants (motherswashstands) which threaten to slither across the surface of the line at the end. Such memorial verse is at one and the same time literal and figurative, the referent and the referred. In Muldoon’s parabolic poem, the literal and the figurative make contact, if still aware of MacNeice’s argument that we cannot reduce one entirely to the other without residue: an actual marble wash-stand top is made out of the same material from which the monumental may be made. Wills says that marble and soap are ‘at variance’, as indeed the literal and the figurative might be. Yet the word that Muldoon uses in the circumstances is quite opposite to ‘variance’. The bar of soap, he says, he will daily ‘reconcile to its pool of glop / on my mother’s wash-stand’s marble top’. The tone of the poem’s conclusion, though, allows that variance will not be far from the supposed consolations of reconciliation here. The effect of staring at these domestic objects with Thomist attentiveness courts bathos, and can affront common sense: for all that they are frequently in close contact, what sort of reconciliation can be literally attained by, or even figured by, viscous soap and impermeable marble? Just how do the sonic tricks of the final line irreverently challenge the bringing together of these remains of the dead? Generically, elegy demands the consolation of its ending, as here the parabolic mode demands the reconciliation of object and referent, the literal and the figurative. ‘The Soap-Pig’ performs irony in its tone and diction: the poet’s decisions about words, the reader’s decisions about pronunciation, and the need for poet and reader to collaborate in its fiction through conveying and hearing the tone of a poem which edges with fondness towards a recreation of the quality, the quidditas, of the humour of the absent. Nevertheless, the possible reconciliation of soap and glop on marble invites us at least to contemplate the contiguity of transient and permanent remains. The indicative statement ‘It’s a bar of soap’ in ‘The Soap-Pig’, pointing to the remains of the gift, is a rare one for Muldoon. The remains of ‘Yarrow’ are all those objects in memory which resist the encroachment of weed and flood under which ‘all would shortly be overwhelmed […] all would be swept away’ (P, 346–47; my emphasis). Edna Longley was the first to comment on the peculiarities of Muldoon’s ‘pre-sentence’ syntax,

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his ‘postponement rather than subversion of the indicative, its distrust of the definitive’.16 The conditional ‘would’s in the pre-sentence here are held out against the sentence which longs to be spoken, the imperatives of ‘can not’ or ‘must not’, the imperatives of the persistence of memory. The phrases contain within them the pleading of their opposite: ‘all cannot be overwhelmed […] all must not be swept away’. More out of conservationist hope than fatalistic experience, ‘Yarrow’ holds on not just to ‘memorable lyric utterance’ but to a feeling that knows the contaminations which result from both physical presence and memory being taken apart by loss and time. The relief of pain or the respite of elegy may involve the extinction of feeling. The ‘traditional’ elegy ostensibly seeks to provide the formal counterpart for the elegist’s process of ‘getting over it’. It provides not only a pattern of feeling but a pattern of form often in direct mimetic relation with the feeling itself. Elegy is at one and the same time text and experience, and if its finger is always on the remote control, the memories replayed are of the elegist’s own suffering. In his classic psychoanalytical account, Peter Sacks saw that of all the genres, elegy warns us ‘of how easily the problem of subjectivity may be elided if its entire assimilation to the status of language may be taken for granted’. This is because elegy is especially ‘characterized by an unusually powerful intertwining of emotion and rhetoric, of loss and figuration […] this intertwining is both an event and a structure’. He quotes Wallace Stevens on the poem ‘as indeed “the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself”’.17 Sacks sees the therapeutic pattern of what Freud calls the ‘work of mourning’ evident in both the event of elegy and its textual structuring. As distinct from melancholia, the pattern of mourning, like the pattern of elegy, runs from the trauma of loss to a consolation whereby the replacement of the lost one provides some form of compensation. Melancholy, or depression, is analogous to grief, but more like a perpetual mourning, an inability to ‘get over it’.18 In his poetry Muldoon has allowed the pattern of his elegies to cling on to the remains of the absent, the scant fragments of memory or memento which will not allow forgetfulness, since to do so will bring the poem to an often resisted closure. Consolation is the getting over it for the elegist within the poem, and carries within it the danger of a second extinction of form, the ending of the poem. Nevertheless, while elegies may end, they still perform a memorial function and look to their forms in posterity, a time after grief. The pattern of elegy is often a loose one of contrasting grief, distraction,

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forgetfulness and then bitter reminder of concentrated grief again. The looseness, the fancy, the ‘false surmise’ of the metaphysical play in a poem such as ‘The Soap-Pig’ may indeed court the charge of which Johnson accused Milton’s Lycidas, and indeed of which some contemporary readers have accused Muldoon: ‘Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief’.19 Leisure can still do the work of mourning, since the distractedness which is a part of elegiac convention can be matched in Muldoon by the sudden concentrations of the fluid precision of his poetry. The chills of feeling (or feeling-as-chill) which approach those moments of pointed vision and re-vision may be described as the end of an openness in language to experience, something Muldoon himself has called ‘inspiration’.20 For instance, cold things occur throughout his collection Hay as figures for both a cold aesthetic concentratedness and the chill of unavoidable feeling. These come to their point in the analogy for feeling which concludes the short memorial for a child who died soon after birth: ‘Once, on a street in Moscow, a woman pushed snow in my face / when it seemed I might have been frostbitten’ (‘White’ [P, 457]). While elegy may incidentally provide aesthetic moments which come to the point, as in ‘White’, Muldoon’s elegies also find ways of not coming to their point, of relaxing the urge that is in the form for consolation or closure. The penultimate section of ‘Yarrow’ states, quite definitively, ‘there’s no more relief, no more respite’ (P, 392). As in the elegies of Thomas Hardy, ghosts continue to haunt subsequent poems at the same time as their possible existence is refuted and ironized. The form is continuously distracted into and out of the pressures of the social, the historical and the political, given not only the generic pressure that the war elegy or war poem exerts throughout Muldoon’s work, but also the pressure to intervene allegorically in the politics of gender, cultural nationalism, global anti-capitalism, or even environmentalism. The pressure to commit is dramatized in tones of contrasting guilt and satire around the multiform character ‘S—’ in ‘Yarrow’, for example. ‘S—’ shifts in and out of varying forms, from aisling/Ireland figure to mother/Ireland figure, suggesting that there are some oedipal goings-on (about nation as well as mother) that Muldoon is not being that precise about. (This may or may not be the repression which is hinted at in the concluding, and exasperating, reference to ‘something […] that I’ve either forgotten or disavowed’ in ‘Yarrow’ [P, 392].21) Muldoon’s elegies initially occupy a domestic space, for parents, lovers and friends, and he shades their forms almost imperceptibly together. No

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matter that they may occupy highly distinctive stanzaic or prosodic systems, it is frequently the case that Muldoon draws the forms of his elegies together. It is as if he contrives to show that there is as little distinction between poems as there is in the feeling of loss for distinct persons. Notoriously, ‘Incantata’ and ‘Yarrow’, published in 1994, have been discovered to hinge on the same set of rhyme endings, and ‘The Mudroom’, ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’ and ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, published four years later in 1998, also share the same rhymes. More than a ‘Slight Return’, rhyme returns not just within a poem but across poems, volumes, subjects and even genres. In one of its plots, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ might even be the mirror-image of elegy, imagining what it would be not to be born. The virtuoso control of a poetic form which consistently draws attention to itself may be an example of Corcoran’s ‘endlessly ironizing and selfironizing technologies of representation’. However, the figure of the poetic finger of ‘Yarrow’ on the remote control of the video, isolating memories for contemplation, suggests that the ‘frame’ – of rhyme, form, feeling itself – is an inherited one, at once under the chilling control of the poet, and ready to chill his attempts at getting over loss, his attempts at consoling himself through art. ‘The master’ in ‘Sushi’ (poet as well as chef) works his extraordinary skill and ingenuity against the insistent, if parenthetic, voice of one half of a failed love-affair: ‘(I might as well be eating alone)’ (P, 174). The unreconciled persistently intrudes into the perfect point, the perfect pitch, which is one analogy of the exactness of Muldoon’s art. This is the paradox of elegy, one which inheres within the genre as a whole: that the consolations of elegiac art will lead to the extinction of feeling and that the process contains closure and a second death within it. Yet the remains of memory must not be so distinct that its processes will hinder the vital therapeutic activity of the living. Only then can elegy become a ‘work of mourning’. Deathly and exiguous remains multiply throughout ‘Yarrow’. The poem opens with the phrase ‘Little by little’, and goes on to use the word ‘little’ ten times. ‘Yarrow’ is full of English words which suggest the diminutive or the scant: ‘scrap’, ‘whiff’, ‘slightest’, ‘awl’ and ‘slip’. ‘Slip’ is not just the lost ‘carbon-slip’ from which the poem’s accidental confusion, its Freudian slip or mock-theological lapsus of ‘yarrow’ for ‘marrow’ seeds, has taken place.22 The word appears throughout ‘Yarrow’, as ‘diaphanous half- / slip’, ‘short slip’, ‘Freedom’s little green slip’, ‘slip of a girl’, ‘slipknot’, ‘give the slip’. At the end, ‘the great cog’, a figure of circularity and

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necessity, and thus one of possible consolation, ‘slips’. The poem also extends Muldoon’s catalogue of small drinks, with a ‘tot’, a ‘whiff’ and an ‘ampoule of Lustau’s port’. Small measures hide in other languages too: the phrase petit soupçon is used twice, and there is much play with the diminutive ending -ín in Irish, ‘a sup of poteen’ or Eileen. The Irish phrase ‘leabhar in a chroibhín’ (literally, using the wonderfully nonEnglish definition of chroibhín in Dinneen’s dictionary, ‘book in a fistlet’23) metamorphoses into the mother’s gift of a book, Irish Classical Poetry by Douglas Hyde, whose pen-name was an craoibhín aoibhinn – the little pleasant branch, not even a tree. By the end of the poem, these small things mix with further exiguous, partial remains, mineral as well as human. Grail questers hack limbs off, and an explosion rains down body parts. There is even the complete disappearance of the bodily member which appeared earlier in the poem: ‘There’s not even an arm, not an arm left of Arthur Cravan’ (P, 389). In elegy, it may be impossible to return into the ‘presence’ of the lost human object – mother, father, lover, friend. But there are remains. As the absent enter language as absent, language can only figure them by analogy. Judiciously used, analogy can act as a mnemonic. The mnemonic is founded in the parabolic practice that MacNeice had described, whereby, since the image cannot ‘be reduced without residue to that of which it is an image’, so the object may retain a residue of its image after it has been lost. For St Thomas, there is ‘first matter’, which is, according to F.C. Copleston, a purely indeterminate constitutive principle which is capable of existing successively in union with an indefinite multiplicity of forms. When the oak tree perishes, its substantial form disappears, relapsing into the potentiality of matter, but the first matter of the tree does not disappear. It does not, and indeed cannot, exist by itself; for any existent material substance is something definite and determinate. When the oak tree perishes, the matter immediately exists under another form or forms. When a human being dies and his body disintegrates, the matter is at once informed by other forms. But there is continuity, and it is first matter which is the element of continuity.24

In a crude sense – or at least a possibly mystical, and probably heretical, application – the resolutely lapsed Muldoon’s version of this is immortality as a recycling, a coming round again. In generic terms, those of the form of the elegy, this is the coming round which is consolation, and may look like a sort of conservation. To take the example of Wordsworth’s Lucy, say, the poet achieves his

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consolation as he thinks of her ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees’.25 In Muldoon’s version this runs, after the bomb-blast has rained down clay and stones and arms and legs and hands and feet I should, I guess, help Mina rake over these misrememberings […] (P, 390)

‘Dismemberings’ might be the correct word here, but ‘misrememberings’ runs together the members of the body now torn apart, and the possibly mistaken rememberings of elegy. As distinct from the consolation attained by Wordsworth, however, the recycling here is the rolling round of soul less into immanent matter than into a multitude of bodily remains now rendered inanimate. It is this ‘indefinite multiplicity of forms’ that Muldoon’s elegies rake over as they postpone the inevitability of their engagement with consolation. As I have suggested, since consolation is the point at which the form is achieved, it is both the end of elegy and elegy’s end. Can consolation be achieved by poetic form itself? ‘Yarrow’ moves to its conclusion aware of the great generic pressure towards the consolations of immortality which inhabits the achieved forms of elegiac convention. The poet imagines this great wheeling round as he countenances the prospect that his mother might be singing with the birds: In a conventional tornada, the strains of ‘Che sera, sera’ or ‘The Harp That Once’ would transport me back to a bath resplendent with yarrow (it’s really a sink set on breeze- or cinder-blocks): then I might be delivered from the rail’s monotonous ‘alack, alack’; in a conventional envoy, her voice would be ever soft, gentle and low and the chrism of milfoil might overflow as the great wheel came full circle; here the bittern’s bibulous ‘Orinochone O’ is counterpointed only by that corncrake, by the gulder-gowl of a nightjar, I guess, above the open-cast mines, by a quail’s

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indecipherable code; of the great cog-wheel, all that remains is a rush of air—a wing-beat, more like—past my head; even as I try to regain my equilibrium, there’s no more relief, no more respite than when I scurried, click, down McParland’s lane with my arms crossed, click, under my armpits […] (P, 391–92)

All of the small birds here, noisy as they are, are also practically invisible. The bittern, quail and corncrake, too, are fast disappearing from the particularities of the poem’s ‘here’, the actuality of a late-twentieth-century Irish, or ‘home’, geography. Yet there is still the possibility of ‘all that remains’, the ghostly rush of air as the invisible passes over the sceptical, and memory sounds through the recreative act of an elegy which is striving to reach its consolation. It does this as it revisits the real, while still aware that ‘change’ – in this case loss – has taken place, in this place. The place becomes haunted by a profusion of elegies, conventions, expectations and refusals. Pastoral conventions, for instance, are generic to many elegies, some more appropriate than others (it was the pastoral element to which Johnson objected in Lycidas, an elegy for a poet and scholar, not a farmer or shepherd). The eclogue, indeed, has emerged as a dominant mode in Muldoon’s poetry of his middle age. But pastoral here is not so much the generic mode and figuration expected by convention as that suggested by an actual rural upbringing, where pastoral shades into the poem’s concerns with conservation and recycling in the face of the extinction of countryside, memory, pastoral elegy and all. The end of ‘Yarrow’ remembers and mourns a specific Irish landscape and its wildlife, while also remembering and mourning both youth and family. Despite S—’s attack (‘“What have you done for the cause?”’ [P, 383]), the end of ‘Yarrow’ is doubly green, attempting to re-attach itself both to an Irish countryside and to the traditions of Irish pastoral elegy. These are carried in figures which have featured earlier in the poem (P, 363–64), Thomas Moore’s nostalgic harp and Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna’s thirsting yellow bittern. The Ben Gunn character had earlier been armed with Old Moore’s almanac, and this brings in the suggestion of Thomas Moore. So the narrator, Davy Crockett and Mike Fink sing, among other things, Moore’s ‘Believe me if all those endearing young charms’, a lyric of the loss of young love, the passing of time, and the refusal of consolation through the clinging on to green remains. The first stanza of Moore’s song ends, ‘around the dear ruin each wish of my heart / Would entwine itself verdantly still’.26 Ben Gunn then returns and begins drinking by quoting

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Mac Giolla Ghunna’s Bunnán Buí. In a bilingual pun, Muldoon transforms Mac Giolla Ghunna’s name into that of his fantasy childhood comrade (Mac Giolla Ghunna/Gunn) in the spirit of Mac Giolla Ghunna himself (Cathal Buí/Bunnán Buí). The thirst which has led to the bird’s death is also that felt by the ‘bibulous’ poet: ‘Sé mo mhíle brón […] tu bheith sínte fuar i meas / na dtom’.27 By the end of the poem, the bird’s keen (‘ochone’) is run distractedly into the name of a South American river, ‘Orinochone O’. Place, memory and fantasy, present and past, play together in these fragments of elegy held up against the remains of a landscape given sonic form by the near extinct – Moore’s harp, the Irish language, the bittern. Elegy must record change, no matter how painful that fact might be or how powerful are the attractions of an antinomial determinism (the train tracks) or a cyclical fatalism (‘Che sera, sera’ – what will be, will be; the great cog). Through raking over its misrememberings it may also serve to perpetuate suffering, desiring to recall the self as it was at the moment of suffering. Thus the lack of relief from the uncalled-for memory of punishment at the end of the section. While Muldoon rejects the equilibrium that consolation might bring, he simultaneously attempts to reject the prospect either of the persistence of memory as an inextinguishable immortality or the conservation of a world without change. Soul, ghost or bird, the exiguous remains of memory are perceived: ‘all that remains / is a rush of air—a wing-beat, / more like—past my head’ (P, 392). The movement from the small-scale to the monumental in ‘Incantata’ is the closest Muldoon’s poetry comes to a poetic act of consolation. That poem swivels at mid-point looking at its exiguous remnant, a potato-cut, shaped like a mouth which is ‘All that’s left’ of a great overwhelming rush of memory. But before that, Muldoon allows himself this elegiac fancy, edging into ‘the artifice of eternity’: I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by André Derain, of nothing more than a turn in the road where a swallow dips into the mire or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt, a monument to the human heart that shines like a golden dome among roofs rain-glazed and leaden. (P, 335)

Muldoon has said that he is attracted to the small-scale form of the sonnet because of the ‘turn’ at the ninth line, the invitation in the form which

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means, ‘You establish something, then there’s the slight change’.28 The slightness of ‘a turn / in the road’ opens the vision of some sort of continuity of elegiac art at the beginning of this stanza. An analogous moment, using the same image, occurs in In Memoriam xlviii, where Tennyson claims that the achievements of elegiac form must be small-scale, and cannot close doubt or answer propositions. He tells us that Sorrow ‘loosens from the lip / Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears, and skim away’. But then, ‘a monument to the human heart’, ‘a golden dome’? Tim Kendall rightly says that the reader ‘is unused to expect anything so grandiose from Muldoon’.29 He suggests ‘Madoc’ and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan as sources. This golden dome, like the monument, may also come from Yeats’s Byzantium, where the ‘mire’ of ‘Incantata’, as ‘The fury and the mire of human veins’,30 exerts great realist pressure. Muldoon has shown little patience with idealism in Yeats, but Yeats was aware of the shortcomings. Denis Donoghue, in an admirable summing up of the linguistic and aesthetic problems of such idealism, has this to say of the ending of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: Yeats’s feeling, in this respect like language itself, is still half in love with the old fleshpots, time, place, memory, history. This is in the nature of words. Music is the Symbolist art because its relation to the empirical element is weak, it finds no difficulty in releasing itself to a condition of pure form. But words drag the ball and chain behind them, the burden of time. […] ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is preserved by its helplessness, by the conflict between its official feelings, and by Yeats’s reluctance to resolve the conflict, except by continuing it.31

Just as MacNeice is careful to say that the image (or word) carries a residue of its own form when reduced to its content, so Yeats had earlier recognized that the ending of his poem is a kind of red herring, far too persuaded by idealist solutions to questions of artifice and actuality. As Yeats might be reluctant to resolve the conflict except by continuing it, so must Muldoon. It is not the place of the elegiac poet to resolve it. Muldoon has said, ‘All these ideas of “solace” and “succour”, never mind “restitution” or “redemption”, […] are perfectly appropriate to religious, but not, I think, literary discussion.’32 Needless to say, ‘Incantata’ swerves away from any consolation in the notion of the redemptive power of art or the concept of immortality just as quickly as it had arrived there. It finds that the poem’s subject would be appalled at such a conceit, ‘aghast’ at the thought that she might be a

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‘ghost’. The next-but-one stanza rounds the golden dome off, or rather rounds it down: You’d be aghast at the idea of your spirit hanging over this vale of tears like a jump-suited jump-jet whose vapour-trail unravels a sky: for there’s nothing, you’d say, nothing over and above the sky itself, nothing but cloud-cover reflected in a thousand lakes; (P, 336)

Is this the great cog – the wheel returning on itself, a circular Thomist or even Dantean system? Like Yeats, Muldoon resolves only not to resolve, asserting continuity only in his determination to continue the irreconcilables of consolation and loss. Muldoon’s career has moved on from the preoccupations of the major elegies, to poems of parenthood, family or marriage. The home is a new one, if still concerned with pastoral or eclogic retreat. Yet the poems still represent a reluctance to resolve the crux of the elegies. This is apparent at the end of the moving anniversary poem, ‘Long Finish’, where attempts at refining away to the exiguous point, or distilling the ‘pure drop’, are shrugged off. There is always continuity, in that off-hand phrase, ‘and then some’, which now salaciously fuels and ends – because it can’t end – the long finish. Princess of Accutane, let’s no more try to refine the pure drop from the dross than distinguish, good thou, between mine and thine, between longing and loss, but rouse ourselves each dawn, here on the shore at Suma, with such force and fervor as spouses may yet espouse, and then some. (P, 441)

Pure drop, dross, longing, loss: the poet discards the quest for the authentic in the contexts not only of absence but also of desire, as no distinction is required of ‘longing and loss’ in the continuation of married love. As such, the poem presents an oblique generic commentary upon and demurral from the possibilities of psychic and imaginative annihilation in the closure of poetic form that the elegies have faced. The conflict also continues with developing ideas of antinomianism, of doubleness and of Frostian roads not taken. The contemplation of alternative lifetimes suggests worlds before suffering, worlds in which suffering would have been forestalled, since the poet might not then have existed.

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Such possibilities are manifest in ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, in which one of that sequence’s plots imagines the poet’s father emigrating, thus never to father the poet. They also lead to the remarkably realist recreation of the father’s experience before the poet’s birth, as servant-boy, haytreader and Catholic labourer in rural Northern Ireland, in ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’. (There is no third epistle to Timothy in the New Testament. St Paul’s – a pun Paul Muldoon insists on playing – epistles to Timothy along with the epistle to Titus are known as the ‘pastoral’ epistles.) It eventually turns to a vision of a lost agrarian community, rendered all the more communal by the sounding of sectarian conflicts within it: ‘Timothy’ is the Tadhg, Teague or Taig of Northern Irish sectarian name-calling. The poem still gathers its frame from the rhymes of ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Incantata’, but it does so for the purposes of an elegiac evocation of lost communities, contemplating the possibility of the existence of ghosts. It ends, though, contemplating an imagined history which may not have taken place. The next haycock already summoning itself from the windrow after windweary windrow while yet another brings itself to mind in the acrid stink of turpentine. There the image of Lizzie, Hardy’s last servant girl, reaches out from her dais of salt hay, stretches out an unsunburned arm half in bestowal, half beseechingly, then turns away to appeal to all that spirit troop of hay-treaders as far as the eye can see, the coil on coil of hay from which, in the taper’s mild uproar, they float out across the dark face of the earth, an earth without form, and void. (P, 454–55)

Like the close of ‘Yarrow’, this seeks a place of origin, a place which might be home. Muldoon imagines in two ways: in memory that the whole vision might never have existed, or indeed towards an uncertain posterity, and the ecology of a future where there are no remains, where these things might end up ‘Without form’ or ‘void’. Those words, ‘form’ and ‘void’, share their echoes of the opening of the book of Genesis with the opening of Bob Dylan’s narrative of a home found and then lost which pleads for time to be replayed again, ‘Shelter from the Storm’. There, like the places revisited in Muldoon’s elegies, home might only have existed ‘in another lifetime’. The singer has lived in ‘the wilderness, a creature void of form’ and is addressed by the loved one: ‘“Come in”, she said “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”’.33 An elegy

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which engages in a therapeutic work of mourning may remember a previous life of ‘wilderness’, but cannot then allow posterity to face an earth without form. Muldoon’s elegies cling on to remains as objects held against wilderness and void: the eventual return of Dylan to his abject state in his lyric is one that Muldoon must resist. No matter how the return to the past brings home, as it were, the facts of extinction, violence, and change along with the dismantling of the coherent, authentic self, there are remains, things persist, ‘and then some’.

Notes 1 ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by John Redmond, Thumbscrew, 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 4. 2 Neil Corcoran, ‘The Annals of Chile’, Irish Studies Review, 13 (Winter 1995–96), pp. 50–51, at p. 50. 3 Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), pp. 130–31; Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), pp. 111ff. 4 Paul Muldoon, ‘The Mist-Net’, in Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 156. Hereafter abbreviated in the text to P. 5 John Kerrigan, ‘Ulster Ovids’, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran (Bridgend: Seren, 1992), pp. 237–69, at pp. 250 and 248. 6 Corcoran, ‘The Annals of Chile’, p. 50. 7 Neil Corcoran, ‘“A Languorous Cutting Edge”: Muldoon versus Heaney’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 59 (1997–98), pp. 559–80, at pp. 577–78. 8 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 160. 9 Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., xcv, from The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman, 1987, 3 vols.), II, p. 413. See Muldoon’s uncollected memorial poem published on the centenary of Tennyson’s death, ‘A Tennyson Triptych, 1974’, Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1992, p. 9. Written in the In Memoriam stanza, the third part quotes from In Memoriam and ‘Tithonus’, poems written in the aftermath of the death of Arthur Hallam. 10 Neil Corcoran (‘The Annals of Chile’, p. 51) speaks of ‘the difficult but necessary conjunction of poetry and death: which in Muldoon is a glissando of postmodernism into residual neo-Thomism’. Thomism is a frequent subject of metaphysical play in Muldoon. See, for instance, ‘History’ located in ‘Aquinas Hall’, ‘the room where Louis MacNeice wrote “Snow”’; or ‘Incantata’, in which the Thomist fatalism of his former lover may have hastened her death. In ‘Madoc’, the [Aquinas] section is one of the few that bears relation to its surtitled philosopher: ‘He folds his arms: “Would / you say you came here of your own free will?”’ (P, 227). Throughout Muldoon’s work there is also a consistent play with the idea of nomen est omen, as in Brownlee, Eglish, Powers, etc. 11 Quoted approvingly by Muldoon in ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism, 48.2 (April 1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 109.

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 :  

12 St Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts, trans. Thomas Gilbey (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 28, section 74. Extracted from Summa Theologica, 1a.i.10, ad 3. 13 Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 78. 14 Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 128. 15 W.B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 205. 16 Edna Longley, ‘Varieties of Parable: Louis MacNeice and Paul Muldoon’, in Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986), pp. 211–43, at p. 222. 17 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 2; the extract is from ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’. 18 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 251–68. 19 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’, in Selected Writings, ed. Patrick Cruttwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 409. 20 See the interview with Paul Muldoon in John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 130–42, at p. 133: ‘I think one can only be faithful to the language and the way in which it presents itself to you, and to the world in the way it presents itself to you […], faithful in the sense of the meeting between language and experience. I believe in inspiration, it’s a valid way of describing the process of being open. My poems begin with a couple of ideas which try to work themselves out into some kind of shape.’ 21 See Sacks on the elegy as Oedipus complex (The English Elegy, pp. 8–18): the Oedipus complex and mourning both depend for their resolution on the attachment of affection to a new object. 22 This is not entirely clear from the poem, but has been suggested by Clair Wills (Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 176) as one of the ‘central’ events of the poem. 23 Patrick S. Dineen, Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, new edn, 1927). 24 F.C. Copleston, Aquinas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 86–87. 25 ‘A Spirit Did My Slumber Seal’, in Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 149. 26 From the second number of Irish Melodies (1808), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, ed. A.D. Godley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), p. 189. 27 In Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Dublin: Dolmen, 1981), pp. 133–35, the lines and their translation run, ‘A bhonnáin óig, is é mo mhíle brón / thú bheith romham i measc na dtom’: ‘Sorrow, young bittern, a thousandfold / to see you before me among the clumps’. 28 ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature, 35.1 (Spring 1994), pp. 1–29, at p. 25. 29 Paul Muldoon, p. 213. 30 W.B. Yeats, ‘Byzantium’, l.8, in Collected Poems, p. 280. 31 Denis Donoghue, Yeats (Glasgow: Fontana, 1971), p. 64. 32 ‘Getting Round’, p. 126. 33 Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks (CBS, 1975).

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Index

AE [George Russell] 128 Allen, Michael 52, 59 Amergin 129–30, 140 Andrewes, Lancelot 115 Aquinas, Thomas 174, 180 Ashbery, John 65, 89 Auden, W.H. 2, 35, 117, 150

Driver, Paul 151 Duncan, Robert 77, 89 Dunn, Douglas 53, 57 Dylan, Bob 69, 186–87

Barthes, Roland 37, 39–40, 115 Beckett, Samuel 110, 118, 150 Bedient, Calvin 6 Berger, Charles 41 Bloom, Harold 38, 41, 47, 50–52, 58–59 Bromwich, David 4 Brown, Norman O. 70, 73 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 78–79

Ford, Mark 6 Foucault, Michel 118 Freud, Sigmund 137 Frost, Robert 26–41, 55, 77, 96–106 ‘Acquainted with the Night’ 31 ‘Choose Something like a Star’ 31 ‘Cow in Apple-Time, The’ 100 ‘Death of the Hired Man, The’ 106 ‘Directive’ 40–41 ‘For John F. Kennedy…’ 27, 29 ‘Frost and Ice’ 28 ‘Gift Outright, The’ 27–28, 106, 155 ‘Hillside Thaw, A’ 31, 34 ‘Master Speed, The’ 106 ‘Most Of It, The’ 101–02 ‘Mountain, The’ 33, 38, 96–97 ‘Mowing’ 105 North of Boston 35 ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ 28 ‘Out, Out – ’ 103, 108 ‘Road not Taken, The’ 31, 99 ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ 31 ‘Witch of Coos, The’ 34 ‘Wood-Pile, The’ 34 Fussell, Paul 46, 127

Carleton, William 130 Carson, Ciaran 67, 74–75 Cavafy, Constantin 35 Chandler, Raymond 14 Coffey, Brian 133 Coleridge, S.T. 155, 184 Colum, Patrick 126 Cook, Christopher 152 Copleston, F.C. 180 Corcoran, Neil 38, 50–52, 54, 59, 170–72, 179 Deane, Seamus 125–26, 145 Deleuze, Gilles 80–82 Derrida, Jacques 21, 39–40, 115 Devlin, Denis 125 Dickens, Charles 154 Donaghy, Michael 7, 26, 27, 35 Donne, John 6 Donoghue, Denis 184

LUP_Muldoon_11_Index

189

Eliot, T.S. 2, 115 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 100

Gardner, Helen 174 Gavin, William Joseph 100

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

190 Gibson, Wilfred 35 Gill, Bernard 153 Goethe 155 Goldsworthy, Peter 151 Goodman, Alice 151 Graves, Robert 45–51, 55, 59, 135 The White Goddess 46–48 Grennan, Eamon 126 Guattari, Félix 80–82 Hagen, Daron Aric 151–52, 155, 164 Hansen, Olaf 101 Hardy, Thomas 178 Harsent, David 151 Haughton, Hugh 113 Heaney, Seamus 6, 7, 8, 18, 20, 24, 33, 38, 41, 48–49, 51–57, 69, 103 ‘Broagh’ 106–07 ‘Digging’ 37, 49, 53 ‘Flight Path, The’ 145 ‘Harvest Bow, The’ 65–66 Haw Lantern, The 50 ‘Mud Vision, The’ 133 North 72, 88 ‘Other Side, The’ 88 Seeing Things 50 ‘Squarings’ 50 Hendrix, Jimi 15 Hill, Geoffrey 115, 143–44, 167 Imlah, Mick 21 Iser, Wolfgang 39 James, Henry 110 ‘Figure in the Carpet, The’ 114 James, William 96, 99–101 Jarrell, Randall 99 Jenkins, Nicholas 86 Johnson, Samuel 122, 178, 182 Jordan, Neil Crying Game, The 158–61 Joyce, James 67, 118, 122 ‘Dead, The’ 142, 155 Finnegans Wake 162 Ulysses 14, 150

Kavanagh, Patrick 67 Keller, Lyn 152 Kendall, Tim 8, 12, 13, 21, 32, 54–55, 89, 151, 156, 161, 170, 184

LUP_Muldoon_11_Index

190

Koch, Kenneth 77 Kristeva, Julia 21, 37, 62, 64–65, 76, 85–86, 91 Larkin, Philip 150 Lawrence, D.H. 67 Leary, Timothy 69 Lentriccia, Frank 105 Lloyd, David 80 Longley, Edna 6, 48, 50, 52, 54, 64–65, 176– 77 Longley, Michael 52–54, 56–57, 59, 67 ‘Alibis’ 56 ‘Freemartin, The’ 53–54 ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ 53 Gorse Fires 56–57 ‘Remembrance Day’ 88 ‘Thaw’ 57 Lorca, Gabriel García 165 MacNeice, Louis 22, 28, 67, 175, 180, 184 ‘Taxis, The’ 88 Mahon, Derek 59, 125, 127 ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ 59, 77 Marcuse, Herbert 69, 87 Masefield, John 13 Matthews, Steven 6, 50–51, 54 McCarthy, Thomas 127 McClatchy, J.D. 151 McDonald, Peter 6, 21, 65, 114 Melville, Herman 86 Monroe, Marilyn 28 Montague, John 125–26, 128 Morrow, John 52, 67 Motion, Andrew 32–33 Muldoon, Paul Poems and volumes of poetry ‘7, Middagh Street’ 13, 22, 78, 116, 153 ‘Aftermath’ 88 ‘Aisling’ 70 Annals of Chile, The 15, 47, 50–51, 54, 56–57, 68, 76, 91, 121, 129, 146 ‘Anseo’ 18, 49 ‘At Martha’s Deli’ 69 ‘Bangle (Slight Return), The’ 84, 144–45, 179, 186 ‘Bangle, The’ 140 ‘Bechbretha’ 79 ‘Between Takes’ 141 ‘Big Foot’ 6

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 ‘Big House, The’ 9 ‘Blemish’ 134 ‘Boon’ 6, 68 ‘Boundary Commission, The’ 53, 103, 130 ‘Brazil’ 69 ‘Briefcase, The’ 77 ‘Capercaillies’ 79 ‘Cheesecake’ 69 ‘Cherish the Ladies’ 49 ‘Clonfeacle’ 7–8 ‘Come Into My Parlour’ 33–38 ‘Coney, The’ 36–37, 50 ‘Country Club, The’ 32–33, 96–97 ‘Cows’ 81, 107–08, 130, 136 ‘Crossing the Line’ 79 ‘Cuba’ 6, 8, 11–12, 13, 66–67, 69, 74 ‘De Secretis Mulierum’ 6 ‘Elizabeth’ 10–11 ‘Errata’ 45–46, 84, 137–39, 143 ‘February’ 9–10 ‘Field Hospital, The’ 18 ‘Frog, The’ 115–16 ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ 48–49, 53, 59, 73–76, 77, 108 ‘Geography Lesson, The’ 6 ‘Girls in the Poolroom, The’ 11, 69 ‘Gold’ 27–30, ‘Grass Widow’ 76 ‘Gypsy’ 22–23 ‘Half Door near Cluny, A’ 138 Hay 3, 10, 17, 22, 77, 84, 87, 120–21, 129, 132–34, 142, 146, 165, 178 ‘Hay’ 134 ‘Hinge’ 52–53 ‘Hopewell Haiku’ 140–41 ‘How to Play Championship Tennis’ 11 ‘Immrama’ 128 ‘Incantata’ 56, 76, 82, 89, 117–18, 179, 183–85 ‘January’ 31–32 ‘Key, The’ 63, 76 ‘Kissing Seat, The’ 8 Knowing my Place 129 ‘Leaving an Island’ 70 ‘Little Black Book, The’ 86–87 ‘Long Finish’ 87–88, 185–86 ‘Louis’ 117 ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’ 9, 20, 108,

LUP_Muldoon_11_Index

191

191 163 ‘Ma’ 69 Madoc 3, 51, 78, 128–29 ‘Madoc’ 77, 80, 98–99, 134, 153, 184 ‘Making the Move’ 14, 76 ‘Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife, The’ 171 ‘Mary Farl Powers: Pink Spotted Torso’ 85 Meeting the British 6 ‘Meeting the British’ 29, 79 ‘Milkweed and Monarch’ 55–56, 59, 83–84, 103, 135, 138 ‘Mirror, The’ 49 ‘Mixed Marriage, The’ 50, 54, 57, 59 ‘More a Man Has the More a Man Wants, The’ 15, 72–73, 76–77, 107, 134, 161 ‘Mudroom, The’ 84, 120, 123, 132–33, 139–40, 143, 179 Mules 17, 32, 53, 68 ‘Mules’ 17, 54–55, 58 New Weather 7, 10, 15, 17, 68, 134, 139 ‘Now, Now’ 134 ‘October, 1950’ 57, 59 ‘Ontario’ 15 O-O’s Party, The 84 ‘Our Lady of Ardboe’ 103 ‘Panther, The’ 79 ‘Plot, The’ 138 ‘Point, The’ 171 Prince of the Quotidian, The 55, 125, 129 ‘Profumo’ 12–13, 69 Quoof 11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 71, 74, 86–87, 132, 142 ‘Right Arm, The’ 17 ‘Rune’ 85–86 ‘Sleeve Notes’ 19–20, 70, 87 ‘Soap-Pig, The’ 172–73, 175–76 ‘Something Else’ 29, 78, 100 ‘Sushi’ 78, 179 ‘They that Wash on Thursday’ 35, 85, 164 ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’ 19, 88–91, 179, 186 ‘Thrush’ 70–71 ‘Toe-Tag, The’ 170–71 ‘Trifle, A’ 110–13, 118

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

192

‘Truce’ 67 ‘Twice’ 6, 19–20, 56, 118 ‘Under Saturn’ 17–18 ‘Vaquero’ 163 ‘Waking Father, The’ 49 ‘Whim’ 70 ‘White’ 178 Why Brownlee Left 15, 17, 33, 67 Wishbone, The 170 ‘Wishbone, The’ 170–71 ‘Wystan’ 116–17 ‘Yarrow’ 3, 6, 15–17, 19, 28, 40, 51, 54, 55–57, 59, 69, 76, 82, 87, 89–90, 100, 102, 104–05, 107, 119, 135–37, 139, 171–72, 177–83 ‘Yggdrasill’ 71–72, 81 Prose ‘Chez Moy’ 18, 23 ‘Getting Round’ 1, 27, 119 Scrake of Dawn, The 19 To Ireland, I 3, 46, 99, 122, 128, 130, 135–36, 142 Plays and libretti Bandanna 130–32, 135, 152, 157, 163– 67 Shining Brow 129–30, 134–35, 152–57, 167 Six Honest Serving Men 159, 161 Vera of Las Vegas 131–32, 152, 157–63 O’Brien, Sean 114 O’Donoghue, Bernard 162 Olsen, Charles 77 Osborn, Andrew 15 O’Toole, Fintan 128–29 Owen, Wilfred 65, 67 Patmore, Coventry 64 Picasso, Pablo 77 Plath, Sylvia 28, 50, 57, 59, 102, 105, 137 Poirier, Richard 97, 99, 103 Pollock, Jackson 77 Queen’s University Belfast 18 Quinn, Gerard 26, 28–31, 42

Sacks, Peter 177 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4 Seymour, Dermot 81, 159 Simic, Charles 96 Sirr, Peter 127 Skinner, Knute 32 Snyder, Gary 75 Soutine, Chaim 28 Spacks, Patricia Mayer 6 Staten, Henry 115 Stein, Gertrude 77 Sterne, Laurence 39 Stevens, Wallace 177 Stevenson, Anne 32 Strauss, Richard 152 Stravinsky, Igor 152 Swift, Jonathan 73 Symons, Arthur 64 Synge, J.M. 150 Tennyson, Alfred 184 Valéry, Paul 96 Vendler, Helen 77 Walcott, Derek 129 West, Cornel 100 Whitman, Walt 77, 88 Leaves of Grass 89 Wills, Clair 29, 47, 54–55, 57, 76, 89, 91, 121, 170–71, 175–76 Wilson, William 6 Wimsatt, W.K. 62–63, 79, 86 Wordsworth, William 2, 4, 180–81 Yeats, W.B. 48, 69, 73, 117, 150 ‘Cold Heaven, The’ 28 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ 155 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 184 ‘To a Wealthy Man…’ 64–65 Vision, A 90 Zevon, Warren 19 Zukofsky, Louis 138

Raine, Craig 151 Redmond, John 161

LUP_Muldoon_11_Index

Reich, Charles 70 Ricks, Christopher 10

192

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