‘An overwhelming sense of déjà vu’
Chapter 4 examines the importance of the long poem for Muldoon. It engages with his ever-expanding schemes of rhyme, and identifies a turn in Muldoon’s rhyming practice that coincides with his move to America. The archival discoveries in this chapter shed light on the most striking formal development of Muldoon’s American phase, namely, the introduction of a template of ninety end-words which recurs through multiple volumes. This rhyming procedure—a means of remembering and repeating earlier material—has become the blueprint for Muldoon’s longer forms (many of which are elegies), and gives rise to an extended intertextual performance of memory and mourning. If rhyme is often understood as a form of remembering, Muldoon’s long rhyming forms monumentalize the inability to forget, pulling the poet’s Irish past into his present and future writings in America.
