Paul Muldoon in America

Paul Muldoon was looking west long before he left Ireland for the United States in 1987, and his transatlantic departure would prove to be a turning point in his life and work. In America, where he now lives as a US citizen, Muldoon’s creative repertoire has extended into song writing, libretti, and literary criticism, while his poetry collections have themselves extended to outlandish proportions, typified in recent years by a level of formal intensity that is unique in modern poetry. To leave Northern Ireland, though, is not necessarily to leave it behind. Muldoon has spoken of his ‘sense of belonging to several places at once’, and in the United States his work has found another creative gear, new modes of performance facilitated by his Irish émigré status. This book approaches the protean work of his American period, focusing on Muldoon’s expansive structural imagination, his investment in Eros and errors, the nimbleness of his allusive practice as both a reader and writer, and the mobility of his transatlantic position. It draws on archival research to produce provocative new readings of Muldoon’s later works. Exploring the poetic and literary-critical ‘long forms’ that are now his hallmark, this book places the most significant works of Muldoon’s American period under the microscope, and opens up the intricate formal schemes of a poet Mick Imlah credits as having ‘reinvented the possibilities of rhyme for our time’.

‘Stunt-Reading’

Chapter 2 offers the first full-scale treatment of Paul Muldoon as critic. It looks at his major works of literary criticism, from the F. W. Bateson Lecture ‘Getting Round’ and To Ireland, I to the later End of the Poem, and considers what these lecture series from his American years can tell us about Muldoon the reader, as well as the poet. Muldoon announces himself on the critical scene not only as a self-proclaimed ‘stunt reader’ but an extraordinarily Freudian thinker, who is unusually attentive to the kinds of veiled communication and word-association that might reveal a writer’s ulterior motives, resistances, or unconscious desires. But his offbeat, often knowingly mischievous performances in these lectures also suggest a basic distrust of the authority of the critical reader, and in turn raise questions about the kinds of reading his own poems are expected to elicit.

Children of The New Poetry

This chapter argues that the offsprings of The New Poetry have neither the nerve nor nous to have both the fierce partiality and the representativeness of Alvarez. Its Penguin successor, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Penguin Book of Contemporary British Verse, was ultimately a consolidation of a dominant taste more than an argument for a fresh one. The oft-stated complaint about the younger poets championed in their book is that their work was merely a continuation of the Movement by flashier device, but in truth a number of them are better seen as children of The New Poetry. Bloodaxe, a specialist poetry house, has for the last two decades taken upon itself to publish generation-defining anthologies. Its own The New Poetry borrowed Alvarez's title, if not his sense of purpose, but drew heavily on the format and ethos of Edward Lucie-Smith, if not his evaluative sense. The editors assembled work which often showed the influence of Paul Muldoon as well as the New York Poets, whose sense of play, even of fun, is much more clearly at odds with the spirits of Alvarez and of Conquest than are the influences of the Motion/Morison book.

O Brasil de Paul Muldoon

A tradução aqui apresentada visa mostrar ao leitor brasileiro a representação de seu país feita pelo poeta norte-irlandês Paul Muldoon. Entretanto, cabe ressaltar que esse retrato é mais do que um olhar alienado. Ele é, na verdade, parte constituinte de uma psique artística que tem o interculturalismo como alicerce de sua lírica. Todos os poemas sobre o Brasil são variações de sonetos narrativos. Sendo assim, expressam, duplamente, a coloquialidade da fala prosaica e a musicalidade do verso. Além do mais, as experimentações artísticas, bem como a métrica e o estranhamento das imagens, envolvem a experiência pessoal em uma rede de significados globais. O ethos produzido por tais relações é um espaço subjetivo de confluências, pois a poética torna-se um espaço criativo onde escritor e leitor configuram suas identidades coletivas e específicas.

Translation

‘We know we have to find the “voice” to write a poem. The voice, not of the author, but if anything, the voice of the poem.’ The esteemed Irish poet Paul Muldoon utters these words in conversation with the German poet, novelist, essayist, and publisher Michael Krüger. In line with its etymological roots, translation is frequently thought of as an act of ‘carrying’ a verbal construct ‘across’ linguistic boundaries, before setting it down in a new language. This is not what Muldoon and Krüger, accomplished translators both, argue for in their discussion of translation captured in this chapter, however. Instead, they urge us to consider that literature becomes multiply authored when it circulates in the world, and that translators, far from being mere shipping agents wrapping a poem in gauze, instead impose their presence upon the work.

The Etymological Poetry of W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon

This book defines, analyses, and theorises a late modern ‘etymological poetry’ that is alive to the past lives of its words, and probes the possible significance of them both explicitly and implicitly. Close readings of poetry and criticism by Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon investigate the implications of their etymological perspectives for the way their language establishes relationships between people, and between people and the world. These twin functions of communication and representation are shown to be central to the critical reception of etymological poetry, which is a category of ‘difficult’ poetry. However resonant poetic etymologising may be, critics warn that it shows the poet’s natural interest in language degenerating into an unhealthy obsession with the dictionary. It is unavoidably pedantic, in the post-Saussurean era, to entertain the idea that a word’s history might have any relevance to its current use. As such, etymological poetry elicits the closest of close readings, thus encouraging readers to reflect not only on its own pedantry, obscurity, and virtuosity, but also on how these qualities function in criticism. As well as presenting a new way of reading three very different late modern poet-critics, this book addresses an understudied aspect of the relationship between poetry and criticism. Its findings are situated in the context of literary debates about difficulty and diction, and in larger cultural conversations about the workings of language as a historical event.

Paul Muldoon the ‘Etymological Junkie’

‘Who knew forensic derives from forum?’, Muldoon asks in a recently published poem. His compulsive etymologising challenges audiences to see both the relevance and the irrelevance of etymology to interpretation, thereby accepting that they are the ultimate arbiters of Muldoon’s linguistic forensics. Following an analysis of how audience responses to etymologies are cued in his criticism, this chapter reflects on the connection that seems to exist between etymologising and elegising in Muldoon’s poetry to characterise the effect of what Paula Blank calls the ‘“etymological moment” in contemporary critical practice’ when it occurs in the poetry itself.

Mistaking on Purpose

This concluding chapter measures this book's argument about mistake against poems that openly describe the process and feeling of mistaking. Can poets use their own mistakes productively and still be mistaken? What does their trying to do so say about the nature of mistakes in poetry more broadly? The chapter explains that when poets celebrate the unconscious creativity associated with error, they likewise confirm mistake's inevitability—and the importance of acknowledging it. Touching on the work of several contemporary poets, including John Ashbery, Paul Muldoon, and Geoffrey Hill, it positions mistake alongside other elements of poetic craft and suggests that the critical urge to deny mistaking is often at odds with the process it means to defend. Finally, the chapter tells a story of making via poets who usually treat their mistakes as flaws worth mentioning, not excusing.