Paul Muldoon

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Walking on Air

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In the following review of Poems 1968-1998, Newey contends that Muldoon's “ludic” poetry often lacks “any substantial core” and risks falling into self-parody.
SOURCE: Newey, Adam. “Walking on Air.” New Statesman 130, no. 4541 (11 June 2001): 70-1.

I worry about Paul Muldoon. I mean, on the one hand, here is a poet of extravagant gifts, a true original who delights in weaving lexical patterns of great wit and complexity; on the other, we have someone who thinks it enough to construct a poem (albeit a brief one) around an agonisingly laboured pun on “Armagh” and “Armani.”

In one sense, that coupling gives the trajectory of his own journey, from low-key Catholic childhood in rural Ulster to high-status stateside professorship (he has been based at Princeton since 1987). Later this year he turns 50, and Faber has brought out this collection of his eight published volumes, which makes it a good moment to assess the career of the most acclaimed (and most imitated) poet of his generation.

Success came to Muldoon early, while a student at Queen's University, Belfast. A schoolteacher brought him to the attention of the Belfast “Group”—Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney foremost among them. For a while, Heaney tutored him at Queen's. The realisation that poetry was being written and talked about so seriously so close to home seemed, to the son of a mushroom-grower, a kind of epiphany. “These people were publishing poems about walking through fields and I thought: ‘I can do that.’”

It's a disarming, throwaway, typically Muldoonian remark. But part of the enormous difficulty Muldoon presents for readers is knowing how seriously to take anything he says, or writes. The word that critics love to apply to his style is “ludic.” There are the often abstruse allusions, the casual, even cheeky tone, the endless wordplay. In Muldoon's work, images stack up like a heap of discarded road signs all pointing in different directions; some of his poems read as if created by the William Burroughs cut-and-paste method.

Another difficulty comes from not knowing where the poet stands in relation to his work. Muldoon is everywhere in his work and nowhere. There are plenty of references to his childhood, to the villages and landscapes of Armagh, yet such are the levels of displacement here that you never know whether you are meant to believe these recollections or whether they are part of some wider professorial game. You follow the poet around one corner only to find he has doubled back and seems to be coming up behind you. And finally you discover the impenetrable irony curtain between writer and reader.

This stems, I think, from what we can ascertain of his conception of the act of reading and writing. In the author's note to this collection [Poems 1968-1998], Muldoon describes himself as “the person through whom” his poems were written. This is not some disingenuous antiauthorial conceit: he has said that he tries to instill in his creative writing students a humility towards language, a willingness to follow its logic, rather than treat language as a tool for self-expression. The poetic self is forged out of language, not the other way round. This is true even (and perhaps especially) in extremis. In “Footling,” the poet's wife is about to give birth and, “though she's been in training all spring and summer … [has] now got cold feet / and turned in on herself, the phantom ‘a’ in Cesarian.”

This, I think, explains why Heaney has praised Muldoon's work as being like “walking on air,” why the poems seem to grow out of themselves—and why, to me at least, they appear to lack any substantial core, any heart. Yet there are signs that Muldoon may have reached a turning point. In his most recent volume, Hay (1998), there is a clutch of almost pastoral poems that deal with the natural world around his Princeton home.

Perhaps the greatest threat to any artist in mid-career is the risk of self-parody, from which Muldoon has not been exempt, leaping at times from the ludic to the ludicrous (although another poem, “Errata,” points us in a different direction with the line “For ludic read lucid”). Several poems in Hay have a desperate quality to them, as if the poet were trying to kick his way out of a stylistic straitjacket and finally discover something solid amid the rush of jarring images. Perhaps that book will come to represent the pruning back that stimulates a new season's growth.

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