SOURCE: Muldoon, Paul, and Lynn Keller. “An Interview with Paul Muldoon.” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 1 (spring 1994): 1-29.

[In the following interview, originally conducted between April 22 and 23, 1993, Muldoon discusses the creative origins and artistic aims of Shining Brow and Madoc: A Mystery, his incorporation of historical and literary references in these works, and his views on contemporary poetry and the formal aspects of his own verse.]

Born in 1951, the poet Paul Muldoon was raised in a Catholic household in county Armagh in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. His father was a market gardener, his mother a schoolteacher; as the offspring of this “mixed marriage” (the title of an early poem), Muldoon in his writing seems drawn on the one hand to the reassuring—if currently threatened—solidities of nature or of rural life and on the other to esoteric scholarly learning and flights of verbal fancy. His work is often autobiographical, yet individual identity is of less interest in his poetry than the processes of perception and the energies inherent in language. Thus his poems frequently foreground the associative movement of thought; one thing—“which made me think of something else, then something else again” (Meeting the British 40)—leads to another, each one precisely registered even if contexts shift vertiginously. The surprising movements of consciousness are enhanced by playful metamorphoses of language and poetic form. Muldoon delights in half rhyme, gives rein to puns and homophonic suggestion, and is as interested in sonic links between words as semantic ones; employing a dazzling range in both vocabulary and allusion, he often calls attention to his own high style and imaginative high jinks.

One might say that Muldoon's poetry is concerned with “seeing things,” in several senses of that phrase. First, dream vision and hallucination are often essential aspects of the experiences depicted. Second, the poems make us see the “things” of a fluid and pluralistic reality more truly. They open our eyes to the strangeness, the multidimensionality of our experience, and to often-ignored currents running beneath its surfaces. This emphasis on the complexity of truth has a political dimension. For like the other Ulster poets writing now, when Northern Ireland is bursting almost as much with poetic talent as with violence, Muldoon is compelled somehow to confront “the troubles” in his work. He does so in a more oblique fashion than, say, his former mentor Seamus Heaney or his contemporary Ciaran Carson. For he remains intensely conscious of the ambiguities attending all allegiances and of the very limited power poetry and poets wield in the political arena. But his preference for allegory and parable, for ironic disguise and playful indirection, does not diminish the seriousness with which his poetry considers issues of ideology and politics and of artistic responsibility. As is the case in “Meeting the British”—a poem portraying not an Irish encounter but one in the French and Indian Wars—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history often serves as Muldoon's vehicle for exploring the dynamics of twentieth-century Irish history.

Muldoon attended Queen's University in Belfast, where he studied Celtic and Scholastic philosophy as well as English literature; his tutor was Seamus Heaney. His first collection of poems, New Weather, appeared in 1973, the year he obtained his B.A. From 1973 to 1986 he worked as a radio and television producer of arts programming for BBC Northern Ireland. Since 1987, he has lived in the United States. He now directs the creative writing program at Princeton University. His collections of poetry, from Faber and Wake Forest, include Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983)—all represented in his Selected Poems: 1968-1986 (Ecco)—and Meeting the British (1987).

The works discussed at length in this interview are Muldoon's most recent publications, Madoc: A Mystery (1990) and Shining Brow (1993). The long title poem which occupies most of Madoc is constructed from short sections, each headed by the bracketed name of a philosopher. In a highly elliptical collage, “Madoc” depicts what might have happened if the poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey had realized their scheme to emigrate to America and establish on the banks of the Susquehanna a community based on the principles of “pantisocracy,” or equal rule of all. Madoc is the name of a twelfth-century Welsh prince said to have founded a community in North America—one that perhaps interbred with the Mandan Indians; Madoc is the subject of an epic poem Southey published in 1805. Shining Brow is a dramatic poem, the libretto of an opera commissioned by the Madison Opera Company. The plot concerns the turmoil in the personal life of Frank Lloyd Wright between 1903 and 1914: Wright abandons his wife Catherine and his children for Mamah Cheney, the wife of client Edwin Cheney. The two live for a while in Europe before returning to the Midwest, where Wright builds his “house that hill might marry,” Taliesen—a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.” Taliesen burns, set afire by the Barbadian chef, and Mamah Cheney and her two children are killed in the blaze.

Paul Muldoon—along with the composer Daron Aric Hagen—was in Madison for the opening performances of the opera. This interview was conducted in two parts, on April 22 and 23, 1993. On the day preceding the first part of our conversation, Paul Muldoon had given a reading at the University of Wisconsin; that same evening both he and I had been among the audience attending the première of Shining Brow.

[Keller]: Would you say something about the history of your involvement in Shining Brow?

[Muldoon]: Daron Hagen, the composer, and I were in the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He got this phone call from Madison Opera, asking if he would write the opera. I happened to be sitting outside the phone booth, between games of pool. (To help the poems into the world, one should intercut them with pool games.) He said to me—I'm not quite sure how serious he was—“You want to write an opera?” and I said, “Sure. Why not?” So, that's how it started. This was Madison Opera's first commission, and they specified that it be an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright. I think they might have even come up with the title, though I no longer recall.

I spent about a year writing it, which is a long, long time. I don't know if it was worth it or not. I think it's worth it in terms of last night's performance, though at the same time, I'm in many ways very skeptical about opera. I hate to think of the amount of money that an opera costs. I hate to think of it being an elitist art form. I hate to think of it being so extravagant in every way. And yet, there's something sui generis about opera; there is nothing quite like it. And it's just thrilling to be involved in it, despite the reservations one has. Those have to do partly with the stereotypical image of the kind of person who tends to be an opera buff—the kind of person to whom one would want to give a pretty wide berth.

It's not your audience?

I don't know who my audience is. I have no sense of an audience. The only thing I know about it is it's very small.

To what extent did you determine the plot and the themes? Of course, Wright's life is a given, but to what extent did you and Daron Hagen together determine what you would treat and how you would treat it, and to what extent was that your territory?

Initially, we sat down together and wrote a treatment, like a film treatment, very detailed. I had made some preliminary sketches, since I felt from very early on that it should focus on the period between 1903 and 1914, which are the years in which drama, in its broadest sense, occurred in Wright's life. He lived a very full and very varied life, but, frankly, presenting an architect going about the business of doing his job is not going to inspire anything very much. In fact, when people used to ask me what I was doing during the time I was writing this, and I said I was writing an opera on Frank Lloyd Wright, they'd look at me as if I'd gone crazy.

It's interesting, though, that you gave only the slimmest representation to the joys of art and artistic creation. There is the passage in which Wright presents his dream to Louis Sullivan, for instance, but for the most part it's a very dark presentation.

It's very dark. I suppose, one of the things in dealing with an historical personage—in this case, Frank Lloyd Wright—is that that person looms quite large in the popular imagination. Wright is generally perceived as one of the great figures of twentieth-century art. We felt that we could use that as a given, though maybe we rely overly on the audience's preconceptions about Wright. I find it hard to judge. But that's certainly one of the difficulties in dealing with an historical character and documentary elements.

How much did you rely on documentary knowledge? I gather that you both did a lot of reading about Wright. Did you then essentially throw that away?

Exactly. We read his autobiographical writings about the period and read Brendan Gill's wonderful biography, Many Masks, for example, but after determining the historical framework, we were much less interested in veracity than verisimilitude. We took some liberties, of course. There are certain things that are presented as historical incidents which did not take place, though they're few and far between. For example, Wright and Sullivan did not meet in the Cliffdwellers Club on the day of the fire at Taliesin, nor did Edwin Cheney come rushing in to tell them about it. That's there for dramatic effect. Mind you, Edwin Cheney did ride on the same train as Wright to Taliesin, so it's not such a distortion, if that word is even appropriate. I mean, everything is a distortion. After all, this is not Frank Lloyd Wright we're looking at. It's not Ed Cheney we're looking at. These are characters that are based on historical characters. After getting the bones of the story down, I set them down as characters and let them look after themselves, let them deal with the inherent drama in their situation.

The drama is tremendous. But it strikes me that the part of Wright's career with which you deal puts him at about your age.

That's right.

His issues, I presume, are in some way your issues. What do you think?

Well, I don't know. I'm engaged by him, but mind you, I'm engaged by every character in this opera. I don't know if that comes across.

Yes, they're very multidimensional.

That's what I wanted to do. There was no way I was interested in writing a piece in which ciphers would trundle on and off the stage and utter a few banalities. I wanted to do something that was about something real, that was about real crisis, a series of crises, that was about strong emotions and disturbing aspects of the psyche. That's material which opera can deal with in a way difficult to approach in other forms. There was something I wrote in the program notes about allowing these people to come right out and say, “Hey, listen. I'm in deep trouble here. I feel very unhappy. I'm gonna kill myself.” Whatever. The amazing thing about this art form is that you can get away with that.

Yes, opera's so overstated.

And it's all okay. You can teeter on the brink—perhaps even go over the top—and there's something about this medium that allows you to do it. And it doesn't seem completely wacko, the way it would in film or a poem, at least the kind of poem I am interested in.

I want to ask you a question prompted by the opera's theme of purloining, or borrowing, which is so central to the plot and is embodied in the heavily allusive quality of the libretto. What kind of relation to your artistic forebears do you try to establish in your own writing? In the libretto there's Wright in relation to Sullivan, there's you in relation to any number of others. How do you see it?

Well, that goes back to your question that I didn't really answer earlier. Maybe the gist of your question is, do you think you're like Frank Lloyd Wright?

In some ways that is my question.

I hesitate to answer. I wouldn't want to sound such a fool as to compare myself to Frank Lloyd Wright. But I suppose there are ways in which the libretto refers to my life. One of the things about Wright is that he seems to me to be entirely out of touch with his emotional life. In my own life I often find it difficult to express my emotions, and I think it's a common enough thing in the male species, as we hear ad nauseam these days, perhaps. I think there's some truth in it, though I don't want to put in an ad here for Robert Bly. There are aspects of my life that I regret, ways in which I've been cruel. So I do feel very much for Wright. Let me go on, though and say I feel very much for Sullivan, for the character who has had his thunder stolen; one of the things that fired me, in a way, about the relationship between Wright and Sullivan was that I had in the back of my mind some of my own relationships with other writers and other mentors. In other words, there are things happening in this that are about my own life. I have, for example, been divorced in my life, and so I feel very much for Ed Cheney's situation, and Catherine Wright's situation.

The libretto links Wright's stealing and the building of his career with the stealing of lands from the Native Americans and the building of the nation. But how analogous are empire-building and artistic creation? And is artistic creation the issue, or is it more this idea of imagining there's a clean slate out there, on which to write?

I don't know. I'm not sure if artistic creation was uppermost in my mind, to tell you the truth. I don't really have theories about purloining. Of course, “purloining” is a word used in a rather famous text, and that was there vaguely in the back of my mind, but how far even that's relevant, I wouldn't know. I was less interested in the whole business of the “work of art” than I was in the business of the artist making a space for herself or himself in the world. And one of the main distinctions between Sullivan and Wright is that Wright is a charismatic character, who is a tremendous self-publicist. So in that sense, it has to do more with the artist than the work of art. We don't have to look too far to see examples of good artists suffering and second-rate artists thriving. And that often has to do with how they sell themselves.

So it's the empire-building of this particular man, not the artistic endeavor per se. Wright is an artistic robber baron here.

That's right. That's how he is being presented. I'm sure there's a tie-in with, you know, colonialism, postcolonialism …

I wanted to ask you about that.

To tell you the truth, I'm about the worst person to talk on these matters. I'm not a theorist. I don't use that word with any kind of disdain or in any pejorative sense. I just do not think in those terms. That's not to say that I'm a complete ingénu, but I don't think in those terms. Sure, I can conceive of a system in which one would say, “Look, every work of art is based on expansionism, is based on an urge if not exactly to put somebody down, then in some sense, to put something down.” A work of art (we'll still use that term, for the moment) rushes in to fill a vacuum, or whatever existed before.

But it's rarely a vacuum that existed before—that seems to be a premise in the opera.

Exactly. Indeed, maybe it's some other poem—be it a poem written by John Donne or Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop. We're touching a little bit on Harold Bloom's theory. I'm not an expert 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. What I resist very strenuously is the superimposing of any particular world picture, any kind of ism, that insists on everything falling into place very neatly—as in some great cookie cutter from the sky, or some magician's trunk that will include any mannequin that happens to swim into its ken (what a mixed metaphor!) and all the legs and arms, if they don't fit in, are going to be chopped off. I'm antiprescriptive.

And your work thwarts that: the way in which you insist on mysteries or open-endedness works counter to that simplification.

Well, it's not as if I get up in the morning and say, “Today I'm going to …”

“Thwart those Lacanians.”

Right. I don't think my job in life is to do that. No. I suppose I am interested in exciting myself, amusing myself, disturbing myself.

I want to ask you another question about Shining Brow: did writing this push you in new directions in your poetry? And, as a follow-up, would you like to do more writing for opera?

Yes to both. I think it did. I wouldn't have continued to do it, I think, even though I was commissioned to do it, if I didn't think that something interesting was happening there. What would be the point?

Do you see its effect on things you've written subsequently?

I do—it's quite incredible. The poems I've been writing since have been influenced in a strange way; I still haven't quite broken free of the mold of it.

“Cauliflowers,” for instance—the “going down in history,” the “going down.” Would that motif be an example of something that carried through?

Well, that was in Madoc. So that was before.

When were you writing the libretto?

Shining Brow was written almost immediately after Madoc. The first thing I wrote after Madoc was a children's book, which hasn't been published yet; but then this was the next thing. Now, that phrase, “going down in history”: I had wanted to write a song for an Irish singer, and that was a refrain for an early version of it. Then I decided I would use it in this opera. But there are certain carryovers from Shining Brow to what I'm doing now. One of the things I've been working on is a very complex poem involving nine or ten intercut exploded sestinas. It uses repetition in a way that wouldn't have occurred to me before Shining Brow. There's something about the way repetition is used in this opera that has interested me, and has continued to interest me. Let me say a little bit more about this libretto. It has been published, as you know, and I wanted to write something that would be “good enough” for that.

It's great! We went home after the performance and read parts of it again—the takeoff on Goethe, the blues bit—“I woke up this morning, I was still in my dungarees.” To give those workmen that lovely melodic passage …

That was such fun to do.

It's very powerful, the anger of the downtrodden that pervades the whole opera.

I hope so. I've always wanted to write a blues poem. And this was just a wonderful occasion when that was, I think, appropriate. It's a measure of the extent to which the libretto really does influence the music. That is not often discussed, because, finally, librettists are not much thought of. Yet they have much more effect on the finished product than many people recognize. (Not this composer, by the way, who's a great, great guy. He's extremely literate, very interested in language, very well read. And our collaboration has been wonderful.) But as I was saying, this libretto has been sold as a dramatic poem in its own right. There are dangers in that, I think. There was a review of it the other day in the Irish Times saying, “This isn't very good.” The guy who wrote it was absolutely disinclined to like it. It would be nice to think that a reviewer might, if anything, give it the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he did, of course. It's not as if you can stick something on the back cover saying, “Look, I do wish that as a reader you would remember you cannot hear the music, that you cannot quite read this the way you would read another book.”

But you can read it as you can a dramatic script, don't you think?

I would have hoped so. But let me address the other part of your question: yes, Daron Hagen and I want to do more work together. We have several projects at hand, and we're just trying to decide. If someone wants to take us up and give us a commission, we have a chamber piece that we want to do, called “Nora.”

After Nora Barnacle?

Exactly. Nora and Jim and Jimbo and Stanislaus and Lucia and Sam Beckett and John McCormack would be the main characters. We haven't really gone too far down the road with it, but that's one plan. I'm excited about that. I mean, most people we have mentioned it to say, “That's great!” It's as if I went to a Hollywood producer and said, “We want to do this,” and he said, “Okay!” But, on the other hand, it's kind of daunting. It would be a difficult thing to do; I'm not sure if I'm ready to do it. At the same time, I feel that I've written a number of pieces about literary ménages. Maybe I've done enough of that. Maybe I should go on to something else.

I want to ask you about your long poems and, in particular, about Madoc. First, more generally, what draws you to these longer poetic forms?

I don't know. I just find myself writing them. I seem to have no control over it. I just seem to be drawn to longer forms.

Narrative seems to be one of the things that gets played with when you enter into these longer forms. What do you think you're up to with narrative?

Well, I'm sure it varies. There is a narrative in Madoc. To use the Hollywood producer analogy again, if you went in to a Hollywood producer and said, “In two or three sentences, this is a story of two youthful poets who set up a little colony in North America and, for various reasons, went their separate ways. One turned into a bit of a demagogue, or worse, a despot—as Frost says, ‘I never dared be radical when young for fear of being conservative when old’—and the other subsided into drug abuse, and this is the story of their lives.” That is the narrative, their various adventures along the way. One of them, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, joins, briefly, the Lewis and Clark expedition, then finds himself in the western part of the United States moving from tribe to tribe, while the other, Robert Southey, embarks on this disastrous course of self-aggrandizement and increasing self-delusion. Actually, one might say that in fact this is very much like what happened to them in their actual lives. However, this is just a story. And this is the poem's story. Then one can add, “All of that is told within the framework of a descendant, we think, of Southey's. It's set a little bit in the future, and it's all retrieved from the back of his eye by some remarkable device, which will probably be available to us very shortly, and this guy has a very strange vision of the world. He's some kind of a Sunday philosophy buff, and he's really weird. It's as if his whole way of ordering the world—and we all have a way of ordering the world, somehow, of making sense of it—is very strange. The way he's made sense of the story about where he comes from and who he is, is to filter it through a totally madcap history of Western thought. And that's what happens in the story.” When you put it like that, it's very, very simple. I hope it's comparatively simple.

The book, Madoc?

Yeah. An amusing thing happened to me here, in the Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin. I was here for rehearsals a couple of weeks ago, and I came down one morning and the bellhop greeted me and said, “I bought your book yesterday, and I read it last night.” I said, “Oh, what book's that?” And he said, “Madoc.” I said, “Really? That's a pretty weird book, don't you think?” or something along those lines, and he said, “Yeah, but you know, I got into it, and I just read it, and I read it from beginning to end.” And I said, “Well, that's wonderful. I wish all the people could read it like that.” Because that's the way to read it: you just start, and you go and you don't worry too much about what Nietzsche has to do with this damn horse, or whatever.

I was going to ask you about your expectations for the audience for that poem. I had a very different experience with it. I took that book with me when I went to visit my sister and brother-in-law a few weeks ago. I took it on the plane and was pretty much through my first reading by the time I arrived. My brother-in-law does American Studies, specializing in Western literature. So I started asking him questions, and before I knew it I was surrounded by reference books, and I spent all my free time that weekend poring over those reference books. It was a fabulous experience. I was reading George Catlin; I was reading Southey, I was reading about John Evans, about Aaron Burr, about Lewis and Clark; I was suddenly learning all this information about various Native American tribes. Not only was the poem coming together for me in many different ways, but I felt as if my own knowledge had significantly expanded. This research changed the poem for me in a fundamental way: when I read it through the first time, the events in the poem seemed so bizarre. Then when I started reading the history, I saw that it's the history that is bizarre!

Oh, absolutely. It's totally bizarre. And much of Madoc is the “real” history. And it's so corny.

People like Evans or Burr—these are characters we couldn't invent in our wildest dreams!

And the serendipity of it all, I found alarming. The more I got involved in it, the deeper I sank. I discovered that this person knew that person and was involved with this other person and that they all knew each other in some way. Burr knew Thomas Moore and Byron and Blennerhassett and so on and so forth. Just unbelievable. I haven't read it myself for a while, or I would be able to comment more extensively on the net—“net,” of course, being a very important word in the whole thing—of historical interrelations.

But the other thing I felt was that I had to do that reading to make sense of the poem. There's one kind of reader, the bellhop here, and you took pleasure in the fact that he read it through. It was a good read. There's another kind of reader who approaches the poem as I did. Do you want your readers to go out and read supporting materials as I did?

If they want. You know, it raises questions about the nature of reading. I'm one of those old fogies who was brought up on the New Criticism and practical criticism; I believe that one of the writer's jobs is to reduce the number of possible readings of a text, to present something that can really only be read one, two, three, or maybe four ways. The kind of writing I'm interested in is self-contained, or as self-contained, as a thing on the page, as possible. Insofar as is possible—insofar as we all have a notion of red, of wheelbarrow, of rainwater, or whatever—I believe in that. I believe that is part of my job. Having said that, however, I'm not too interested in the author. I don't believe that the author is dead, but I do believe that poems somehow write themselves. I suspect that many of my academic friends when we've talked about these things think either that I'm totally crazy, or that I want to have my cake and eat it, too. So, I believe in these things, but then I go and write this poem that, really, can be read in a number of ways. Think of the complexity of the relationship, for example, between the text and the philosopher supertitles—one almost wants them to be subliminal, almost not there at all. In fact, my editor and I talked at one point about whether they should be there. It's a very risky thing to have them there at all, because it almost raises more problems than it solves. Like the notion of Ulysses—when should the chapter titles be there or should there be anything? I mean, you've got the building, and you've still got the scaffolding. Do you leave the scaffolding up?

It's a complex business, and I really don't know what I think about it. The poem seems to work for a lot of people. I'm sure for many, it won't. But even for those for whom it does work, there are problems with it. I can't believe how favorably it has been reviewed. But even some of the most favorable reviewers would express some impatience in the midst of the review. For instance, there's a review by the very good English poet Michael Hoffman in some English magazine where he said, “There were points in reading this when I wanted to throw it through the window.” And that's a very understandable feeling. But basically, I'm with the bellhop here; insofar as what I have to say has any weight (which it hasn't), 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 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 Blennerhassett 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.” But it's certainly not as if I'm interested in writing big crossword puzzles; I'm not interested in writing difficult poems for the sake of writing them. It's a complex poem, but it's complex, I think, because it's dealing with something quite complex.

I asked you earlier about your sense of borrowing and stealing in writing. One of the things of interest to me is that you chose to title the work Madoc. Southey titled his epic “Madoc,” and there's a kind of notification of belatedness here, of going over someone else's territory. When Joyce writes a book called Ulysses, Joyce is doing the same thing—but he didn't take a poem like Southey's “Madoc,” which one might say is alternatively outrageous or excruciatingly boring.

Right on both counts, there.

The same thing with your long poem from Why Brownlee Left, “Immram”: you have a precedent text in Tennyson's “Voyage of Maeldune,” and so, as your protagonist is going out, Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson are going out before him. Going before him both times, going in and going out, as I recall. Why this choice of the used?

The template?

Yes.

I don't know if, when I started on Madoc, I knew I was going to call it “Madoc.”

But did you have Southey? Where did Madoc start?

Madoc started with Byron. I did a little edition of selected poems of Byron.

So it was his anger at Southey that triggered the poem?

Yeah. I had begun to think about Southey—Byron's always taking out, not necessarily the heavy artillery, just the old musket and taking a pot shot at Southey, and then I started to think again about the pantisocratic scheme. Of course, that scheme didn't materialize. Then I thought, well, hey, what if it did? And basically, it goes down.

Let me add something: the fact that Southey wrote this poem called “Madoc” becomes emblematic, somehow, of his self-delusion—which, of course, is all very risky. That's the kind of thing that could easily blow up in your face. But then, I'm interested in that. I'm only really interested in things that are risky. I don't see the point anywhere else. Not just for the sake of taking risks—I'm not talking about poetic bungee jumping or hang gliding. But there's a challenge in there. That challenge is not the only thing that interests in formal challenges that coincide with challenges of content. “Immram” of course is based on this older Irish text, what Tennyson was basing his—again, a terrible, terrible poem, though not quite so bad as “Madoc”—his work on. I'm borrowing, or purloining, great mediocre artists. Who was it who said, “mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal”?

I think it was Eliot.

Eliot. He did a lot of it, too. It's not as if I think that if I steal, I'll become a better poet; there's no little syllogism in there. But yes, the voice of “Immram” is stolen, you might say. Purloined from Raymond Chandler and Byron. It's a pastiche of those styles and voices. In a sense, it's stolen, borrowed.

Some people would claim that's the situation with contemporary art.

I can understand that. And some people would go further, and say that's the situation of art and always has been.

Would you say that?

I think, certainly, works of art do not spring fully formed from anybody's brow. They come from context. They come from social, cultural, historical contexts. I also think that what Bloom said about the anxiety of influence makes sense. That said, so what? That doesn't mean that the next time I sit down to try to write a poem that consciously—of course subliminally is a different matter—I'll be saying, “Now today I'm going to subvert whomever.” But, to repeat, these poems do not come out of thin air. Of course they don't. They come through one personality, at one point in history, in one culture, and all the rest.

One of the main issues in Madoc is the fate of this pantisocracy, of this utopian impulse. I see that elsewhere in your work as well—the myth of the frontier, that sort of thing. Do you think that all utopian projects are doomed in the way this one clearly is? Or is that even an interest of yours?

Certainly, that's a poem about a dystopia. What are the great utopian projects of history? Marxist socialism, communism is one. It doesn't seem to have done very well. I'm not saying that some of its basic ideas are not ideas with some value. Somehow, anything that becomes codified—take the religious impulse, for example, based on perfectly legitimate ideas, that there is something beyond us, that we should love our neighbor. Whatever the mottoes are, somehow when they become organized, codified, then I think there's a very fine line between organized religion and organized crime.

Does the historic, the legendary Madoc represent a more positive utopian possibility?

I don't think so. One of the things that interested me a lot about the story of Madoc is perhaps not evident from the poem, though it's evident from other poems of mine—for example, “Bechbretha,” which is a poem about the use of art by politicians. Now, the myth of Madoc was invented by a man named John Dee—or rather, it wasn't invented by him, but he gave it a lot of currency—and it really all had to do with British expansionism in the New World. There is the germ of the story—the myth of Madoc and the Welsh Indians and all the rest of it—but why it had such currency, why it ran and ran, had to do with the fact that the English wanted a rationale for laying claim to as much of the North American land mass as possible. That's what it's all about.

But Evans was in the pay of the Spanish, right? When Evans denied that the Mandan were the Welsh Indians, he was in the pay of those who would have an interest in not furthering the British claims.

Was he in the pay of James Wilkinson at that point? That's right, he was. I had forgotten that.

Why should we give more credence to Evans than to others? My question isn't meant to undermine what you're saying about the dynamics.

I understand, but extrapoem, as it were. Mind you, Evans was sent out by the Welsh.

Isn't it true that he, in fact, spent little of his life in Wales? His knowledge of Welsh culture and Welsh tradition and language was minimal, so that his ability to identify Welsh traces was questionable.

Right, but anyone's ability to detect Welsh traces in the Mandans would have been questionable.

Although Catlin believed it.

Catlin believed it. There are still people who believe it. There's a guy called Barry Fell, who had some connection with Harvard. He wrote a book called America, B.C.; I borrowed sometimes from it (I don't think I purloined anything from it!). Most of what the horse talks in this poem comes from, or is not unrelated to, what Barry Fell says—about the Celts coming to North America, how you find a few scratches in a stone somewhere in Massachusetts, and it looks suspiciously like “ogam,” and you say, well, obviously the Irish got here.

Does that horse owe anything to Ed Dorn's Slinger?

I've read Slinger, though I don't remember it well. There was a review of “Immram” years ago in which it was compared to Slinger, I think just because it's a slightly longer poem. But is there a talking horse in Slinger?

Yes, there is a talking horse. Read it again; I think you would enjoy it. There was no exchange here with that book?

I might have had a subliminal memory of it.

That Bucephalus/syphilis rhyme—it was a wonderful invention!

I'm glad you think so. Often, these rhymes are completely crazy. I'm a great fan of Byron, and I really like these totally crazy rhymes. A lot of the time I just love to say, “Let's see what happens. Just how near the edge can you go without dissolving into outright doggerel?” That's something I'm very interested in. Again, it's a risky thing. Some people may think, for example, that the writing in versified direct speech in the poem that I read yesterday called “The Key,” which is in Madoc—some people may think that I think that's good. But that's a chance I have to take.

Madoc develops an interest in Native American history that has long been evident in your work, at least back to Why Brownlee Left.

Way before then, actually. In the first book I published, which is not readily available in this country, there are a couple of poems, including one called “The Indians and Alcatraz,” which is really the first poem I wrote featuring Native Americans. And there's a longish poem, the first longish poem I wrote, at the end of that book, which was based on Native American iconography. It was called “The Year of the Sloes,” and it's dedicated to Ishi, who was the last member of the California tribe that was discovered early in this century, 1910 or 1911. I suppose I started out in a fairly romantic way. I was interested in fairly crude parallels with the Irish situation. The other day I was saying to the guy who plays Frank Lloyd Wright in this opera—to go back to the extent to which this libretto is closer to me than it might appear—that some of the hokum that Wright talks about Indians is really commenting on some of the hokum I talk. Basically, it is saying, “Hey, look. Stop doing this.” On one hand, I'm very interested in Native Americans: I feel very strongly, and I know a lot about Native American cultures. But maybe I've done it just once too much.

Is an association between Native Americans and the Irish, both of whom the British found so wild and primitive—

One thing very important about that is that the British used Ireland, as it turned out, as a kind of testing ground.

Then they treated the Indians according to what they learned in Ireland.

Absolutely. I say mine is a very crude comparison, but historically it started out as a very crude comparison.

For Irish readers, is this a common identification?

I don't think so.

With Madoc do you think of yourself as writing for an Irish audience?

I'd like to think that some Irish people would read it.

In many ways, that poem seems to me an American poem. Have you seen the American West where that poem takes place?

Yes.

And would you have written it before you saw it?

Actually, I wrote it before I went.

So your knowledge of the geography is irrelevant.

Except for films and that sort of thing.

Does it strike you in some ways as an American work?

Well, a large part of it. Of course, I think it's set in Ireland.

The character South is in Ireland?

South is in Ireland, I think. I'm pretty sure that Unitel is in Ireland. So you might say it's set in Ireland.

The Republic of?

Yeah. Somewhere near the border. Maybe Southeopolis is Ulster; it's set in Ulster.

Right, even if it's Ulster, Pennsylvania.

Which is a great little town. I suspect it hasn't changed all that much, externally, from the time when it was founded, which was just about the time of the poem. I could say, if I were the kind of person who would tell you straight up, “Well, look. This is a poem about Ireland. This is a poem about the failure of Ireland, as a state.” It's not necessarily the first thing I'd say about it, but it's a perfectly legitimate thing to say about it. I was fearful when I was writing it that, in fact, it would be too obvious that that's what it was about, that the Ulster thing was growing heavy-handed.

What is “crotona” and what is “croatoan”?

“Crotona” is what was inscribed on a post in the poem. “Croatoan” is written by somebody in the lost colony of Roanoke Island, on the piece of wood that was found when Raleigh's forces came back. Nobody's quite sure what it means. It probably refers to a tribe or a place associated with a tribe. Of course, he works out that it's “crotona,” which, of course, was Pythagoras's settlement, his little place in Italy. And that's why “Pythagoras in America,” the Lévi-Strauss essay, is mentioned in the earlier poem and why beans are so big, because that's an essay about eating beans.

Actually, that's one of the overlaps between you and Dorn, that whole Lévi-Strauss thing, and beans, and so forth.

Are you kidding? I must go read this book.

The horse is at some point named Lévi-Strauss, as I recall.

Heavens. Ed Dorn. I hope he doesn't think I've purloined this, because I certainly haven't. I wouldn't want him to think I have. I have certainly read that poem, you know. Maybe I'm just a determined plagiarist.

No, no. I just feel as if the poems talk to each other. Anyway, about Coleridge in your poem: in his decline, he explores various drugs across America. He's one of many drug users in your work. It seems to me that the hallucinatory experience has a lot more value elsewhere in your work than it does, perhaps, when we see what happens to Coleridge. What importance do you attach, in your work, to that sort of hallucinatory perspective?

I suppose my line would be the same as Aldous Huxley's line in The Doors of Perception, which is quoted in “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants.” I think the world is hallucinogenic.

I would like to ask you about some formal matters. You mentioned to me that you had looked at the [Summer 1992] issue of Contemporary Literature we had sent you in which the so-called New Formalism was at issue. What were your thoughts when you saw that?

One hears of the New Formalism, but I myself had never noticed the old formalism going away. Some of the great writers of the last generation, Richard Wilbur, for example, were using these traditional formal patterns—formal, stanzaic shapes, rhyme and traditional metrics—and I just hadn't thought they had gone away. Basically, I don't like clubs or gangs. I'm someone who writes often in what would generally be construed as formalist terms, traditional terms. I use rhyme, for example; I often use conventional stanzaic patterns. But I wouldn't describe myself as a formalist. I'm not. I would never be described as a New Formalist. I've been described as all sorts of things: as a New Narrative poet, even as a Martian poet. People feel the need for some kind of label, either as commentators or as writers themselves. It seems to me that any decent writer eschews labels. I don't want to belong to any group. One of the things about formalism, for example, as it's called (I hate even to use the word. Everything is formal. Free verse, as Pound ofttimes observed, is formal in its way, and in many ways much more difficult to write than traditional verse. Both, it seems to me, are very difficult.) is that many of the poets who trade on their being formalists or New Formalists are just not very good at it. And to do it, you've got to be very good at it. I object to people in a way sullying the name of formalism. I object to people wanting what I have elsewhere described as “time off for good behavior,” wanting a reduction in their life sentence because they're writing in traditional forms, using rhyme—generally very badly—as if there were inherent virtue in that. By the same token, I hate the knee-jerk reaction to traditional forms, where people say, “That's old fogey stuff. We're living in the twentieth century. Look what William Carlos Williams did.” Well, actually when you sit down and look what he did, that's not so great, either, in many places (though at his best he's a wonderful poet). But any of these prescriptive terms, I think, are diminishing. And if the first thing that strikes one about a poet is that he or she is either a formalist or not, if things have come to that pass, heaven help us! If that's the most interesting thing we have to say about a writer—and it seems to me that the debate about poetry in this country is often centered on such questions—if that is the most interesting question that can be raised about the state of poetry in the United States, then I think things are pretty dull. That's not the most interesting question, but it's a question that's often raised. And it bores me rigid.

Do you have some idea of what the most interesting question about poetry in the United States now would be?

Well, there are a number of poets who are writing whose work I think is very interesting. The question that's raised, I suppose, is, is this engaging? Am I being forced to look at the world in a new way? I don't care if it's written in quatrains or whether it's written two words per line down the middle of the page. All I'm concerned about is, does it affect the way I look at the world? What do I discover?

Now, the Language poets might claim that changing how we look at the world is their aim. Do you read any of that work with interest?

Well, there are a couple of those poets whose work I like—Michael Palmer, for example. Again, I have to say that, as with the so-called New Formalists, I don't understand why anyone would want to belong to a group, why anyone would want to gather behind any banner. I could understand why, if something really revolutionary were happening, people might want to at least loosely associate with movements. But I understand from talking to one or two of the so-called Language poets that they don't really want to belong to it either.

Early on, the group identity may have been useful in getting some visibility.

Absolutely. Frankly, let's face it, this is a publicity matter.

Which is not shameful.

It's not shameful. But let's not beat around the bush. It's for publicity. Anyway, there are a couple of the Language poets whose work I like—basically, the ones who make more sense than the others.

Besides Palmer, who else?

Leslie Scalapino, I rather like. Let me say something more about Language writing, because as I understand it, and I may understand it imperfectly, one of the planks of Language poetry is “stopping making sense.”

I think they want us not to make sense in some conventional ways, or to have to pay attention to how we make sense.

Well, absolutely. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in the unconventional. Insofar as I would be prescriptive about anything, I'd say every poem should change poetry, somehow. But I wouldn't champion nonsense, insofar as that is part of their agenda. I will say this: any fool can make nonsense. Making no sense is easy. I'm a great fan of John Ashbery, and I often don't understand what he's going on about. But there's something about him that I find persuasive. Rhythmically, he's very persuasive. He's got a fantastic ear. And I like his disruptive vision of the world. I like the fact that one of his main planks is that we are assailed by randomness, by a world that doesn't add up. And I understand why and how his poetry is mimetic of that. But having said that, I wonder, do I really need to be reminded again and again of how the world doesn't seem to make sense? Maybe it makes perfect sense. If your vision of the world is chaos and flux, if that's how you get out of bed in the morning, you don't really need anyone to remind you of it. Basically, I'm fed up looking at remakes of John Ashbery poems—and some of them are remakes by himself. Self-parody is one of the great dangers of all poets, I think. Ashbery, as well as almost every other poet, runs the risk of self-parody and, I think, doesn't always avoid it. But to go back to the Language poets—I'm taken by what some of them say and by the writings of some of them, but I certainly wouldn't want to launch on any kind of generalization about them, except this: I don't like generalizations. I'd just as soon they didn't operate under generalizations.

I'm interested in how risk-taking comes into your work in terms of poetic form, beyond what you talked about earlier concerning the risk of doggerel. You play with the sonnet a great deal, often handling it unconventionally. And I was intrigued in the “Cauliflowers” sestina—or rather, squished sestina; it intrigued me that you talked in that poem about genetic mutation, because it seemed to me that mutation is what you were doing with poetic form.

The sonnet, though it's an Italian form initially, of course, came into English, as you know, and there's something very appealing about the sonnet. I remember reading somewhere about the way the thought process of the sonnet—

You mean, with the turn?

Exactly. You establish something, then there's a slight change. And how that way of looking at the world still obtains. The fact that it's such a common form, I think, is no accident, any more than the commonness of iambic pentameter is accidental. Whether you're a Language poet or a New Formalist, there's no getting around the fact that (a) the English language falls into this particular pattern in its stresses, and that (b) most of us hold our breath for a certain duration that roughly corresponds with the duration of the iambic pentameter. Now, many people of course think of formalism, so-called, as somehow imposed on the language, rather than being organic. I don't see it as being anything but natural to the language. So this just happens to be the way a lot of these poems come out. They seem to announce themselves sonnets, two or three lines into the poem. It's a mystery, just as it's a mystery why a painter chooses a particular size or shape of canvas. I believe in the poem writing itself, through the medium of the writer. As writer I'm somehow determining how it comes out. Of course there are dangers that too early in the process one can think, “This is likely to be a sonnet.” After all, though I argue for it being an organic form, the sonnet is not what one sees in nature. So the fact that I am predisposed to write in these conventional forms is an element in why so many of the poems come out that way, even though I would argue that every poem determines its own form.

My understanding about someone like Auden is that he took a more conscious pleasure in identifying a form and saying, “Let me go try it.”

Well, that can be fun, as an exercise. But I regret to say, because Auden was such a great poet, that he became involved in exercises in the second half of his career. I'm much less interested in later Auden than earlier. And he wrote too much. I think it's very difficult, very difficult to keep going as a writer. It gets harder rather than easier. And Auden became, I think, a bit of a versifier, in a pejorative sense. He had fantastic skill, but that is no substitute for the real article. The genuine article emerging in conventional forms is quite different from somebody with a lot of skill simply being able to impersonate poems.

Is the Auden of “7, Middagh Street” still the vital Auden?

I think that's on the cusp. We're talking about the English Auden and the American Auden; that's going into the American Auden. I don't think it has much to do with the fact that he came to this country. It's just that it is hard to keep on writing poems. I'm in my forties and it's a lean decade for many, many poets. I think of so many great poets who had very lean forties and, indeed, fifties and just went off altogether. Auden, Wordsworth. The case of Yeats is less the rule than the exception—the poet who gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and reinvents himself. The forties are bad for so many contemporary poets, so I don't know what I'm going to have to do. Maybe I'm just going to have to write libretti and wait for the forties to blow over, and hope that something good will happen. Maybe I'll have to get a monkey gland transplant!

Tell me more about other people whose work you are interested in.

I'm interested in a lot of poets around the world; there are a lot of great poets working at the moment. Yehuda Amichai. Miroslav Holub. (This is going to be a very spotty list.) In England there's a lot of very good poetry. I'm still taken by the very best of Ted Hughes, for example. I think Ted Hughes is far from finished, despite what some people might say. Craig Raine I think is a very good English poet. Michael Hoffman. There are some very good Irish poets. I think Seamus Heaney is a great poet. Great inspiration, actually, and a challenge, I think, in the best sense, to many poets, including myself, because Seamus has managed to keep going, and to keep producing the goods, not as if he were some kind of factory but producing poems of consistently high standard. That's quite an achievement. But there are a lot of other good Irish poets, too. One of the troubles with the world is that we can only deal with one Polish poet, one Irish poet, one English poet at a time. There are lots of other wonderful Irish poets, including some wonderful women poets like Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

She writes in Gaelic, doesn't she?

Yes, but she's translated into English, by myself among others. Ciaran Carson I think is a very good poet, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley. In this country, I'm a big fan of Charles Simic, C. K. Williams—at their best, very good poets. Heavens, once I start naming names I don't want to leave people out. A few women poets in this country: I think Jorie Graham and Louise Glück are interesting poets. Ashbery, I think, is good at his best. Adrienne Rich, she's very good. Mark Strand is doing very good work at the moment. He's been writing very well recently when, as I said, it's so hard to keep going. The fact that one does more of it does not mean one gets better at it. That's the terrible, terrible truth. If anything, one probably gets worse. And the pressures from oneself! One becomes more critical, but at the same time, more self-conscious.

Worrying, can you do it again, or are you just a fake?

Exactly. You know, to psych oneself back into that pure place that a nine year old, say, so perfectly inhabits, so unselfconsciously inhabits, is the ideal, I think, for many writers. Just to have that open, untrammeled, energetic engagement with language, and in a state of wise ignorance. A state of humility, which is the only decent state to be in. It's not even a matter of choosing that state: the only state in which I think anything half-decent might get done is to be humble before the power and the possibility of language, to let it have its way with you, as it were. That's perhaps an unfortunate sexual metaphor; no decent metaphor approaches it—to allow one to be a conduit and wait for something. I suppose the hope is that one might one day be an equal conduit, somehow, that the gauge of one's conduit might be equal to the force coming through it. I don't even know where that metaphor comes from. I see molten metal coming down out of a foundry.

Maybe old age will be the time to get free of that self-consciousness. I see that sometimes—a what-the-hell attitude in old people.

One would hope to get that before old age. Because, who cares? It's not as if there's a world out there clamoring for more poetry. There isn't. It's not as if the world is about to rush out to the bookstore for the latest …

The latest Paul Muldoon.

No way. That, in fact, is a wonderfully releasing thing, too. Because you don't even have to think about that. You just get on with it. And if one's lucky enough, something exciting might happen. Not just exciting for the sake of being exciting. Not different for the sake of being different. Just something with a bit of a buzz to it, really. Otherwise, what's the point? We might as well just go and watch TV. I think in the overall shape of things there's a problem with poetry and its place in the world. A few people read it. Maybe only a few people have ever read it. Not many people were reading John Donne. Five hundred people made Byron famous overnight. Tennyson was selling thousands of copies of books, but so was Rod McKuen.

Do you think poetry has any more vital life in politically beleaguered situations?

It seems to have. The former Soviet Union has a coded language for political expression, as do some of the countries of the Eastern bloc.

Do you think that has something to do with the outpouring of poetry from Ulster in recent years?

Political repression is not necessarily what forced that particular club to blow. But extremity, in a certain sense, yes. This is a dangerous idea, because if you extend it, you end up saying things like, “Political unrest is an energizing thing.” And that's problematic because it's a step away from fascism, essentially, if you associate violence with energy. But the fact that there's a sense of the unfinished about the state of Northern Ireland or, by extension, Ireland as a whole, that the question of who one is in this country and exactly what one's allegiances are remains a question—that has something to do with it. But then, what part of the world is not, in a sense, up for grabs? If you sit in Madison, Wisconsin, you think, “Madison, Wisconsin is in the middle of America—it's not up for grabs.” But I don't know. Maybe it is. America, as much as anywhere else, is up for grabs in a certain sense. We're not talking about the Russians coming down the pike tomorrow. We're not talking about the Mexicans or Canadians invading. But surely, there's a political agenda in this country, too. There's room for so-called political poetry. I don't mean by that propaganda or speech-making. I mean poetry that addresses the condition of being here and now. It did not go out with Robert Lowell. Politics doesn't happen in foreign parts, in Poland, or in Central America, only. We sit around and talk in this country about this gap between poets and the public; maybe the fact that poetry has, in so many instances, retreated into inconsequential gobbledygook, perhaps written by one poet for another, helps explain why people aren't rushing out to buy the latest book of poems.