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Paul Muldoon – at arm’s length

Eben Harrell
The Aspen Writers Foundations Winter Words Series opens with poet Paul Muldoon speaking at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies on Saturday.
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Editor’s note: Paul Muldoon will give a reading on Saturday, Jan. 15, as part of the Aspen Writers’ Foundation Winter Words Series. Tickets are $20 and are available at the Wheeler Box Office, at the door or by calling 925-3122.My first encounter with the great Irish poet Paul Muldoon came when I was a senior in college. I was in a small Greek takeout restaurant, taking a break from writing my senior thesis. Muldoon was waiting for a gyro.I recognized him immediately – tussled hair, mischievous face, sharp, roving eyes. I smiled at him. He, in turn, asked how I was doing.”Good,” I said proudly. “I just finished the first paragraph of my thesis. It took me three hours to write.”

Here, I figured, was a poet who understood all too well the demands of great writing. Three hours for a paragraph? Nothing for a man who made his living putting language under pressure, picking words like berries, carefully, with an eye only for the perfectly ripe and juicy.”That’s terrible,” Muldoon replied in his great Irish brogue. “You’ll have to write faster than that.”He winked at me, picked up his gyro and left.This story, I think, tells all you need to know about Muldoon – his quick, unexpected sense of humor, his impish charm, his healthy irreverence. But it also shows a poet who feels most comfortable at arm’s length, who’d prefer not to commiserate or share, at least not unless it’s on his own terms.As a poet, Muldoon is a masterful craftsman. He is dauntingly well-read, articulate, free and comfortable even when writing in the most constraining forms. “The Misfits,” a poem in his latest collection “Moy, Sand and Gravel,” is a sestina, a form that has 39 lines and requires the poet to have only six words with which to end those lines. Muldoon chooses “Ostrich” as one of his six end-words. We’d accuse him of showing off if we weren’t so dazzled by his skill.Muldoon’s virtuoso performances, however, can often be frustrating for a reader searching for softer truths, for what Wordsworth called the “spontaneous overflow of feeling.” As a primary obstacle, it’s nearly impossible to get through many of his poems without a dictionary or encyclopedia.To appreciate “A Collegelands Catechism,” for example, the reader must know that William Bligh was an English captain set adrift by a mutinous crew, that Charles Blondin was a funambulist who crossed the Niagara gorge many times on a rope, that Culann was the blacksmith whose watchdog guarded the pass to Ulster, that Setanta was a mythological Irish hero who was a superhuman hurling player and that the Greek philosopher Diogenes was known as “dog” and gave his name to the Cynics, as cynic means “dog-like.”

One often wishes that Muldoon would stop playing around and get serious – and personal.But that’s not Muldoon’s style. In “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999,” Muldoon writes about family, mortality, the Holocaust, Prohibition, and the exploitation of Irish laborers in a poem set during the great floods of Hurricane Floyd, when the New Jersey canal overran its banks. While many poets would use the surging river as an excuse to let emotions flow over such serious topics, Muldoon constantly retards his lyric with jarring intrusions, heavy diction, and arcane references. This is a poet who insists on recollecting emotion in tranquillity, even as the torrents rush past him. It’s not that Muldoon is incapable of writing beautifully. He often does, as in a short poem written shortly after the birth of his son Asher:When they cut your birth cord yesterdayIt was I who drifted away.Now I hear your name (in Hebrew, “blest”)As yet another release of ballastAnd see, beyond your wicker Gondola, campfires, cities, whole continents flicker.It is telling that even in this most personal and touching poem, the poet moves further from us. He drifts away, just at the point when we feel closest to him.For poetry scholars, or for those wishing to spend an evening in the company of a charming man, this should scarcely matter. But for those who ask something more of poetry – insight, transcendence, an occasional lift from her viewless wings – Muldoon will always be holding something back.Eben Harrell’s e-mail address is eharrell@aspentimes.com