Paul Muldoon

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Paul Muldoon started his poetry life in Northern Ireland but the distinguished poet and now professor of poetry at Princeton University has certainly been taken into the bosom of his adopted country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and last year he was made poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. He's won almost every major prize in the poetry world, too numerous to mention. He's been called 'a force of nature' by the Irish Times, and 'the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War' by the TLS. He's here in Wellington with me now in a little old studio at New Zealand Radio. Welcome to The Book Show Paul.

Paul Muldoon: Thank you so much for having me.

Ramona Koval: And of course you're no stranger to studios like this because from 1973 to 1986 you worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC.

Paul Muldoon: I did indeed, many a happy hour waiting nervously for the line to come through, waiting nervously when it went down for it to come up again. Exciting times.

Ramona Koval: So what were you doing then, and where did the poetry fit in?

Paul Muldoon: You know, the poetry fitted in as it has fitted in when I was a teenager, as it had fitted in when I was a university student, it fitted in I suppose in the lunch hour, at the weekend, it was always something that was stolen somehow from what I was meant to be doing, and to some extent that is still the case. I'm a professor at Princeton and an administrator at Princeton, and I have to confess that there are moment when I'm meant to be writing some important memo or a deeply significant email, as they all of course tend to be, when actually I take a little time out and write a line or two of poetry, so most of it written on the fly. I'm making a virtue of necessity. I've always, as most poets do, had a job really to keep body and soul together.

Ramona Koval: So poetry isn't a job?

Paul Muldoon: It's a job but the fact of the matter is that directly for sure it's not a particularly high paying job. One really needs to be doing something else in terms of making a living, although I have to say that in some sense I suppose I've been very fortunate in that the fact that I wrote poetry along the way did in fact bring me into my job in the BBC in a roundabout way...

Ramona Koval: How?

Paul Muldoon: In the sense that I'd published by first book when I was still a student at Queens University Belfast and I'd gone into the local BBC station for an interview a bit like this, and then there was a review of my book, so there was some sense in that very small community that I might have written a poem or two, so that when I applied for a job in the BBC there was some faint sense that I might in some minor way fit into that long tradition of the poets who, in Dylan Thomas' phrase, had run away to the BBC. He said once, 'In olden times poets ran away to sea, now they run away to the BBC.'

So there was a great tradition of poets who were involved as radio producers, and most immediately in the Northern Irish context, two wonderful poets, WR Rodgers, and then somewhat better known, Louis MacNeice, who had of course worked as a radio producer. So there was something of a history there. And I suppose the fact of the matter after that is that I would have gotten my job as a teacher, and predominantly in Princeton University, the university with which I've been most associated, I suppose because of my poetry. So in that sense maybe there is a direct relationship. But usually we have to do something else to earn a crust, and that's probably not a bad thing.

Ramona Koval: Did the work you did as a radio producer feed the poetic mind, or did the concentration on sound do anything for the poetic ear?

Paul Muldoon: You know, it's very hard to judge that but I suspect it did, and I suspect that one impact it had as I wrote my radio scripts, I was very conscious, for example, of the requirement that the words coming through the speaker in someone's home must be immediately accessible. One cannot turn back the page in this medium, one has to make sense immediately, one has to connect immediately. And while some of my poems...I suppose, it is the case that some of them are a little bit more difficult to take in and perhaps don't announce themselves immediately, the fact of the matter of is that I think they're all setting out to be immediately or immediately-ish accessible. I'm certain that that was something that was influenced by the many years I spent as a radio producer and presenter to some extent.

Ramona Koval: What sort of programs did you make?

Paul Muldoon: I made programs about the arts in Ireland, a wide range of programs, in BBC conventions we made documentaries, we made feature programs. I'm not sure if that notion is available here; programs, in other words, that have a narrator but they involve actors and sound effects, they're partly dramatised. We made lots of magazines programs, review programs of films, books, exhibitions, theatre events, book programs like this one, short stories, poetry programs, a wide, wide range of programs on radio predominantly, and then a little bit of television towards the end, films about various aspects of the arts in Ireland.

Ramona Koval: So you swam in it.

Paul Muldoon: I did and I loved it. I did it for 13 years. After a while though, it has to be said, particularly when I went into television, I realised, as anyone who works in television I think will testify, that television in particular is an even more demanding business. One is much more at the mercy of everything, from the whereabouts of a contributor to the weather, and I used to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about whether or not it was going to rain the next day. And frankly, although it exercised me and though I loved it and I miss various aspects of broadcasting, the truth of the matter is that it really took all my time. I realised, for better or worse, that I probably wouldn't have even the lunchtime, even the little odd stolen moment, very, very hard to find in the television business. A wonderful business if that is one's main interest in life, but if one has other interests, as I did, a little bit more difficult.

Ramona Koval: Let's hear some of the things you've written in your stolen moments. First a poem from the newest book Horse Latitudes. Why is it called Horse Latitudes?

Paul Muldoon: Horse Latitudes is a term that refers to the area a few degrees both north and south of the equator where, in the sailing era when sailing ships were more a matter of course than they are now, where ships would become becalmed, an area sometimes known as the doldrums, to be in the doldrums.

Ramona Koval: Is that what it means? I never knew where it came from.

Paul Muldoon: Yes, and apparently there's some arguments of course as to where precisely the term arose, but one theory has to do with the fact that when the ship became becalmed they would throw the poor horses overboard to save a bit of water...

Ramona Koval: As ballast.

Paul Muldoon: I think that may have been a component. They would have been drinking some of their water supplies. For whatever the reason, it was an area where it was rather dangerous to be a horse. That's certainly one way of thinking about it. One of the applications, the way of thinking about this title for the book had to do with the fact that I suppose over the last few years in my adopted homeland, the USA, there was a sense that we were somewhat in the doldrums, the political doldrums I suppose one would say, a strong sense of that pervading the book. And also I might say something of that sense coming across from the Irish context also where we were in a kind of waiting room.

So this is a poem that's set in Ireland and I suppose a poem that to some extent is exhibiting something of the very stasis that I'm referring to, something of that very aspect of one step froward, two steps back, or two steps forward, one step back, it's hard to know some days. The form of the poem, where we're involved in a certain amount of repetition, is an indicator of that, of somehow this poem itself being in the doldrums. So, a few sections from it, The Old Country.

[reading from Where every town was a tidy town... to ...every resort was a last resort.]

And it continues in that vein.

Ramona Koval: It's very, very wonderful, it's very amusing. Was it fun to write?

Paul Muldoon: You know what? I think it was almost too much fun to write, which is a problem, and I rather got carried away just by the momentum of the poem and the fact that there was such amusement to be had in the midst of all these truisms, all these rather worn phrases, these clichés indeed, that in a strange way are at the...we look down on the cliché but the fact of the matter is that we spend...

Ramona Koval: 'The fact of the matter', you use that quite a lot actually.

Paul Muldoon: Where every fact is the fact of the matter, every resort was a last resort, every runnel was a Rubicon, every cut was a cut to the quick, every slope was a slippery slope, and so on.

Ramona Koval: Fantastic! It is wonderful.

Paul Muldoon: It was actually addictive, and of course on one hand I do rather like the idea that poetry should engage in a little bit of humour or at least may engage in a little bit of humour, there are many people who feel, I suppose, that poetry should somehow should eschew humour, that it should be much more solemn. I myself don't fall into that category, at least I enjoy the odd humorous poem, both as a reader and a writer.

Ramona Koval: The structure of that poem...what would that be referred to as? Is it a sonnet?

Paul Muldoon: Yes, it's a sequence of sonnets, and there is a component here whereby the last line of each of them is picked up in the first line of the next. Actually it's a device that I think may have traced back partly to my heritage in terms of the poetic inheritance of the Gaelic poetic tradition. We see it a little bit in the Welsh tradition and the Bardic tradition and both cultures, where there was a particular device known as a 'cangle', which is a way of...it means something like a connection, something that's used to bring together various elements. So a spansil, something like that, maybe even a yoke. So it's a yoking together of various components that's based on repetition, repetition of course being one of the major components in poetry, as it is, by the way, I notice even in the news report at the top of the hour there, I noticed that there was a politician who was complaining about prime Minister Rudd, 'He does not have the courage, he does not have the compassion, he does not have the integrity.' The politician, as much as the poet, is very, very adept and very sensitive to the impact, the power of repetition.

Ramona Koval: So that's a bit of spin doctoring, but it must have also been to have the function of reminding people of long poems that they had to remember by heart.

Paul Muldoon: There was that component absolutely, just on the most practical of levels, these poems written in the aural or oral tradition, they were an early form of radio show, one would say. They were broadcast to the, of course, slightly smaller audience, but they were broadcast nonetheless, and they were recited from memory. And of course as a little aid memoir, as a little mnemonic, very useful...one of the reasons why rhyme is a component also in much poetry.

Ramona Koval: You once said that you were not using language so much as being used by it. Do you remember that? I hope you do...

Paul Muldoon: Yes, I do.

Ramona Koval: I can explain it a bit more but...and I wonder whether you could talk about this specifically in relation to such deliberate structuring.

Paul Muldoon: Certainly it does seem strange that one would, on one hand, talk about being used by the language rather than using it, but I think that's a phenomenon that many of us are familiar with, actually. Even if we're not necessarily writing poems, we may be sitting (even in this era) to write a letter or an email, and we may have a sense of what we might want to include in the body of that text. The fact is I think we all experience that sense that the thing has got away from us, sometimes actually with tragic results.

Ramona Koval: You press the 'send' button too early.

Paul Muldoon: ...with tragic results.

Ramona Koval: Have you had a tragic result like that?

Paul Muldoon: One or two perhaps, one or two, what can I say? You know, one certainly needs to be very mindful of...the email phenomenon is a very strange one, I have to say, for all sorts of reasons. Yes, I do try to...it's hard for me as a poet, actually, to be involved in email because I'm so used to taking so long to write a sentence or a line that most of my emails are first of all extremely short, then of course they're written in this deathless prose, if not in verse.

Ramona Koval: Anyway, we're talking about being used by the language or using the language for such a deliberate thing as to write a poem in the traditional form.

Paul Muldoon: Yes, but what's odd about that is that having given oneself over to that, actually one is at its mercy in a strange way. It does seem sometimes as if it might be contrived, as if it might be fake in some way, as if it might be artificial, and in some sense it is. Artificiality is not necessarily such a pejorative term. We're all engaged in artifice from day to day. It's not necessarily the worst thing that we might be guilty of.

Ramona Koval: But where does risk-taking sit with the use of these tried and true structures?

Paul Muldoon: The risk-taking is involved I suppose in the sense that paradoxically, though we have given ourselves over to a structure on one hand, the fact is that we have done just that; we have given ourselves over to it. So there is built into that idea the very sense of humility and openness before the structure and before the language that means that we are actually involved in a business over which we have no control and we do not know what we're doing. That's the great paradox.

Ramona Koval: I wanted you to read another one which actually does show that you do play a bit with these structures. Do you want to tell us about Perdu?

Paul Muldoon: This is a poem called Perdu and it's written in couplets, for what it's worth, but there's also some version of that same 'cangle' that I referred to earlier on, of that same yoking as the lines come round the corner. I was sitting one night watching a production of Romeo and Juliet and I heard just out of nowhere a line I had never heard before; 'The orchard walls are high and hard to climb.' Just one of those throwaway lines of Shakespeare, so brilliant, 'The orchard walls are high and hard to climb.' And I thought there's a line of Shakespeare that's so simple and basic, let me take off from that.

[reading from The orchard walls are high and hard to climb... to ...sentinel here for a long time.]

Ramona Koval: So you broke the mould of the formal structure and gave it a bit of a twist yourself.

Paul Muldoon: In a strange way I think ideally each poem sets up its own structure, and it may not be a received or traditional structure at all. I have no particular brief for rhyme, for example, or any of the traditional shapes and forms. I'm not in the pay of the rhyme people, I'm not a spokesperson for the rhymesters. But the fact of the matter is that I do...more often than not I suppose I am somewhat predisposed to that engagement. And while I never really know what shape or what form the poem might take as we embark on it, I suppose it's fair to say that quite often I do find myself falling into these chimes and rhymes that occur naturally in the language, however much it seems to casual observers of poetry (as most observers of poetry are) that they might be imposed on the language. They're native to the language.

Ramona Koval: I didn't understand that poem completely though.

Paul Muldoon: You know, I'm not sure if I quite understand it myself. It's a strange poem. It's having to do with a sense of being left behind, 'perdu', lost, yes, and used quite specifically it seems for a person who is left behind on a battlefield. There are aspects of it I simply don't quite understand myself, however strange that seems.

Ramona Koval: It does seem strange because it sounds like you're not trying to say something in this poem.

Paul Muldoon: I suppose I'm trying to embody something of the condition of being lost. The fact is that the roots or the origins of the poem...at the end of the day I'm sure that it's an entirely successful poem but it arose from a couple of elements, one of which was my five-year-old saying to me in the way that children can so brilliantly get to the point and say something that actually Shakespeare would have loved to have been able to say, if I may suggest that, he said to me, 'Tell the buriers to bury me with you.' The buriers! Who are the buriers, for heaven's sake? We know who they are and we know nothing about them.

The 'bow and arrows Quintus...'...now that seems very strange, but however strange it seems, the fact is that three or four years ago I bought a bow and a quiver full of arrows and they were made by a man called Quintus, his name was and is Quintus and he lives in Hopewell, New Jersey. So that sounds as if it might come from outer space but it's just a statement of fact.

Ramona Koval: It just comes from New Jersey.

Paul Muldoon: Well, New Jersey is a very interesting place.

Ramona Koval: Well, The Sopranos come from there.

Paul Muldoon: You know what, I have to confess, I'm a person who's never seen a single episode of The Sopranos but I believe it's brilliant.

Ramona Koval: Do you feel a bit lost in America still?

Paul Muldoon: No more lost or found than I think writers (in so far as I would think of myself as such a thing) feel anywhere. No, actually I feel, if anything, very much at home there. I love living there. I very much enjoy my life there, I enjoy teaching at Princeton, and it's a fine place to be. There are real concerns with how the country has been run at the moment, but that is true of many countries around the world actually.

Ramona Koval: Do you think American poets are a more corporate breed than elsewhere? I'm saying that because I do.

Paul Muldoon: 'Corporate' in the sense of..?

Ramona Koval: They carry their briefcases and they have big jobs at universities and they seem to be teaching creative writing a lot. There's not a lot of 'garret' going on up there.

Paul Muldoon: You know, there is of course this sense that the living in the garret and starving...to speak of artists starving in a world in which there is so much hunger and famine, to speak metaphorically of it is almost offensive. I suppose there are some artists who are indeed in difficulties. I think one might find that that's a slightly romantic view of the ideal situation for the artist. I think while I suppose one doesn't want to become too comfortable with anything and certainly that is perhaps what lies behind this slightly romanticised idea about the artist in the garret, has to do with a realisation, which is an accurate one I think, that the artist belongs somewhere slightly on the edge of society, partly because that's where they're perceived to be, partly because it where they need to be. One would like to be able to move from the edge to the centre, bring the edge to the centre and the centre to the edge. One has to invent, I suppose, some notion of the garret, even if one is sitting in a book-lined office.

Ramona Koval: I'm not sure how the garret applies to my next question, but I suppose 'on the edge' is a bit of a concept. You've published a selection of Byron's poetry. You've chosen some Byron poems. Why Byron, the mad, bad, dangerous-to-know man?

Paul Muldoon: I've always been a fan of Byron. It goes back partly to something I was saying earlier on to do with the fact that great poetry, as in the case of Byron for sure, may be quite humorous. One of the things I love about Byron is his capacity for the hilarious line and the hilarious rhyme, often a feature of the couplet that comes at the end of so many of the stanzas in Don Juan and Beppo and so many of the other great poems. He's also a master of the actually quite touching, heart-rending shorter lyric poems. One of my favourite poems of his...there are so many, but one of them is The Destruction of Sennacherib, that poem having to do with...'The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,' and ends with that image of the horse lying dead with its 'nostril all wide', just this beautiful description of a dead horse. So Byron is great, to embark on the horse metaphor, he's great over the short distance, and he's great over the longer course.

Ramona Koval: He's a stayer as well.

Paul Muldoon: He's a stayer, he really is. He's a stayer over the grand national of poetry as well as the sprint.

Ramona Koval: I'm tossing up whether to follow up your interest in horses, which seems to be pervasive in your work as well, in your ideas, but I think I must ask you, as somebody who is trying to find special spots in the day to write poems, you got another job; poetry editor of the New Yorker. What kind of a job is this?

Paul Muldoon: It's a job that involves determining which poems might appear in the magazine.

Ramona Koval: It's a pretty powerful gatekeeper role, then. Are you feted by poets all over or do find them lurking in alleys trying to beat you up?

Paul Muldoon: You know, I don't think of it as being a gatekeeper job, I really don't...

Ramona Koval: But it is.

Paul Muldoon: Let's think of the gate; if it is a gate it's an open gate, it really is. I'm much more interested in having wonderful poems come in rather than keep poems out, though the fact of the matter is that I suppose, as you suggest, that one does include the other. It has to be said that I would much prefer to be calling up a poet, as I did the other day, I called up Richard Wilbur, one of the great American poets who's been a feature and a fixture there right through my own poetic life, and say to him, 'It's a thrill to be able to accept your poem for the New Yorker.' One would much prefer to be saying that, frankly, than writing to someone or saying to someone, 'You know what? I'm really sorry but this one doesn't quite cut the mustard.'

Ramona Koval: What about the fact-checkers? Do they get to the poems?

Paul Muldoon: They do. It's one of the wonderful...I must say, one of the reasons why I took the job was that first of all I was always delighted, the few times I did get that call myself, to hear from Alice Quinn who was the poetry editor before me, that they were going to take a poem. It's one of the few calls I think...and I think if you'll ask most poets they'll agree to this, that really mean something. However blasé poets might get...even poets, for some reason, tend to become a bit blasé...however blasé they might be, they're not blasé about being published in the New Yorker and that was one of the thrills of being involved in it. So one would much prefer to be making that call to Richard Wilbur...

Ramona Koval: And the fact-checkers?

Paul Muldoon: The fact-checkers...you know, in poetry it matters that the facts are accurate. One of the delights was to have my own poems fact-checked, and sometimes making me change things, actually.

Ramona Koval: I'm amazed at that.

Paul Muldoon: No, not at all. I think a poem...I mean, obviously there are great poems where the facts are wrong that have managed to survive, but why not get it as right as one possibly can?

Ramona Koval: I'm not sure about letters to the editor; 'Dear Sir, it was blue, it wasn't azure,' or something.

Paul Muldoon: On balance, getting it right is not a bad thing and I think most poets would accept that.

Ramona Koval: Paul Muldoon, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you again.

Paul Muldoon: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Paul's latest book of poetry is Horse Latitudes published by Faber, and he's also selected a book of Byron's poems called Lord Byron, also published by Faber.

Publications

Title: Lord Byron

Publisher: Faber

Description: Poems selected by Paul Muldoon, ISBN-13 9780 5712 3663 3

Title: Horse Latitudes

Author: Paul Muldoon

Publisher: Faber

Description: ISBN-13 9780 5712 3235 2