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Fanciness and Fatality

I.

How allusive should a poem be? Should readers be helped by notes? Eliot published The Waste Land first without notes, and then with them. Empson, confronting the issue of allusiveness, wrote:

There is no longer a reasonably small field which may be taken as general knowledge. It is impertinent to suggest that the reader ought to possess already any odd bit of information one may have picked up in a field where one is oneself ignorant; such a point may be explained in a note without trouble to anybody....

Paul Muldoon may not himself be ignorant of any of the many fields (historical, philosophical, linguistic) to which he constantly alludes, but most of us, opening Horse Latitudes, his tenth volume of poems, may long for notes, and even for explanations.

The title poem is an enigmatic sonnet sequence, in which each sonnet is prefaced by a proper place name beginning with B. These titles seem to allude to battles, since we find among them such well-known battle places as Bannockburn and Bunker Hill: but where, we wonder, are Baginbun, Benburb, Badli-Ke-Serai, Bronkhorstspruit, and Bazentin? And why must all the title battles be B-battles? And what relation do the battles bear to the sonnets couched under them? With Google at hand, one can discover that Baginbun is the Wexford site of the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170, Benburb is the Armagh site of a victory of the Irish over the Scotch in 1646, Badli-Ke-Serai (near Delhi) is the site of a battle during the India Mutiny, Bronkhorstspruit is the South African location of a battle in 1880 in the First Boer War, and Bazentin is one of the Somme battle places in World War I. Even when one recognizes familiar place names in the titles (Beijing, Burma, Beersheba), one may not know the battle being summoned up (at Beersheba, for instance, the Allies defeated the Turks of the Ottoman Empire in 1917).

The principal dramatis personae in these opening sonnets of Horse Latitudes are a speaker and his woman companion, named Carlotta (who, in another poem, points out that her name is an anagram for "oral tact," or, as she puts it, "oral fucking tact"). They seem to be staying at the Vanderbilt Hotel in Nashville. Carlotta's dead grandfather is the third character in the sonnets. In the Army, he had to do awful things to pack-mules, such as cutting out their vocal cords so that their bray could not give away the position of the troops. (The grandfather was also a grammatical purist and aphorist, likely at any moment to correct Carlotta's placing of an adverb or to announce that the most insidious kind of censorship is self-censorship.) The speaker and Carlotta seem to inhabit the doldrums or "horse latitudes" (the 30th to 35th parallels) of middle age. (The latitudes were so named because sailors becalmed there were said to have thrown their horses overboard to save water.) Nashville falls within the horse latitudes, and so does Bermuda, where Muldoon is later found in this volume. Perhaps Bermuda is the cause of all the battles beginning with B?

I quote one of the sonnets of Horse Latitudes ("Beersheba") to give an idea of what the Muldoon style sounds like when it is resisting intelligibility:

Now summoned also the young Turk
who had suddenly arisen
from that great pile of toot, heehaw,
as from one of Beersheba's wells.
Like the sail that all of a sudden swells
or the yawl that all of a sudden yaws,
a wind finding meaning in a mizzen
and toppling a bouncy castle.
Her grandfather fain to wrastle
each pack mule to a rubber mat
whereat ... whereat ... whereat ... whereat ... whereat ...
he would eftsoons get down to work,
reaching into its wide-open wizen
while a helper clamped back its jaws.

We find here familiar Muldoon turns: the arbitrary title (the individual poems in Muldoon's 1990 sequence "Madoc" bore the names of philosophers, scientists, and so on); the historical allusions; the jokey language (from Spenserian "eftsoons" to Wild West "wrastle"); the slang ("toot" for "dung"); the interpolated low-style commentary phrase ("heehaw," and the poet as mule -- Muldoon's second volume was called Mules); the puns and the sonic play ("the yawl that yaws"); the glance at contemporary absurdity, here the inflatable structures put up for children's parties ("a bouncy castle"); the break in syntax (the repetitive "whereats," which I suppose call up the successively mutilated mules); and the indistinct connection of all these to the historical battle of Beersheba or to the relations between the speaker and Carlotta. This sonnet (like its eighteen companions) rhymes in the "concealed" manner characteristic of Muldoon: the rhymes of the first three lines (Turk, arisen, heehaw) match the rhymes of the last three lines (work, wizen, jaws), while inside these brackets, three couplets ("wells/swells"; "castle/wrastle"; and "mat/whereat") sit next to two lines (ending in "yaws" and "mizzen") that rhyme with members of the first and last tercets.

Nothing exhilarates this poet more than an elaborate scheme that both provokes and confines the words or the rhymes that will fill it out. In the poem "The Birth," from 1994, the alphabet offers such a scheme: the things the poet's about-to-be-born daughter will find in the world are "apple-blossoms and chanterelles and damsons and eel-spears/and foxes and the general hubbub/of inkies and jennets and Kickapoos with their lemniscs/or peekaboo-quiffs of Russian sable/and tallow-unctuous vernix, into the realm of the widgeon -- /the 'whew' or 'yellow-poll,' not the 'zuizin.'" Various lengthy rhyme schemes pervade Muldoon's volumes, many so complex that the reading eye does not perceive them. Then again, the containing scheme can be an acrostic, as when the initial letters of the poem "Capercaillies" in the 1990 volume Madoc spell out "Is this a New Yorker poem or what?"

One thing that can be said for Horse Latitudes is that nobody else writes like this. Muldoon has made an unmistakable style for himself, in both short poems and long. From the beginning, he has added to the lyrics of each volume a more elaborate longer poem, sometimes narrative and sometimes lyric. Horse Latitudes follows this pattern: its long closing poem is also an elegy, the three-part "Sillyhow Stride," written in aba tercets that on the page resemble Dante's underworld terza rima. ("Sillyhow" is an archaic word for "caul," which Muldoon later applies to his dying sister's oxygen mask; the poet is perhaps to be thought of in "Sillyhow Stride" as playing stride piano.) The elegy commemorates the composer-pianist-singer Warren Zevon, dead of mesothelioma, and Muldoon's younger sister Maureen, vanquished, like Muldoon's mother, by metastasized uterine cancer.

Muldoon's long poems, "Sillyhow Stride" included, are always a breakneck cinematic unreeling of truth, fiction, journeys, crossed plots, snapshots, memories, illustrations, quotations, and allusions. They can be tiresome or exhilarating, depending on how well their glittering surface coordinates with the momentum pulsating underneath it. Lamenting the undoing of youthful dazzle, "Sillyhow Stride" sketches Zevon's descent into alcohol and drugs, his struggle against addiction, his re-addiction, and ultimately his premature death. It intercuts its progress, as it scans Zevon's life, not only with slang, rock terms, and Zevon song-titles ("excitable boy") but also with phrase after phrase from the poetry of Donne, as though only Donne offers words reckless enough for a life lived at the edge and intense enough to convey simultaneous love and dread:

Two graves must hide, Warren, thine and mine corse ...

The alcoholic
knows that to enter in these bonds

is to be free, yeah right....

O wrangling schools that search what fire
shall burn this world ...

had none the wit unto this knowledge to aspire,

that this your fever, the fever that still turns
the turntable, might be it?

The poem goes on in this allusive fashion even to its end, even to the turkey buzzards (ornithologically, Cathartes aura) who, hovering over carrion, ascend after their grisly meal through the rooms and bars where Zevon drank and played the piano:

turkey buzzards waiting for you to eclipse and cloud them
with a wink

as they hold out their wings and of the sun his working
vigor borrow
before they parascend through the Viper Room or the
Whisky A Go Go,
each within its own "cleansing breeze," its own Cathartes aura.

In his poem for Zevon and Maureen, Muldoon is, far more than in the sonnets of Horse Latitudes, at pains to make his lines intelligible -- not "accessible" (that favorite American vulgarity) but clear, even while studding his page with the names of friends, technical music terms, quotations from Donne, and glimpses of current horrors ("child soldiers from the Ivory Coast or Zaire"). He explains, at least implicitly, whatever he cites from his encyclopedic reading and his equally encyclopedic memory. For instance, in his indescribably savage elegy for Maureen, called "Turkey Buzzards," Muldoon makes use of, but also explains for the reader, the fact (I quote the Cornell Bird Guide) that the turkey buzzard "often defecates on its own legs, using the evaporation of the water in the feces to cool itself down." With the grim and jesting nihilism (the aggressive face of sorrow) that governs the poem, Muldoon speaks of

the nifty,
nay thrifty, way

these buzzards are given to stoop
and take their ease
by letting their time-chastened poop
fall to their knees

till they're almost as bright with lime
as their night roost....

"Turkey Buzzards" owes something to the lurid satisfactions of Baudelaire's "La Charogne," but Muldoon's poem of carrion has a wild terseness absent from Baudelaire's meditation. To Muldoon, the turkey buzzard stands in for art, as it beautifully soars over life and then stoops to consume it. (The Cornell Bird Guide again: "Although it has an ugly, bare-skinned face, the Turkey Vulture is beautiful on the wing. Seldom does this graceful and talented bird flap its wings as it soars over large areas searching for carrion.")

Muldoon begins the striking elegy for Maureen with a view of two circling buzzards. (A total wheel of buzzards would amount, as he sees things, to a hellish parody of the Dantesque and Eliotic "multifoliate rose"; these buzzards are merely two petals of that rose):

They've been so long above it all,
those two petals
so steeped in style they seem to stall
in the kettle

simmering over the town dump
or, better still,
the neon-flashed, X-rated rump
of fresh roadkill....

We see things from the greedy point of view of the vulture as it descends on a corpse:

trying ... to get to grips
with the grommet
of the gut, setting its tinsnips
to that grommet.

But the poet's dying sister is now the envisaged subject of the birds' zest for fresh meat. Could she, Muldoon bitterly wonders, take the vulture's "blissful" point of view and perceive that elegy is every poet's favorite genre?

it's hard to imagine, dear Sis,
why others shrink
from this sight of a soul in bliss,
so in the pink

from another month in the red
of the shambles....

The viciousness of the poet's dissection finally turns on the buzzards themselves, as they take infection from a corpse and learn at last, like all artists, their own mortality, realizing in the end that their aesthetic disengagement has removed them from warm proximity to life. The buzzards have now to give up soaring in style over "the thick scent/of death":

buzzards getting the hang at last
of being stripped

of their command of the vortex
while having lost
their common touch, they've been so long
above it all.

Sardonic in grief, "Turkey Buzzards" is the most anguished poem in Horse Latitudes, a volume suffused by the losses accompanying middle age. (Muldoon, who published his first book as a precocious youngster in 1973, is now fifty-five.)

Indeed, the first sonnet of Horse Latitudes announces diminished expectations: "For now our highest ambition/was simply to bear the light of the day/we had once been planning to seize." Many of Muldoon's earlier volumes contained poems of adventurous seizing, but his current pieces tend toward generational sadness. In a sestina called "The Last Time I Saw Chris," he knows that he and his friends are passing

from an era in which we were all still relatively sound
in wind and limb to an era of night sweats, gasps, and pants,
... now threatening to tar
all of us, straight or gay, with the same brush, the god who oversaw
our not knowing of him yearning now to mete

out retribution....

That is the gist of the elegy for Chris, but the poem would not be Muldoonish unless a salient flourish were to inscribe, into the recipe for grief, some dash of the demotic. The third line that I quoted above actually begins with one of the two slangy interpolations -- "for crying out loud" and "for the love of Mike" -- that recur in alternating stanzas throughout the poem:

night sweats, gasps, and pants,
for the love of Mike, now threatening to tar
all of us....

The other interpolation, in one of its appearances, had entered a recommendation that a condom be used in sex: "No monkey/business without an overcoat, for crying out loud."

Muldoon, who once called himself (in a sequence dropped from his Collected Poems) "The Prince of the Quotidian," brings in such colloquial interpolations (including, as we've seen earlier, "heehaw") as one of his forms of refrain, tethering the poem to the mundane. Unlike Yeats, who regularly alternated between princely seriousness and quotidian speech, between "aristocratic" poems and earthy ballads, Muldoon refuses to sequester one plane of English (or one plane of personal response) from another. It is this refusal that makes his elegies for Maureen and Warren Zevon so unnerving, as they zoom up and down the scale of intimacy and distance.

II.

Muldoon dislikes saying things "straight." For him, that seems boring (and even unnatural in a poet). But nothing could be more "straight" -- and also cunning -- than his self-portrait here as an "outlier" ("something separated or distanced from the rest"). Earlier in Horse Latitudes, Muldoon remarked that as a child his father sat on a bench "at the end of a lane marked by two white stones." In the minimalist autobiography "The Outlier," the stones have become the speaker's parents. (Necessary notes: Muldoon was born in Northern Ireland in June 1951; the "Fomorians" mentioned in the poem, original nature gods of Ireland, were sometimes said to have only one eye.) "The Outlier" rhymes in immobile fashion on "one-eyed" words (all formed on the single template "vowel + n"). In each of its two parts, the stanzas gradually "grow" from two lines to three to four to five, enacting the process by which nurture distorts an already distorted nature:

I

In Armagh or Tyrone
I fell between two stones.

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
I fell between two stones.

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones.

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones
that raised me as their own.


II

I had one eye, just one,
they prised and propped open.

I had one eye, just one,
they prised and propped open
like a Fomorian's.

I had one eye, just one,
they prised and propped open
like a Fomorian's
with a fire-toughened pine.

I had one eye, just one,
they prised and propped open
like a Fomorian's
so all I looked upon
would itself turn to stone.

This eerie poem, recounting a step-by-step growth of awareness, shows stony parents creating a child version of their own stoniness. In time, the stoniness develops from an inward condition into an outward-reaching blight. Unable not to look at his surroundings, with his perpetually propped-open eye (the eye of culture which has cruelly supervened on that of nature), the adult sees the organic world itself turning to stone around him.

Muldoon's moving minimalism of structure and rhyme in "The Outlier" is the other pole to the gigantism of his long poems. Other minimalist poems in his new book are less successful. It was inevitable, I suppose, that when instant-messaging became possible, Muldoon would write instant messages. In "90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore," Muldoon (apparently on holiday in Bermuda) assimilates instant-messaging to aba rhymed haiku, and addresses his messages to Tom Moore, the Irish song-writer, who himself spent the year of 1803 in the "horse latitudes" of Bermuda. Muldoon's instant messages have their moments, but mostly their wit seems labored, as in this Heraclitean haiku:

Hamilton. Tweeds? Tux?
Baloney? Abalone?
Flux, Tom. Constant flux.

And by the end of Muldoon's sojourn in the doldrums, the haiku have become tautologically bleak, their monorhyme the equivalent of deadness:

Completely at odds.
We're now completely at odds.
Completely at odds.

In each of his volumes, the clever Muldoon, known for his cleverness, somewhere lets his full ingenuity loose in a tightly formed longer lyric: here, that poem is "The Old Country," a satiric sonnet sequence on Ireland (which actually has a contest every year for the best "tidy town"). The sequence is a linked "corona" (a "wreath" form used by Donne among others) in which the last line of sonnet I is the first of sonnet II, and so on. (Muldoon competitively does the form twice over in this single poem.) "The Old Country" explodes the clichés of Irish utterance, using as its template "Every x was a y." The poet has left the old sod, where in the past a "half" (a half-pint of beer) could be had cheap, in the old coinage, and the diet did nothing for one's health. It was a country

Where every town was a tidy town
and every garden a hanging garden.
A half could be had for half a crown.
Every major artery would harden

since every meal was a square meal.

The formal template is maintained with high spirits and a profusion of meanings, exposing the dolorous upshot of everything in Ireland, from roadworks to diction, from sex to architecture:

Every start was a bad start ...
Every major road had major roadworks ...
Every resort was a last resort ...
Every lookout was a poor lookout ...
Every ditch was a last ditch ...
Every boat was a burned boat ...
Every cut was a cut to the quick ...
Every hope was a forlorn hope ...
Every slope was a slippery slope.

The poem ends as it began, in that Muldoon-forsaken country where, for the young,

every dance was a last dance
and every chance a last chance
and every letdown a terrible letdown
from the days when every list was a laundry list
in that old country where, we reminisced,
every town was a tidy town.

Although he has lived in the United States for years, and is married to an American, Muldoon remains irremediably Irish, as are many of his poems and much of his prose; but, as the ironic observer that he is, he takes an angled and quizzical stance toward his country of origin, as toward almost everything else.

III.

Critics have found Muldoon useful as an example of post-this and post-that (post-colonialism and postmodernism, mostly); but he is both too mercurial and too traditional to be so easily confined and defined. He looks more often backward than forward, and delights in tracking today back not only into yesterday, but into yesteryear and yester-era, as he does here in a charming shaggy-dog poem called "Tithonus." (Tithonus, the subject of a famous elegiac poem by Tennyson, was the youth given immortality by the gods in answer to the plea of his beloved, the goddess of the dawn, who forgot to add eternal youth to her request; she remained forever young, while Tithonus declined into a chirping grasshopper.) Muldoon, trying to identify a strange sound in his house, recalls, in a single long back-tracking sentence, various possible noises associated with a grandmother, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-grandmother only to realize, with delight in being part of an even more ancient story, that the sound is "the two-thousand-year-old chirrup/ of a grasshopper." Although it could be said that the comic succession of ancestral sounds is an example of eclectic postmodernism, it could equally well be argued that Muldoon, in joining his poem to Greek myth, to Milton's cricket on the hearth, to Keats's grasshopper, and to Tennyson's "Tithonus," is sustaining an uninterrupted tradition.

Although Muldoon has had post-colonial moments, many of his poems remain entirely within a rural Irish horizon unconscious of England. Of the many poems in Horse Latitudes that track a story back in time, the Irish poem "Eggs" is the most painfully memorable. It recalls a family anecdote kept "hush-hush" in the house, a story about Muldoon's maternal grandmother, who used to bicycle in from Cullenramer to the market in Dungannon with a dozen fresh eggs to sell, eggs she had scoured into whiteness with a potash rag. (Every other stanza contains the word "eggs"; others contain the phrase "hush-hush," the two repeated insertions summing up the story.) One day the egg seller disgraced herself in drink at the market, using up her indispensable egg money, and was brought unceremoniously home in a farmer's truck:

It would be midnight when my mother's mother got back

from Dungannon, now completely smashed
on hard liquor bought with hard cash,
fuck you, cash on the barrel. It was all hush-hush

as she was taken from a truck
painted matter-of-factly milk & eggs
into which they'd bundled her, along with her bike,

for delivery to Cullenramer. It would be all hush-hush
next morning in the whitewashed
scullery where she wrung out the potash

rag and took it to another dozen or so new-laid eggs.

What else was the young housewife to do the next morning but bend once more under the yoke to which she had yesterday said "fuck you"? The poet leaves it to our imagination to picture her having to present herself again in the market where the "hush-hush" gossip would center on her humiliation of the night before. Muldoon -- ever the master of distancing himself while involving himself -- frames, fore and aft, this unbearable vignette of a past family scandal with a comically rendered Proustian moment of his own. The eggs he is unpacking at home in New Jersey remind the poet of his grandmother's disastrous fall from grace, which he sets about resurrecting in his imagination:

I was unpacking a dozen eggs
into the fridge when I noticed a hairline crack
at which I pecked

till at long last I squeezed
into a freshly whitewashed
scullery in Cullenramer.

As Muldoon ends the poem, he links his grandmother's past to his own present: his chastened grandmother takes up the potash rag once more, applying it

to another dozen or so new-laid eggs,
from any one of which I might yet poke
my little beak.

The appeal of the anecdote to the poet is precisely that it is "hush-hush," whispered within the family, never referred to aloud; the poet pokes into any crack where obscured stories lie, since it is part of the vocation of the writer to unveil prudishly covered-up actualities. But the voyeurism of the storyteller, like the airy superiority of the turkey buzzards to their prey, will perhaps go before a fall, a crack in the smooth whiteness of the egg.

His youth in Northern Ireland may account for Muldoon's sense that art and violence are inextricably connected. In the excellent poem "Medley for Morin Khur," the wherewithal for art's instrument (the morin khur is a Mongolian violin) is seen to come from the death of horses:

The sound box is made of a horse's head.
The resonator is horse skin.
The strings and bow are of horsehair.

As the poem ends, the call of the violin

may no more be gainsaid
than that of blood kin to kin
through a body-strewn central square.

A square in which they'll heap the horses' heads
by the heaps of horse skin
and the heaps of horsehair.

The grotesque abundance of violin supplies from bloody Mongolian massacres is shaming to the artist, although he will, we know, scavenge a skull here, some skin there, some horsehair elsewhere, and begin to fabricate his morin khur. This is a poem stemming, at least in part, from the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, but its Mongolian setting, so far afield, makes it resonate through other countries, other conflicts, other "body-strewn" central squares.

Everyone has recognized (and some have criticized) Muldoon's investment in all forms of language -- foreign, archaic, local, dialectical, learned, recherché. In one of the poems in his new book, Muldoon is taking his son to see the site of his parents' house in Ireland. The poet's love of the English language generates a comic refrain reiterating the poem's title and referring to the poet's ancestors: "At least they weren't speaking French." The sheer number of words in modern English (by comparison with modern French) makes Muldoon's exuberant linguistic variety possible: what kind of poet could he have been if the family stories had come down to him in the language of Racine? In spite of the comic refrain, all the incidents of the poet's father's family retold in the poem are dire: a tale of parental absence is followed by a tale of infant death and a tale of septicemia, and these events are framed by the almost mute existence of Irish rural parents, even in catastrophe. Such parents are astonished at the modern generation, who actually talk; they themselves would blench if they found themselves speaking aloud (in the Irish idiom, "giving out"). Nothing, no matter how terrifying ("Not the East Tyrone Brigade, not Baader-Meinhof") would have brought the suggestion of a frown

to those two mummer stones still trying to lie low,
trying to keep their mummery down
to a bare minimum, two stones that, were they to speak,
might blench
as much at their own giving out as our taking in that at least
they weren't speaking French.

Showing off as usual, Muldoon builds the whole of this thirty-six-line poem (except for its refrain "fol-de-rol fol-de-rol fol-de-rol-di-do") on three rhyme-sounds (-ench, -one, and -oth). French, bench, trench, clench, stench, wrench, and blench are, for example, the "-ench" words; and Muldoon, seeking them out one by one and writing lines around them, enjoys cramming his ancestors into this tragicomic Procrustean bed. Yet the linguistic high-jinks have not been allowed, here, to occlude feeling; Muldoon keeps both fanciness and fatality in focus. (Note: in the following passage describing Muldoon's young uncle dying from septicemia, "sowans" or "flummery" is a food made from the husks of oats):

At least they weren't speaking French
when another brother, twenty-something, stepped on a nail
no one had bothered to clench
in a plank thrown
halfheartedly from the known to the unknown

fol-de-rol fol-de-rol fol-de-rol-di-do

across a drainage ditch on a building site. His nut-brown arm.
His leg nut-brown.
That nail sheathed in a fine down
would take no more than a week or ten days to
burgeon from the froth
of that piddling little runoff

fol-de-rol fol-de-rol fol-de-rol-di-do

and make of him a green and burning tree. His septicaemia-crown.
Sowans as much as he could manage. Trying to keep that flummery
as much as any of them could manage.
However they might describe the stench,
as exhalation, as odor, at least they weren't speaking French.

A balladic nonsense refrain always implies that eventually everything subsides to story, to story retold, to story hoary with age, and to story devolving at last into unintelligible syllables. The sympathy for the dying boy and his desperate parents, the comic grotesquerie of "At least they weren't speaking French," and the detached yesteryear folk refrain constitute here that peculiar mixture of affect that characterizes the Muldoon style.

This mixture of odd emotions magnetized by a single event appears again in the sonnet "Hedge School," as the poet hears, while in Scotland, that the doctors have found a "metastasis" of Maureen's cancer, that his sister will die of the cancer that killed their mother. In the space of a moment, Muldoon's relentlessly etymological self wants to know the root of "metastasis"; his furtive ingenious self is trying to figure out how to unseal the shrink-wrap on a shop dictionary so that he can discover the Greek word's root; and his narcissistic historical self is recalling that another "Maelduin" was a bishop in St. Andrews in 673 -- while, deeper than all these, his shocked fraternal self is "lash'd with woe," as he has said earlier, quoting Shakespeare:

-- all past and future mornings were impressed

on me just now, dear Sis,
as I sheltered in a doorway on Church Street in St. Andrews
(where, in 673, another Maelduin was bishop),

and tried to come up with a ruse
for unsealing the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
back in that corner shop
and tracing the root of metastasis.

Rhyming "Sis" with "metastasis" clinches (for the poet) the possession of his sister by the disease. Words retain, for him, a literal power to confirm a fact, just as facts (the moment in a doorway, St. Andrews, Maelduin, the dictionary, the shop, metastasis) must be imaginatively fused into a single gestalt by rhyme and sonnet form. In this accurate inventory of the compulsions (autobiographical, etymological, historical) that possess him even in a moment of horror, Muldoon pitilessly clones in verse his disconcerting self.

IV.

Paul Muldoon seems to me a more convincing poet now than he was ten or fifteen years ago. Recently, while continuing to write poetry, he has been commissioned into prose. Some years ago he published To Ireland I, the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, concerning Irish poetry and organized in an alphabetical scheme from "Amergin" to "Zozimus," and then, as professor of poetry at Oxford, he delivered the fifteen lectures on individual poems that are now collected into The End of the Poem. Muldoon is a bizarre critic, a shape-shifter. He turns every poet he considers into some version of himself.

To his mind, a poet is one who creates an extravagantly odd chain of allusions, puns, phonetic links, mutations among words, crypto-etymologies, and so on. Muldoon became notorious for saying in an essay, about Robert Frost's "The Silken Tent," that "I cannot but, can't but, hear a 'cunt' in the silken tent." In an equally far-fetched way, he remarks here of Arnold's withdrawing Sea of Faith in "Dover Beach": "The word 'withdrawing' occurs just one line before the word 'retreating,' and I want to propose that this near-redundancy may represent a little nub of indeterminacy which may be an indicator of a subliminal presence in the word 'withdrawing.' The presence is that of Darwin, a version of whose name is found in 'withdrawing.'" This sort of untenable inference is dear to Muldoon, unprovable and unlikely as it is. He makes pro forma apologies for his inferences, but he cannot let go of them.

He especially likes to provide extended commentaries on words that do not appear in the poem under discussion, but to which he wants to grant "a subliminal presence." In his lecture on Yeats's "All Souls' Night," the two such words proposed by Muldoon (but not present in the poem) are "lees" and "cork." Yeats, because it is the night of the dead, has set out two glasses of wine, hoping that some ghost will come to keep him company, but reminding himself that any ghost that may come will find it sufficient to "drink from the wine-breath/While our gross palates drink from the whole wine." Muldoon, proceeding via Keats's "emptying some dull opiate to the drains" in the "Ode to a Nightingale," says,

[There exists] a synonym for the "drains" in what has been "emptied ... to the drains," a term which, in his simultaneous recognition of, and resistance to, its appropriateness, would have presented Yeats with a problem. The term is "lees," which Webster's defines as "dregs, grounds, residue," and it's an indicator of what lies under the surface of these lines which centre on his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees.

In the Yeats poem there is no suggestion of anything being drained to the dregs (nobody in fact touches the wine). There are no lees, there is no mention of Georgie Hyde-Lees being with the poet (the second glass of wine having been set out for the hoped-for ghostly visitor), and the "our" has to do with human beings' way of drinking, by contrast with the more ethereal and ecstatic inhaling proper to ghosts:

It is all Souls' Night.
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost's right
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine

After naming the possible dead friends who might come, in ghost form, to join him at the table, Yeats concludes,

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole wine.

Continuing his commentary on this passage, Muldoon wants to make a further suggestion, which will, he says,

strike some as being totally off-the-wall, but which falls into a way of reading which I find useful.... It has to do with being alert to another resisted usage -- a word, like "lees," which simply does not find its way onto the page but which is central to a poem that is prefaced by the opening of a bottle of wine. The word I'm thinking of is "cork," and it's a word that would have been much in Yeats's mind ... given that the mayor of the city of Cork ... had died in Brixton Prison only a few days earlier.

All of Muldoon's lectures depend on this sort of giddy non-referential referentiality, in which a spool of possible resonances unwinds backward as far as possible from the (often absent) word where it began. He loves the possibility that "Nomen est omen," as he says in a jocular passage:

Now, I know that this kind of reading may sometimes seem ... a little fiddle-headed, but what can I do? I'm sitting at a desk I acquired from the gentleman who looks after surplus furniture at Princeton. His name is Sam Formica. On the desk are two books. One is The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. The other is Archie G. Walls's Geometry and Architecture in Islamic Jerusalem. An Archie Walls who specializes in Islamic architecture, including "the great horseshoe arch" ... a Pollan who specializes in pollination, a Formica who oversees formica? It's humorous in a parlour-gamish way, in the Nomen est omen mode I'm fond of playing with.

These lectures -- provocative, often amusing, sometimes even true -- prompt the question of how fond of such "parlour games" the authors of the poems might have been. Such a question does not bother Muldoon, who, believing that the reader always personally recreates a poem, recasts these poems in his own image. Sometimes the process enlivens the poem, sometimes not. Muldoon's most interesting lectures are those on Frost, Bishop, and Lowell, poets he has admired for many years. (Not that these lectures are devoid of the arcane Muldoonian cryptography: "The fact that ... 'élan' [is] to be found in 'Ireland' is not without its reason.... It is that Henri Bergson was of Irish extraction, both his parents being Irish-Jewish.")

But the more attractive things in The End of the Poem are Muldoon's general statements about the art of poetry, which spring up irrepressibly in the midst of his whimsical commentaries. These reflections remind readers of truths not often enunciated:

One may scan the poem as a shape on the page, taking in aspects of its geometry, well before one embarks on what we think of as a conventional line-by-line reading.... Another of the unlikely, generally overlooked, aspects of reading a poem has to do with the intermittent quality of our reading, so that having begun it, and proceeded a little into it, one may now leap back to the beginning, now again leap forward.

In the lecture on Bishop's prose poem "12 O'Clock News," Muldoon remarks: "Yet another sense of the phrase ['the end of the poem'] I'll be focusing on ... is that of the precise location of the surface of the poem, particularly when there seems to be a discrepancy between the surface and the subterranean -- what we generally term 'irony.'" And in his discussion of Stevie Smith, he announces a theory of poetry as ventriloquism that perfectly suits his own ever-ironic poetics: "A female poet is remembering a male speaker, allowing him to speak through her in the act of ventriloquism of which every single poem is an example."

He usefully surprises us (given his own torrentially allusive practice) by reflecting, in his lecture on Lowell, that although "no poem may be read as a completely discrete construct, we also know that part of the function of the poem is to present a construct that is relatively free-standing, to create a relatively squared-off stand of timber on the plain." And commenting on Montale's "The Eel," Muldoon gaily suggests that "there's a strong sense of the poem as an autonomous creature ... one which, as it bucks and bounds and comes into being under [its writer and reader], remains intact." These observations are more restorative, certainly, than those crypto-cipher-scrutinies peering at words in invisible ink between the lines of poems.

Age has deepened Muldoon's poetry, and in Horse Latitudes he has been able, in his finely maintained tightrope act, to bear aloft both grief and playfulness. He is still enamored of the absolutely arbitrary, and he may always be attracted to abstract schemes, since he belongs to that line of poets (from Herbert through Auden to Moore, Merrill, and Ashbery) who find in the most arbitrary poetic forms an entrancing stimulus to imagination and expression. For Muldoon, tragic stories in arbitrary cages make for the ultimate effect: "a gloom ... distinctly shot through with glee," unnerving for the exasperated and admiring reader, but true to the mixed motives of the serious shadowplay of art.

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