Paul Muldoon: Biography And Essay
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Oxford and Princeton University professor Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland in 1951 and has been touted as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War” by The Times Literary Supplement. He has also won numerous and prestigious national awards. Therefore, it may come as a surprise to learn that Muldoon grew up in a home with very few books. “Believe it or not,” he writes, “the only reading material we had in the house was The Junior World Encyclopedia, which I read and reread as a child. Other books must have come from the local lending library but the Encyclopedia was my text of texts.”
Muldoon, who is married with two children, has written eight volumes of poetry in addition to many chapbooks, plays and childrens books. His first collection of poems, New Weather, was published in 1973 and his most recent book, Hay, was published in 1998.
As a child, Muldoon began writing poems to get around a teachers weekly essay assignment. From there, he says, he just kept on writing. Of the process of writing, he says, “I do absolutely think of it as a mystical experience.” Muldoon is a poet who is obsessed with the details of the world, and this is evident in his poetry, particularly in the poems of his that I read.
I chose to research Paul Muldoon for no particular reason. I dont particularly like poetry; I can recognize a good and a bad poem, but I cant for the life of me write one. I prefer to say what I mean, mean what I say, and leave little room for interpretation. Sometimes I think that poets take the easy way out by writing ambiguously about dinosaurs, and then people read and think that the poet is really talking about social injustice or sending their child off to the first day of school, when in fact, the poet just really likes dinosaurs. Sometimes I think that if I wrote a simple sentence about, say, a red wheelbarrow, and chopped it up into lines and told people it was very deep, theyd be impressed.
And so thats why I chose Paul Muldoon. I read a few poems of his, could understand pretty well what they were about, liked how they sounded, and enjoyed that a respectable poet ended a line with “the.” Plus, I was running short on time.
What follows is one poem that stuck out to me and is the first poem featured in Muldoons book, Hay. An excerpt from “The Mudroom”:
We followed the narrow track, my love, we followed the
narrow
track through a valley in the Jura
to where the goats delight to tread upon the brink
of meaning. I carried my skating rink,
the folding one, plus
a pair of skates laced with convolvulus,
you a copy of the feminist Haggadah,
from last years Seder. I reached for the haggaday
or hasp over the half door of the mudroom
in which, by and by, I grasped the rim
not of a quern or a chariot wheel but a wheel
of Morbier propped like the last reel
of The Ten Commandments or The Robe.
I really enjoyed this poem. The rhythm is wobbly, and the word “narrow” standing alone is really effective in reinforcing this. I wish this poem were full of things I hate–Im much better at criticism than I am praise.
I suppose I like this poem because it seems to be where simplicity and complication collide. On the one hand, we have two lovers walking through a valley, watching wild goats, and carrying a collapsible skating rink and a pair of ice skates. Aside from the “of meaning” in the fifth line, this is pretty clear and straightforward. But as the poem goes on,