Paul Muldoon is interviewed in the issue of Valium I have here. I read some of Muldoon’s poems not too long ago. They were like dying nursery rhymes kept alive by IVs of perverted erudition. He could be ignored except for the fact that he is considered by many, and considers himself, to be a genius. He won the god damned Pulitzer!
“I don’t write these poems,” Paul says, “I really don’t. And frankly my position is that only if one accepts that notion is there a possibility of anything interesting happening.” How spiritual! I wonder if he donated the Pulitzer money to the collective unconscious. The fact that he gets so mystical about poetry betrays his con. He inflates the whole idea of poetry via circular elucidation and sophistry. It’s just poetry! It’s not going to make you a saint, it’s not going to transform human nature, it’s not going to last forever. Even our sun will burn out one day, but somehow I’m expected to believe Paul Muldoon’s acorn-filled face will hover there in space for eternity. Muldoon’s work is so weak it could never stand on its own without his velvet-voiced rhetoric, his contrived profundity. Without his education and his wool suit and his brogue, he would be laughed at as he should be.The interviewer asks Muldoon: “If you could experience what it is like to be any animal, which would you choose, and why?” Who cares what kind of animal Paul Muldoon wants to be? How is this relevant to anything? By the way, it was a hedge hog.
At one point the interviewer quotes two separate lines from Muldoon’s poetry, specifically to show him being “irreverent” and “wily and mischievous.” Here they are, so hang on:
“with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click”
“with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick”.
Holy cats! I’m not sure which is supposed to be “irreverent” and which is supposed to be “wily and mischievous.”
Later, Paul Muldoon is summed up for the dummies: “It seems one of the effects of your poetry is putting the reader in the position of an awareness that is heightened, but at the same time he or she is often insecure because he or she’s not quite sure what’s happening.” Nice spin, sycophantic interviewer! Muldoon’s poetry is cold and dead, he’s a false prophet, can’t they smell him? And now someone’s claiming Muldoon’s poetry can heighten your awareness? It can heighten your awareness of stinko verse, maybe.
At one point the interviewer asked Muldoon why he sometimes used the same word to rhyme with itself. Muldoon answered with his typical genius: “Well, I don’t know,” he said.
Me neither, Paul.
As is common when prominent poets are interviewed, there are no poems to go along with the interview. We are to assume the poet’s work is at such a high premium the journal could not afford to buy it. So, we are spared a little, after all.
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2009).
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