Irish poet Paul Muldoon - 'In Irish poetry, the great poems are songs' . Photo / Getty Images
Fresh from editing McCartney's lyrics, the great Irish poet Paul Muldoon asks what sets apart poems from songs – and shares a brand-new sonnet. By Tristram Fane Saunders.
Paul Muldoon is stumped. I've called up Ireland's most inventive poet to wish him a happy birthday – he turned 70 on June 20 – and to ask a question that he has wrestled with most of his life but still hesitates to answer: what's the difference between a poem and a song? "It's a sticky wicket," he says, mulling it over in his back garden in Sharon Springs, a small town in New York's Mohawk Valley, where he's spent lockdown. (He left Ireland for the US in 1987.)
"A poem wants to be finished, needing no extra component," he offers. "Whereas a lyric is always missing something, and that something is usually music. But you wouldn't want to stand up in front of a judge and say, 'I know what the difference is.'"
Still, if a court ever needed to call an expert on it, they might ask Muldoon. Not content with being "the most original and influential poet of the past 50 years" – in the words of Carol Ann Duffy – he is also an acclaimed lyricist, most recently for rockers Rogue Oliphant. Bruce Springsteen has covered his song My Ride's Here, and he teaches songwriting at Princeton.
Here's a snippet of his song Sidemen: "I'll be McCartney to your Lennon/ Lenin to your Marx/ Jerry to your Ben &/ Lewis to your Clark." If he ever rewrites it, he could add "Muldoon to your McCartney". He has spent the past five years working with the other Paul M on a book "as close to an autobiography" as McCartney is ever likely to write, a commentary on his songs, out in November. "We could conceivably have spent 10 years on it," he says – perhaps because they were having so much fun.
If McCartney is (as Muldoon has called him) "a major literary figure", he's one with a sense of humour: he once prank-called the poet pretending to be Donald Trump, offering to hire him as the White House "poetry czar".
The book covers 154 McCartney songs – the precise number of Shakespeare's sonnets; a coincidence, but it makes comparisons tempting. After all, Shakespeare's plays are full of songs. Who's a better songwriter – the Bard or the Beatle?
"Do you feel you have to ask that? They're both very good. We have both of them. It'd be a great headline, I know: 'McCartney better than Shakespeare', 'Dylan better than Keats'... One is not better than the other." A like-for-like comparison between singers and poets would be unfair, but so would a cast-iron divide. "The way I was taught Irish poetry – poetry in Gaelic – was often through song. And in that tradition some of the the great poems, the 'big' poems as they say, are coincidentally songs… There's no distinction, in the way there's no particular distinction between the two in, say, the work of Leonard Cohen." (He talks, admiringly, about the "pressure per square inch" in Cohen's lyrics.)
Muldoon is part of "an ad hoc group of people who are interested in writing songs" – others include acclaimed singer-songwriters Damian Rice and Maggie Rogers. "A couple of times a year we get together for a week and commit to writing something each day for seven days, off the cuff and off the radar." Last year, that week's writing turned into a poem, Plaguey Hill, which closes Muldoon's forthcoming book, Howdie-Skelp.
Partly a diary of his lockdown, it also "harkens back to the plague in Irish culture", offering a historical perspective. "At the risk of sounding offensive to the many people who have lost relatives and friends ... since we started eating bacon and eggs, these leaps across from one species to another have been a feature of our lives. So, without diminishing it or making light of it, we certainly shouldn't be so surprised by these successive pandemics that have hit us."
For Muldoon, taking a subject seriously doesn't mean rejecting humour. Even the line-breaks in Plaguey Hill tease the reader: "Jean and I have developed such a fatal" – line-break – "addiction to Boardwalk Empire". Jean is the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, his wife since 1987, who appears in the poem along with their adult children, Asher and Dorothy.
In a "somewhat punning" choice, Plaguey Hill takes the form of a sonnet corona – 15 linked sonnets, the last comprising lines from the previous 14. Compared to his usual baroque rhymed forms, that's straightforward.
"I've been thinking recently of making a definite act of will and saying, 'I'm just not going to do this any more – I'm going to write only in free verse.'" He sounds not unlike a lifelong addict vowing to go cold turkey. It would be a loss if he made good on his threat: nobody rhymes like Muldoon. As Michael Longley once quipped, the man can rhyme "cat" with "dog". (Or, as he does in a brand-new sonnet below, "knot" with "end".)
Muldoon's slant rhymes can be as disorienting as his poems, full of unlikely connections, swerves and asides. If he were writing about our conversation, he'd be sure to mention the interruptions of a delivery man, his barking dogs, somebody coming to mow the lawn, and – in a very Muldoonish coincidence – a snatch of birdsong halfway through his attempt to define "song". "Can you hear that little fellow from your side?" he asks, owlish head tilted. "A fabulous little bird which lives up round here, a house wren."
The house wren, like the house sparrow/ and the common spink ...": the title poem of his last collection, the aptly named Frolic and Detour (2019), had his fans similarly cocking their ears to a familiar song. That "-arrow" and "-ink" are the first two rhymes in a mind-bogglingly complex pattern of 90 – 90! – that have appeared in various Muldoon poems since his 1994 elegy for a former lover, Incantata, where lines in the first stanza ended on "barrow" and "pink". Put simply, the lines in one long poem rhyme with the lines in another.
Seamus Heaney (who taught him at Queen's College, Belfast, and encouraged Faber to publish his first collection when he was still a student) once worried that Muldoon's "fantastic genius … seemed intent upon short-circuiting itself". Mapping that 90-rhyme maze, it's tempting to agree. But, crucially, those -ink/-arrow poems are also some of his most moving. A staging of Incantata received rave reviews in New York last year; another -ink/-arrow elegy, for fellow poet Ciaran Carson, is a highlight of Howdie-Skelp.
He doesn't think it's meaningful to call such poems difficult – "Is there an example of a truly simple poem?" I'd suggest the short, slogan-like "Instapoems" popular on social media, but Muldoon has hopes for the medium. "It's quite conceivable that another, In a Station of the Metro [Ezra Pound's haiku-like classic] will pop up out of the Instagram world. I'd love to think of what Beckett would be up to on Instagram."
How would he respond to readers who say they struggle to understand modern poetry? "I'd say yes, I agree, it can be hard to get into. But then I find that of modern science, and modern philosophy, and modern almost everything. Should we try to simplify medicine? Should we try to simplify astrophysics? There are ways of making it simpler, but some concepts are just very hard to get one's head around.
"My view is that poetry – if it represents the world at all, it's a world of complexity. We understand so very little of the world around us. I'm looking at a tree out here. How much do I really understand about that tree? The fact is, not much. There are things that can be simplified but remain mysterious and complex – because they are."
The Mourner, by Paul Muldoon
From deep within my grave
I must have been hoping to present less of a target
to those who would make me an object of grief.
The use of ergot
to loosen the birth knot
and generally bring on labour
had also proved invaluable to hastening my end.
That silent "v" in Lefebvre
pointed to the space in which an archer might train
his ash arrow on an ash tree.
I was able to gauge this most recent arc
from the green stain
where a mourner had now gone down on one knee
the better to find his mark.
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