Coming home
Pulitzer prize winning poet, professor at Princeton and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon gave a keynote address at this year’s John Hewitt Summer School. The County Armagh-born poet spoke to Owen McQuade about the influence of his home county on his poetry.
It was very much a homecoming for Paul Muldoon when he attended this year’s John Hewitt Summer School held in Armagh. He was greeted by friends from school and university colleagues in the large audience that came along to hear the locally-born poet. “I left when I was 35 and walking around these streets, here in the middle of Armagh, they are charged for me. I went to school here, I mitched off on a Wednesday afternoon and tracked these streets,” relates Muldoon.
The poet still feels a connection with this part of the world: “As I drive around I still recognise every hole in the hedge and feel very close to this place. Much has changed, and changed for the better. They have made a real effort to tidy up Armagh. The place is not at the back of my mind, it’s more the middle of the mind. I would have gone to the cinema here and both of the Cathedrals, etched in some kind of way. Yes, it is home,” observes Muldoon.
“Having said that, I will have lived in America for the following 30 years, so I’m getting there also in a sense of home. That’s where my wife and kids are, in New York. I’m a great believer in multiplicity. There are animals that cover huge distances in their day to day lives. Whales or birds that fly from one pole to the other. If you asked me where home was I would say something akin to the humming bird that comes from Mexico to the north Eastern States or the birds from Chile back to the North Pole, back to the very point to the next where they were hatched.”
Muldoon wrote about Americana before he left these shores and when asked if the reality of living in America has changed his perception of that place, he replies: “I’m not sure where reality resides. There is no such thing as America. It is a series of perceptions of places.”
“We had cousins who had spent more time in America than here. One of them returned for a visit in 1962 and gave me a book, ‘The Golden Book of California’, a glossy dayglow history of California. I thought I knew more about California than Keady. I also was influenced by the movies. When I started writing poems many of them were set in America which seemed a natural thing to do. Bonanza or Clint Eastwood was as real as anything else. It was part of a mix.”
John Hewitt
The reason for his visit to Armagh was to speak at the John Hewitt Summer School. Muldoon worked with Hewitt at the BBC when Muldoon presented a poetry programme for radio. He remembers one programme about Hewitt’s ‘Rhyming Weavers’ collection of poems, “a fabulous study of the weaver poets writing in the Scots tradition.” He enthuses about Hewitt’s writing such as “an ode to a potato, writing about the bits and pieces of everyday life with an extraordinary grace and wit.” He also compliments Hewitt for “his ability to step back and look at ourselves, at a time when people found that difficult. He celebrated the glories of this place, the place names with poems that identified names like the Moy.”
Connections
Muldoon makes much of connections in his poetry. During the interview passing friends interrupt us, he says of them: “These guys: I have an immediate connection with them.”
But it is the unexpected connections in his poetry that often adds a complexity to his writing. Many of his poems take a right turn, with the reader left wondering, ‘where has he gone?’
“What I enjoy about writing poetry is to have that feeling – ‘wow, what is that?’ With connections being made and the chemical reaction to these connections.” Some connections startle the reader. In his latest collection ‘One Thousand Things Worth Knowing’, the last poem Dirty Data sees Ben Hur meet Bloody Sunday and the Troubles. “When connections are made we feel them, particularly unexpected connections.”
Borders
Borders also feature in much of Muldoon’s poetry, including smuggling across the Irish border or in Bandanna set on the Mexico-US border. “I resist borders. I don’t like borders. They cause a lot of trouble. I suppose they have their uses. I don’t like things being put into categories generally.”
With huge numbers of refugees fleeing their territories, borders are very much in the news.
“Nowadays you would hardly know where the border is. We are becoming more borderless which I think is a good thing. The sooner we all, in Northern Ireland, Europe or the West figure out that we are all in this together. It is a tiny planet. I have sailed around it on a ship and it takes no time to circumnavigate it. We really need to think in global terms.”
Why Brownlee Left
When asked to choose one poem that expresses the essence of Paul Muldoon, he replies: “I never know who wrote my poems. I don’t read them much but when I do read them I always think, who wrote that?”
When pressed to choose one he replies: “I always feel I didn’t write them at all but there’s a poem, ‘Why Brownlee Left’ which I still read and I think ‘that’s interesting’.”
