reviewed
by David
Burleigh
Sixty
Instant Messages to Tom Moore, by Paul Muldoon
(Lincoln, Ill.: Modern Haiku Press, 2005). ISBN
0-9741894-1-3. 32 pages. Hand set and bound by Swamp
Press. 5½ x 8½, colored inks & paper, hand tied.
$20.00 postpaid from Modern Haiku, PO Box 68, Lincoln,
IL 60656.
I
can still remember my first encounter with the work
of Paul Muldoon, in an Irish newspaper about 1970.
It was a short poem, but one which delivered a memorable
frisson. It was clear at once that here was a poet
who knew exactly what he was about, and who almost
certainly would
make it new. In the three and a half
decades since then, Muldoon has engaged and entertained
a growing audience of readers. Yet for many of those
readers, his work has proved baffling and exciting
in nearly equal measure.
Muldoons
employment of the haiku form is a relatively recent
feature of his writing. He has always been attracted
to formal patterns, but the haiku only appears in
his later work, the poetry he has written since
he settled in the United States, and is perhaps
a reflection of the life he now enjoys there. A
sequence of ninety verses, called Hopewell
Haiku, after the place that he
was then living in New Jersey, appeared as a chapbook,
with seasonal illustrations, in 1997, and was incorporated
into his next collection, Hay (1998). The
sequence can be read, therefore, either independently,
or as part of a larger collection, since various
references to hay connect it to the
other poems in the longer volume. A shorter sequence,
of nineteen verses, called News Headlines
from the Homer Noble Farm, appeared in The
New Yorker before it
was collected in the poets next volume, Moy
Sand and Gravel (2002), which received a Pulitzer
Prize. These humorous headlines originate
from the summer home of Robert Frost, an important
early influence on the poet. The new sequence, Sixty
Instant Messages for Tom Moore, published by
Modern Haiku, is Muldoons third venture
in this form. The singular feature of Muldoons
haiku is that they rhyme, both individually and
as part of a complex pattern within the sequence
as a whole. They are also composed, fairly strictly,
in 575.
Ones
first impression of the sixty messages inscribed
in these syllabic verses, is that they record a
holiday in Bermuda. But since Muldoons poetry
is not only abstruse, but highly self-reflexive
too, it is not surprising to find an earlier adumbration
of the material. Thomas Moore (17791852),
the hugely popular romantic Irish poet, turns up
in Madoc: A Mystery (1990), where:
all
London hails
the self-evidently angel-voiced
Tom Moore as the new Anacreon
[More]
Odes
of Anacreon (1800), a collection of translations
from the Greek, was Moores first volume, and
Muldoon refers to him in the poem as a leprechaun
because The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas
Little Esq. (1801) was his second. Each section
of Muldoons long poem carries the name of
a philosopher, and in a later one:
The
Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary
of His Britannic Majesty,
one
Anthony Merry
(though merry is hardly le mot juste)
juste
laboriously
presents Tom Moore, late of Bermuda,
to
Jefferson
[Burke]
Here
we have the connection, for Moore, a close friend
of Lord Byron (a selection of whose work Muldoon
has edited), was appointed Registrar to the Admiralty
Prize Court in Bermuda in 1803, and spent some time
there before appointing a deputy (who robbed him),
and going back to London. Moores impressions
of his time there, and of his travels in the United
States, were
recorded in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems
(1806), from which Muldoon also quotes in Madoc.
The short segments of Muldoons long poem are
in turn an imaginary
exploration of a plan by two English Romantic poets
to set up a utopian community in the New World.
It is not necessary to study all this in order to
read Sixty Instant Messages, but it is helpful
to be aware that the earlier
Irish poets experience of Bermuda lies behind
Paul Muldoons own (real or imaginary) sojourn
there two hundred years on.
What,
then, are the pleasures that this little volume
has to offer? This is the
opening verse:
Hamilton.
Tweeds? Tux?
Baloney? Abalone?
Flux, Tom. Constant flux.
First,
the location is specific, the capital of Bermuda.
Second, the poet is in a quandary, unsure whether
to be formal or informal, or even rural or urban.
Third is the possibility that none of it matters
anyway. Fourth is a frivolous sound-association,
raising another question. Last comes a shaking of
the head, or a sigh of resignation. All this is
characteristic of the poet, from the casual way
that one thing drifts into another, to the strict
enclosure of a form. It is the exact quality of
contemporary living.
Life
may be lived in the present, but it is freighted,
as we ourselves are, with the past. The third verse
alludes to the historical past, as well as obliquely
to a more personal one:
The
Big House, you see,
still stands, though now the tenants
are the absentees.
The
Big House was a marked feature of the Irish landscape
during the colonial period. It was usually the property
of landowners resident in England, and these absentee
landlords were the bane of the native tenants
lives. In a second sense, the British government
residence in Bermuda, which is still a colonial
possession, may be the same one as that occupied
by the absent Registrar Tom Moore. In
a third sense, more tentatively, this large residence
may be the home of Irish poetry, or poets, from
which Muldoon himself is absent, but to which he
casts a backward glance over the Atlantic. The hint
of nostalgia is very faint, but is echoed in verse
V,
by a mention of the auld sod. Though
one of the islands of Bermuda is called Ireland,
it is notable that the poet here locates himself
on neither side of the Atlantic.
In
verse IV, meanwhile, the time of the visit is set
clearly:
Good
Friday. We fly
a kite over Bermuda.
Our cross in the sky.
A
number of the poems celebrate, in the naming of
things, a new and unfamiliar place. Thus we have
references to tree-frog and albatross, to longtail
and barracuda. The local flora and fauna are not
just named, but carefully observed (XI):
Matted
twigs and moss.
Herons turn copper-blue eggs.
Boys play pitch and toss.
The
image is suddenly vivid, only to be laid aside for
something else. Yet the verse before this wryly
states that not everything is new (X):
What
we knew as scutch
back home is Bermudagrass.
A crutch is a crutch.
This
feeling of uncertainty is part of the experience
of travel, and there is a suggestion that the language
itself is somehow a kind of crutch.
The collecting of souvenirs produces further ambiguity
and doubt (XIX):
Wasp-nest
on the shelf?
Or a papier-mâché
maquette of itself?
How
can we know? The ambiguity is teasing. The poets
playful language can whimsically express the most
ordinary travel hazard (XXIX):
The
worm that attacks
my large intestine has cut
me a little slack.
The
droll humor in Muldoon makes him one of the most
enjoyable poets to read, even when one doesnt
understand him.
Numerous
historical and sea-going allusions in the poems,
are mixed with observations of the young on holiday,
of romance and rock music, mingling the many elements
that a tourist might experience. Muldoon can sometimes
be wistfully erotic (XXXI):
Once
a lichened breast
turning from lake to lilac
was the litmus test.
The
colors here may have been deliberately chosen to
blend with those in other verses. But Muldoon can
also beautifully time a joke about the past, before
it brings us to the present (LIII):
A
pre-dawn volley
of shots, bottoms up, chin-chin,
from the drinks trolley.
Here
the shots remind initially us of Tom
Moore challenging a critical reviewer to a duel
that ended good-naturedly, much as the poem ends
when we realize the shots are of another
kind. At the end of the sequence, the bibulous poet
finds himself [c]ompletely at odds with
his companion. So what are we to make of all of
this?
Muldoons
first exercise in writing 17-syllable poems produced
a degree of consternation among haiku aficionados.
On the one hand, the strict adherence to 575
and the use of end-rhyme, drawn apparently from
the work of Harold G. Henderson and Kenneth Yasuda,
seemed old-fashioned. Most practitioners now eschew
this pattern, and prefer a freer form. And on the
other hand, the poets use of word-play, and
a whole bag of other literary tricks like personification,
seemed to belie the pure directness advocated by
the most prominent promoters of the form in English.
Reviews of the work were sometimes tinged with hostility
or indignation, in perhaps another echo of Tom Moore.
But there are undoubtedly well-observed moments
in the new
sequence (XXIV):
The
sput-sputter-sput
where the idling fish-torcher
lights on halibut.
William
J. Higginson, who contributes a foreword, has already
written here (Modern Haiku 35.2 [summer 2004])
about Muldoon the haiku poet. In that essay he took
certain verses from the Hopewell sequence
and set them against haiku in Japanese that they
seemed to recall. In a similar fashion, referring
to the verse above, one might say that cormorant-fishing
(ukai), using ukai torches to attract the fish,
is an ancient custom in Japan, that evokes a mood
and season, and is thus a season word. In Muldoons
verse, however, it is the sputtering of the boat
engine that we register, in preparation for the
rhyme.
Again,
lights on in the final line produces
a characteristically clever play on words (find
/ flame). The effect is quite different from the
nostalgic loneliness evoked by the season word in
Japanese. Higginsons approach, while attractive
for the haiku devotee, offers only a partial and
limited reading of the work, since he entirely ignores
the multiple references to other texts in the
Hopewell Haiku. These include obvious
allusions to Robert Frost and Herman Melville, for
example. The play on Yeats, and on medieval Irish
poetry, may have been less familiar to him, but
not to acknowledge the highly intertextual nature
of the work, is to overlook much of what is actually
there. Generally American haiku do not allude much
to other kinds of poetry in English, let alone to
other literary forms. There is an occasional play,
or replay, of a well-known verse in Japanese, by
Bashô or Issa usually, and little more. Yet
it is important to remember that Bashô himself
drew on other poetry before him, and that the full
appreciation of his work depends on understanding
such contexts and allusions. As Haruo Shirane explains
in Traces of Dreams, each new play or replay,
allusion or revision, contributes to the One Great
Poem that every writer somehow takes part in composing.
In that sense, Muldoon participates significantly
in a collaborative literary composition, in the
way that modern literary theory describes it.
The
Higginson approach, while partial, has something
to contribute under that general rubric.
Another reading of the Hopewell Haiku,
this time by a Japanese scholar, Nobuaki Tochigi,
attempted to understand the sequence as a solo renga,
or linked-verse sequence, again pointing to precedents
in Japanese. The practice of shared composition
dates back further than the time of Bashô,
and Tochigi, while fully aware of the Irish and
other literary references, sought to discover a
similarity in technique in terms of the shifting
associations between the moments represented by
the verses. Viewed this way, the sequence of fragments
becomes a string of varied moods and moments, and
this too is a valid approach. It is not clear, however,
whether Muldoon consciously follows an established
pattern of any kind in terms of content, though
there are verses that refer to love, the moon, and
so on in both that sequence and the new one, as
there are in renga.
A
further reading of the Hopewell sequence,
by the Irish critic Edna Longley, sees it as expressing
Muldoons adaptation to his new home in the
United States, with certain wry references to pioneers.
Longleys is one of the most acute of all these
readings, since she has long been familiar with
the poet and his work. The new location, far west
of Ireland, but still east of the United States,
provides a whole new take on the poets
situation. All of these approaches have something
to offer, and there are signs that the work can
submit to
all of them at once. The preliminary chapbook presentation
of the longer sequences appears to encourage a variety
of readings, independently of their place in any
larger schema.
The
verses in Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore
are printed three to a page, like many collections
of English haiku. We are thus invited to see them
as short rhyming verses, and may not fully register
at first the complicated rhyme scheme. In each verse
the first and third lines rhyme, while the second
apparently does not. A closer look, however, shows
that, as with the
Hopewell Haiku, each second line also
rhymes with the first and third lines of a poem
five verses on, VI picking up from I, VII from II,
and so on. In Hay, the earlier sequence is
printed five verses to a page, so that each verse
is complemented by the one opposite on the facing
page. The second line of each of the last five verses
also rhymes with the first and third lines of each
of the first five, pairing I with LVI, and so on,
creating a circular effect. This is a much
more rigorous and complex pattern than the terza
rima of the shorter Homer Noble Farm
sequence. Muldoons handling of these elaborate
patterns, like his earlier work with the sonnet
and the sestina, forms which he has stretched and
tested in extraordinary ways, clearly gives him
technical satisfaction. The delayed rhymes and many
intertextual allusions have sometimes been taken
as unduly complex and abstruse, but the dexterity
and brilliance is undeniable, and the pleasures
of the text are consequently diverse.
It
is possible, really, to take each sequence simply
as a triple-striped stick of candy, consumed in
little bites, there being quite enough to enjoy
simply from the use of language, the sound patterns
and unusual words, the jokes and lewd asides. Despite
the Joycean rigors of the pattern, which is as intricate
and demanding as Ulysses, the tone throughout is
conversational. Muldoon himself is often present
in the poems, but as a bemused persona rather than
a thrusting ego. Lee Gurga suggests in an afterword
that the verbal tricks in the poems sometimes say
look at me, rather than look at
this. But it seems to me that what the word-play
foregrounds is language itself, in all of its uncertainty
and strangeness. Surely words, as
much as objects, form the texture of our living
in the world today?
Tim
Kendall, one of Muldoons most detailed interpreters,
traces through his work an attempt to resolve a
putative division in the poets background,
between his mothers bookishness and his fathers
closeness to the earth. We find this in Sixty
Instant Messages as well (XLIV):
Nostalgie
de la
boue la boue la boue la boue:
an all-Ireland fleadh.
This
is a humorous aside, directed at other Irish poets,
including Seamus Heaney. Nostalgie de la boue
is a longing for low-life or the soil, while a fleadh
(pronounced flah) is an Irish festival of dancing,
which the drumbeat of the second line prepares us
for. From this verse I then skip forward, to the
verse that is opposite or complementary, the one
that picks up the chain of rhyme (XLIX):
Orange
overshoes
make the puffin less nimble
on dry land, its true.
Ostensibly,
this is an amusing portrait of a seabird, yet in
Ireland (because of the orange), I might
read this as a reference to the gracelessness or
awkwardness of Ulster Protestants, out of their
element somehow. In a like manner, too, I might
read the earlier Big House as the British
Broadcasting Corporation that Muldoon, himself a
Catholic, worked for formerly in Belfast. The whole
text is fraught with such ambiguities, barely contained
in the tightly patterned format. The very ambiguities
enable and allow such varied or uncertain
readings.
Returning
to the renga parallel, I notice that there
is an Irish reference in the third verse of the
both Hopewell sequence and the new one,
and there are certainly other references (to frogs
and scythes and so on) repeated from one to the
other, though I could not discern any overall pattern
in terms of content. Yet undoubtedly the formal
constraints that Muldoon has set himself
to work within help to produce the accidental felicities
of rhyme and meaning that enrich his work, just
as the framework of a shared renga composition
forces the participants to work within a binding
set of rules with comparable results.
The
strict syllabics of Sixty Instant Messages to
Tom Moore both contain and evoke the richly
associative encounters and collisions that we make
in contemporary living. The range of reference in
these verses, drawn from the poets formidable
reading, may be broader than we expect from English
haiku, yet there are haiku poets in Japan who are
just as playful and as complex as Muldoon. Again,
the great quotidian is something that
the poet, writing to celebrate a birth or elegize
a death, or just to record the ordinary events of
daily life, has
always been deeply interested in: it is mentioned
specifically in both of the collections that he
published in 1994, for one of which it provides
the title. This very attractively designed and printed
little volume adds a new terrain. It does seem time
for us to widen our conception of what a haiku may
or can be when we encounter a poet as singular as
Paul Muldoon.
WORKS
CITED
Kendall,
Tim. Paul Muldoon. Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan:
Seren, 1996.
Longley,
Edna. Irish Bards and American Audiences.
Poetry & Posterity. Tarset, Northumberland:
Bloodaxe Books, 2000.
Muldoon,
Paul. The Annals of Chile. London: Faber
& Faber, 1994.
,
Hay. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.
,
Madoc. London: Faber & Faber, 1990.
,
Moy Sand and Gravel. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2002. Gravel
,
The Prince of the Quotidian. Loughcrew, County
Meath: The Gallery Press, 1994.
Shirane,
Haruo. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural
Memory and the Poetry of Bashô.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Tochigi,
Nobuaki. Paul Muldoons whimful
game in Hopewell Haiku in
Journal of Irish Studies
XIX. IASIL Japan 2004.
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