Copyright 2005 By Paul Muldoon example essay topic

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 children's 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 teacher's 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 don't particularly like poetry; I can recognize a good and a bad poem, but I can't 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, they'd be impressed. And so that's 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 Muldoon's 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 year's Seder. I reached for the 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 Mortier 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-I'm 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, this simple life is woven tightly with reminders that life isn't so simple. The almost funny pairing of words (Haggadah / haggadah and wheel / reel ) sort of make you pause and want to read the lines again. The goats that tread "upon the brink of meaning" is a line that does something for the reader.

Somehow, it seems like a familiar feeling; I know what the brink of meaning is, and for the first time, someone has found words that describe what I feel. Maybe that's what poetry is. It's explaining things that cannot otherwise be explained through plain language. There a wheel felloe of ash or sycamore from the quadriga to which the steeds had no sooner been hitched than it foundered in a blue-green ditch with the rest of the Pharaoh's war machine was perfectly preserved between two amphora's, one of wild birdseed, the other of Kikkoman.

It was somewhere in this vicinity that I'd hidden the last year's Seder. I think that one purpose of poetry is to be pleasing to the ears. After a quick read of this passage, I really have no clue at all what Muldoon is talking about. But I like it.

I like how it sounds, the unexpected rhyming of hitched / ditch and the off rhyme of Pharoah's / amphora's and Kikkoman/. It almost makes me laugh, which I'm pretty certain I shouldn't be doing. A second reading of this stanza, and I discover that its really very complex wording for something simple. The wheel fell into the ditch, like the Pharaoh's army into the sea. What a great image, though.

I think I like Paul Muldoon because he's inspiring. I could never write the way he writes; I could never use words to create such gorgeous pictures; I could never use words to evoke so many emotions. But after reading his poetry and about his life, I want to try. The Official Paul Muldoon Web Site. Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul Muldoon.

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