Spencer Hupp
Joy in Service on the Rue Tagore
By Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 126 pages.
One comes to expect great and terrible things from Paul Muldoon; over fifty years and fifteen books his poems have shown off their author’s compulsive playfulness, his shaggy dog affect, his knack for metastasized and often unfashionable forms (he is constantly writing elongated villanelles, clogged sonnets, and prechewed sestinas), a painter’s concern with landscapes (three of his last four titles from FSG come plastered with lightly abstracted grey-, green-, and brownscale landscape paintings scrambled, remixed, or orphaned on the cover), plus his rhymes – straight rhymes, buried rhymes, and supralinguistic crypto-rhymes, accessories to what the New York Times has called an “artificially enriched, overinformed doggerel.”
Muldoon’s poems are indeed rancid with language, with namedrops, cameos, popcultural gewgaws and baubles. One particularly fragrant poem in his new collection, Joy in Service on the Rue Tagore, takes on both the “glorified thistle that is an artichoke” and the “. . . humongous / black truffle served by a priest or flamen,” with recourse to Norse and Tungstic mythologies, anecdotes from Pliny and Cicero, the shells of oysters and snails, the sex hormones of pigs, other secretions from all sorts of plants and animals – not to mention a brief narrative of T-Rex frontman Marc Bolan, and production notes to Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus – filing away, on average, a history of the middlebrow. “Near Izium,” the second poem in the collection, walks the current Ukraine War through a dark wood of Slavic history, alongside Muldoon’s own intellectual peccadillos. Hardly a clause goes by without some new, forbidding reference:
We launch kamikaze
drones against Pegasus as one Ivan flung a goose
insult at a second Ivan
in that story by Nikolai Gogol. There’ll be no haven
for those who’ve left a foot in a felt boot
sticking out of a pit.
Putin is destined to have one close call
after another as he strums his banjo-ukulele.
“Goose / insult” and “banjo-ukulele” seem to be enormous shifts, associatively – the goose, we’re told, is an allusion to Gogol’s “The Squabble,” that Russian classic of social dysfunction which takes for granted the fact that ours is a “depressing world, gentlemen!” That “banjo-ukulele” proves more inscrutable but helps, if nothing else, to show off Muldoon’s peculiar intelligence: alert and without scruple, with little interest in explaining itself (as much as one might want it to).
Yet, Muldoon’s poems are sometimes so fetching, so welcoming, such nonce, uncommon fun, that one forgives his many excesses. Take this item, “Ode to the Artichoke,” a version out of Pablo Neruda:
A mild-mannered soul
in the guise of a militiaman,
the artichoke
stands tall, having thrown up
its own little turret,
keeping itself
intact
under
its scale armor.
On either flank
rogue vegetables
are beginning to waver,
becoming
earring-tendrils,
cattails,
bulbs shifting position
in the subsoil
Here is a feat of the pathetic fallacy, of displacing human qualities onto things (this artichoke enjoys two great American pastimes: homeland security and the preemptive strike). The threadbare lineation, coming out of Neruda’s original, is finished with Muldoon’s equally homespun and askance vocabulary – those “rogue vegetables” feel utterly destabilized, happily out of step with nature. Yet the poem never falls too far from its brief, describing the artichoke’s qualities and position in the garden in concrete (if figurative) terms. It’s a poem with both the courage of its pretensions and the courage to let its reader in on them.
So, Muldoon’s complications are overt (though he pretends not to notice them). He makes, as we’ve seen, sometimes inscrutable statements in this book; Joy in Service on the Rue Tagore is itself a somewhat inscrutable title (the title poem makes a portrait of a secret service agent in retirement, nostalgic for the bad old days of Cold War subterfuge and doublespeak). Here, as in his fourteen other books, he finds especial strength in weak and wobbly phrases. Since he’s an inveterate rhymer, one waits on revelation or disaster in a line’s last word:
The black snowflakes
that settle on the linen workers of Odessa Street
summon quite bittersweet
memories of a Catholic boy recently flogged
by the shipyard workers no lighter on their feet
than the parakeet
on his shoulder . . .
Muldoon’s rhymes are sometimes such acute cases that they hardly register on the ear. Take “Three Deer, Sharon Springs, November 2020,” “where a sky once lived is shown by that blue plaque; / the sky this morning’s streaked with Coppertone / now the snow’s been washing its dirty linen in public” (“plaque” quietly elicits “public”; “Coppertone” revises the word “Cupertino” from several stanzas earlier). Muldoon’s difficulties may be nothing more than the rational mind’s attempt to contain the world by combination, to put things in reasonable congress with one another (if only through the intercourse of a well-rhymed pair):
And those of us who’ve ridden the white horse
In our own expeditionary force
Now weep that history must run its course
Now weep that history must run its course
Muldoon’s intellect, broad and capacious as it often seems, rarely bullies. One gets the sense that they’ve learned something from these poems, new ways of both saying and seeing, as in “Rosalind”:
“Nomen est omen,” said Plautus. “Nomen est omen.”
Plautus itself means “plodder” or “Kick the Can
Down the Road.” Such was the acumen
of the 9th Legion they devised a plan
to introduce a diet of offal boiled in a sheep’s rumen
to the already sluggardly Picts.
It is not the case here, as with Wallace Stevens’s “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” that “any schoolboy (of the superior Macaulayish breed) more or less feels what this poem means” (to quote Randall Jarrell), but it’s still charmingly teacherish and macaronic and casts a warm eye on its compound of subjects. Muldoon compensates for his occasional lapses in discernment with an unusual sense of music and unnatural talent for combinations, churning out endearing if ungainly modifiers: “sluggardly Picts” and “rogue vegetable” are not exactly rousing descriptions, but obtusely angular and totally particular ones. Certain sentences that would otherwise scan as readymades, like those faux-aphorisms populating “Nativity, 2020,” also do surprising things: “Even the cart has been kicked to the curb. / Even the harness is under some stress . . . Even the horse has its head in the stars.” Or “Though the armchairs were fitted with antimacassars . . . Though the armchairs were themselves a memorial” from “The Castle of Perseverance” shows his abiding interest in both the innocent animal and the long-suffering object.
Muldoon shares many of his more basic fascinations – ill-used animals and ill-used, often creaky, things – with another chronic flimflammer, his idol Robert Frost, who, with his deadpan Yankee affect, spread a protective lacquer of plain-speaking over his poems, obscuring a great deal of mischief. Like Frost, Muldoon relishes certain journalistic cliches and premade phrases. “The Wheel Invents the Road,” for instance, starts like an extended truism (“The wheel invents the road. / You made me what I am”) until Muldoon quits clearing his throat:
Like you . . . like you, hoping for the best.
That must be why all bets
were off when your own hope chest
was found to contain a goose lamp, a swatch
of Belgian linen, a skirt with a frayed hem,
a pocket watch
with a wonky winding stem
that may or may not have belonged to Burt,
a brandy flask, a spider plant,
and a billet-doux from a little squirt
who’d tried to get in your pants.
This is a love poem which quickly abandons the apparatus of a love poem, building out from that cliche “you made me who I am” into some exquisite particulars: “billet-doux from a little squirt” is about as singular a piece of language as is possible in contemporary poetry.
The best poems in this book are the shorter ones, and I am particularly taken with this number near the book’s opening, a version of an anonymous Irish poem from the 9th century:
That this one smallish bird might fill
an amphitheater with the trill
of notes from its yellow bill
is truly awesome—
a shock
wave over Belfast Lough
from a branch already chockablock
with whin blossom
There’s softness here, but no coyness or diffidence – obnoxious intrusions like “chockablock” and “truly awesome” make sure of that – letting one take an embarrassed pleasure in the sounds of certain words: “Belfast Lough” is as hoarse and pflemgy as “whin blossom” is muted and furred. The poem succeeds as an act of evasion: enjambment buries the “shock / wave” which would otherwise push the poem forward 1000 years to the Troubles of Muldoon’s Armagh childhood and Belfast education.
While Muldoon’s only occasionally quiet, he’s rarely that much more intense. This moderation grants an illusion of control, an illusion sometimes broken by a weird vigor, both laconic and jaunty, that sends one reeling not just through the dictionary or thesaurus but through the centuries for possible precursors, to someone like the Renaissance court poet John Skelton; few poets in the interceding 500 years have tapped such gold from a tin ear (to mix several metaphors):
he wolde gaspe
he sawe a waspe;
A fly or a gnat,
He wolde flye at that;
And prytely he wold pant
he saw an ant;
Lord, how he wolde pry
After the butterfly!
Lorde, how he wolde hop
After the gressop!
I see an inheritor, a country cousin several centuries removed, in Muldoon, whose power comes from his ability to squeeze foresight from memory; his pluperfect tense seems always present – this has something to do, as ever, with his rhymes, which are alternatingly distant, delayed, shapely, corny, pat:
The fact I’ve already one arm
tied behind my back dovetails
nicely with Solomon’s idea that hope
deferred makes the heart sick. A glimpse of daffodils
through the birth-hoop.
What gazed back at Nietzsche was in fact Abyssinia
now he’d gazed so long into the abyss.
This poem draws a thin line between philosophy and myth and makes a desperate attempt to hold on to meaning in a world of competing connotations and signifiers (note how “Abyssinia” swallows “abyss”). In such a dense poem, Muldoon’s sidearm-sleight-of-hand bruises more than it scabs; this isn’t an acid wit, not caustic but sprawling, gathering mass more than speed, until the sounds wear out and open up to:
The main lesson we’d learned
back there in Abyssinia
is that one out of five of these toothsome apple pies
is more likely than not poisoned.
What kind of fun is that?
Spencer Hupp is a poet and critic from Little Rock, Arkansas. His poems, essays, and reviews appear with the Sewanee Review, Raritan, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, Harvard Review, PN Review, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. Hupp was named a semifinalist in the 2021 92Y Discovery Contest, and currently lives in Baltimore.