The mountain is holding out
for news from the sea
of the raid on the redoubt.
The plain won’t level with me
for news from the sea
is harder and harder to find.
The plain won’t level with me
now it’s nonaligned
and harder and harder to find.
The forest won’t fill me in
now it, too, is nonaligned
and its patience wearing thin.
The forest won’t fill me in
or the lake confess
to its patience wearing thin.
I’d no more try to guess
why the lake might confess
to a regard for its own sheen,
no more try to guess
why the river won’t come clean
on its regard for its own sheen
than why you and I’ve faced off across a ditch.
For the river not coming clean
is only one of the issues on which
you and I’ve faced off across a ditch
and the raid on the redoubt
only one of the issues on which
the mountain is holding out.
“The Mountain Is Holding Out” is excerpted from Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon. Copyright © 2006 by Paul Muldoon. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber, Ltd. All rights reserved.
It is what it is, the popping underfoot of the Bubble Wrap
in which Asher’s new toy came,
popping like bladder wrack on the foreshore
of a country toward which I’ve been rowing
for fifty years, my peeping from behind a tamarind
at the peeping ox and ass, the flyer for a pantomime,
the inlaid cigarette box, the shamrock-painted jug,
the New Testament bound in red leather
lying open, Lordie, on her lap
while I mull over the rules of this imperspicuous game
that seems to be missing on piece, if not more.
Her voice at the gridiron coming and going
as if snatched by a sea wind.
My mother. Shipping out for good. For good this time.
The game. The plaything spread on the rug.
The fifty years I’ve spent trying to put it together.
“It Is What It Is” is excerpted from Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon. Copyright © 2006 by Paul Muldoon. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
"Hi, I'm Paul Muldoon and I want to thank you for sending in your questions to Borders Open-Door Poetry. We have a question here from Elizabeth F.: 'The more I change a poem the better it reads to me, so my editing process never ends. How do you know when a poem is finished and editing should stop?' she inquires.
Well, that of course is one of the big questions, perhaps the biggest one. There's one that comes before it though, and I don't want this to sound too silly. The first question is, 'where do we begin the poem?' What I like to think is that we try to begin the poem whether it sounds like an ad for a detergent or a washing powder. We try to begin the poem where you might have expected it to end. We try to begin in a place where one is really going into territory that is unexpected. So we try to begin with an engaging idea . We try to continue in an engaging mode, of course. And we try to end with some sense of resolution. Not necessarily with fireworks going off but there has to be a sense that we have come out of something; that there's been a reason for us being in there in the first place. And there's a sense, I suppose, that we've come out through a window or we hear a door shut, however quietly, behind us. Sometimes the door slams; sometimes it just creaks closed.
But to know, to know when the poem's finished as it were, I think has to do with our having a sense as the first reader of the poem, that something has happened to us; that we've seen something, that we've experienced something new, that we've had a revelation. Emily Dickinson, of course, had this idea that, at end of a poem, coming out of a poem, one should have a sense that the top of one's head has been taken off. Certainly at least, she felt, that the back of the hairs should be standing on the back of one's head. So a physical sensation often accompanies that sense that the poem is finished. We have a visceral sense that something has happened to us and that's often an indicator of something really really major having happened. The hair standing on the back of one's head doesn't necessarily come to us with every poem, alas, but certainly to come out with a sense that something has changed, including ourselves."
PAUL MULDOON was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon is the 1996 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature. Other awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Literature Price for Poetry, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2004 Aspen Prize for Poetry and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize.
He is the author of numerous books, most recently Horse Latitudes (poems) and a collection of his Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC in 2006. Paul Muldoon's other main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Paul Muldoon is the Poetry Editor for The New Yorker.
It has been written about Paul Muldoon's poems that they, "remind us of the Elizabethan's definition of wit, a deadly serious from of play that encompassed far more than mere humor, but included originality and ingenuity, particularly in the forging of concise and startingly appropriate phrased to capture the paradoxes of human experience. These paradoxes are at play in many of Muldoon's poems, which will often share classical forms out of the most common street slang, or tackle metaphysical questions with the language of advertising slogan and pop records."
Paul Muldoon writes lyrics for, and plays the guitar with, the musical rock group RACKETT.
The title of "Horse Latitudes," Paul Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry, refers to those areas thirty degrees north and south of the equator where sailing ships tend to be becalmed, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day. From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom Moore to an elegy for Warren Zevon, and from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, this book presents us with fields of battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament. "Horse Latitudes "is a triumphant new collection by one of the most esteemed poets of our time.
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since "Hay" (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots.
by Paul Muldoon
by Paul Muldoon
by Paul Muldoon
© 2008 Borders, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
