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Hi again Jamie,

Just like to say that I really appreciate the trouble you've gone to  
in your reply below, and indeed in the rest of your posts on this -  
and sorry that you feel 'kinda alone', but knowing the limited  
readership of this list these days it is not surprising. And I know  
some people get irritated by exchanges such as the Muldoon one, but to  
be honest such things are the only thing these days which can suddenly  
bring this list alive.

For myself, I was just trying to be honest. I tried in a very short  
space, and with hardly any time, to explain something of the reasons  
for my rather indifferent response to Muldoon's poetry in the past.  
And I need to emphasize here, that in Muldoon's case it had nothing to  
do with being in any 'tribe' - when I first encountered Muldoon I was  
in a tribe of one and was reading British poetry with an open mind - I  
was looking for things I hoped I would like. This reading led me to  
the Northern Irish lot of course, who were highlighted following the  
success of Heaney etc. I did not respond very positively to most of  
them but Muldoon was among the few that I half heartedly tried to read  
further, for a while anyway. His work did seem to be more 'perky' (to  
borrow Peter's phrase) and more modern. (As an aside here I must  
mention the one N.Irish poet who later did impress me and interest me  
a lot, and still does, and that's Medbh McGuckian.) So my reading of  
Muldoon is limited and partial - I have only read about a third of  
Poems 1968-1998 and this was some time ago too.

So, I've followed your advice and read The Sightseers again. Yes, this  
is a good little poem and I like it. You're right about the deliberate  
banality of the opening etc. But when I first read that poem it was  
clearly not doing the kind of thing that I was personally seeking in  
poetry, so my mind didn't linger there. There is nothing unusual about  
this situation, it's the level at which, I should think, most of us  
operate, especially when we are younger. So this is why I said I did  
not know if Muldoon was overrated, but I had my suspicions. And yes,  
of course my 'suspicions' come from my polemical experience (so to  
speak - if we can have a 'polemical experience').

Reading some of the later short poems in the book now (yes I've  
neglected other things to do this) I do quite like some of them, but  
its a liking which I think is a bit superficial, I sort of acknowledge  
the little twists he takes and can see why and how he does it but I'm  
a bit like Peter in thinking that these are more an example of his  
facility of words, but then, what isn't? I'm such a cynic sometimes  
with regards to the production of poetry and the kinds of value  
judgments people give to it. But I'm sorry, the longer ones really  
bore me at the moment. I need to try them again when in a better mood.

As I have said here and elsewhere time and time again, there ARE huge  
differences in the poetics of the Brit mainstream and us other lot.  
There is bound to be when one has its roots in anti-modernism while  
the other has its roots deep in modernism. However, these differences  
are not static or unchangeable, they go through developments, some of  
which cross over and some which veer away entirely. In my experience  
those people who tend to make gestures towards bridging the gap then  
do the opposite in their behaviour. From both sides too very often the  
good intentions can come across as terribly patronizing. This problem  
interests me a lot. I am not irritated by it but find it quite  
fascinating.

Cheers

Tim A.


On 9 Apr 2013, at 19:50, Jamie McKendrick wrote:

> Hi Tim,
>   If you’ve read his Poems 1968-1998 and find nothing that really  
> impresses or engages you, then I doubt there’s much I can say that  
> would persuade you otherwise. That collection (which I haven’t to  
> hand) represents a prolific 30 years and includes everything  
> speaking of the main books, except  Moy Sand and Gravel, Horse  
> Latitudes and Maggot. Of the last three I like Moy Sand best, but I  
> may change my view in time.
>   At least in this case, there’s obviously such a difference between  
> what you find boring or interesting and what I find so that we’d be  
> loud-hailing each other across an abyss.
> But just to comment briefly on your post: ‘Sleeve Notes’ seems a bit  
> of a dud to me, though I don’t find myself more enamoured of Jeremy  
> Reed on the topic. And I have an allergy to Haiku as a form in  
> English, although Muldoon does something I like, (because) against  
> the grain of the form, by introducing rhyme. I can think of no  
> contemporary poet who has to the same extent enlivened and re- 
> invented the possibility of rhyme. That he’s had a raft of inferior  
> imitators who de-invent those possibilities isn’t something that  
> should be blamed on him.
>    But it’s where you talk of ‘prosiness and flatness’ that makes me  
> feel we are just hearing two completely different tunes. Well no, at  
> times he does use a deliberate flatness and prosiness: take the  
> opening stanza, perhaps even the opening two stanzas of ‘The  
> Sightseers’. It’s hard to imagine any poem of note risking such a  
> banal and flat opening line as “My father and brother, my mother and  
> sister”. It’s only when the reader arrives at the sestet that the  
> poem becomes anything but flat and you see the wit and purpose of  
> that kind of opening, from which it is hard to imagine any poem  
> recovering. For me, at least, it recovers magnificently. Then  
> there’s the different kind of ‘prosiness’ – in the Chandleresque,  
> oneiric narrative of the relatively early ‘Immram’ but that to my  
> ear has no flatness at all.
>   And I hear music all over the shop in Muldoon – just for example  
> from The Annals of Chile – ‘The Birth’ and ‘Incantata’. Even without  
> using the p-m word I may already be sounding as though I’m talking  
> of “somebody else altogether”.
>
> Taking note of your point about suspicions being just that, I have  
> my own suspicions (which may of course be ungrounded, and don’t  
> necessarily include you) why for those on the avant-garde side with  
> a heightened sense of the divide, it’s axiomatic that Muldoon should  
> very much be excluded. For example, a critic as curious and catholic  
> in his tastes as Andrew Duncan, if I remember right, dismisses  
> Muldoon in a few lines, merely referring to him as a purveyor of  
> unpleasant anecdotes. That seems a case of just not hearing what’s  
> going on, so what is my suspicion? Difficult to articulate, but it’s  
> as if someone who’s so inventive and innovative with both form and  
> language, so slippery and elusive with regard to perspective, so  
> deeply committed to linguistic complexity, if he’s seen to be  
> playing for the other side, has to be a phony, has to be “boring”  
> also in David Lace’s predictable terminology (“boring” = mainstream,  
> in this case with ornaments stuck on). Someone like Carol Ann Duffy  
> who has quite a conventional and straightforward sense of language  
> and form, quite a clear perspective, don’t represent anything like  
> the same level of threat and discomfort.
> Last week, I read Muldoon’s essays in The End of the Poem on  
> Marianne Moore and Pessoa – the former a bit labyrinthine for my  
> taste and the latter immensely illuminating. I just can’t see how a  
> poet who writes as he does on either of these topics, or for that on  
> Yeats or Montale, could be remotely shoe-horned into the kind of  
> caricature version of the mainstream that this stream of posts has  
> fitfully thrown up.