Culture That Made Me: Paul Muldoon on McCartney, TS Eliot and Sweeney Todd
A documentary on Paul Muldoon will show at Cork International Film Festival.
Born in 1951, Paul Muldoon grew up on a farm in Co Armagh. He has lived in the United States since 1987 where he is a professor at Princeton University. In 2003, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He recently edited Paul McCartney’s two-volume set, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. He is married to the American novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. They have two children.
- Paul Muldoon: Laoithe is Lirici, a documentary about his life, will be screened as part of the Cork Film Festival, 5pm, Saturday, November 19 at the Gate Cinema. See: www.corkfilmfest.org.
The thing that confirms my sense that Paul McCartney is a major artist is his modesty. By which I don’t mean false modesty, or any form of Uriah Heepism. I mean the modesty that derives from a sense that he is merely a vehicle for something beyond himself. I don’t mean to say that he’s totally inert, but I do mean to say that he is primarily a medium for something bigger and better than himself.
What is fascinating about Paul Simon is that he writes the music first. Then he writes the words. His view is that if the music isn’t good, it doesn’t actually matter about the words. He’s probably right. It’s a remarkable aspect about him – that he can write great music and then he can write great lyrics to go with it. He’s a brilliant lyric writer.
I wrote my first poem when I was 12. Most people are smart enough to get out of writing shortly after that. T.S. Eliot was the poet who got me excited and made me think that writing poetry would be a fine thing. He’s a “modern” poet. For many people, he’s too much. It takes a bit of an effort to read him. It’s not to say he’s not clear, but there are moments when he needs a bit of work. The Waste Land being a case in point. It’s such an outlandish way of doing business – with all these allusions and quotations from other texts. It’s a poem of fracture. For whatever reason that appealed to me as a teenager.
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is the perfect poem for a teenager. The protagonist is a guy who’s saying, “Should I or shouldn’t I ask her out? What’s gonna happen? ‘Do I dare/Disturb the universe?’ ” It’s a poem about the essential uncertainty that is a feature of teenagedom. It continues to be one of my favourite poems.
TS Eliot reintroduced the world to the poetry of John Donne, the metaphysical poet. By extension, he became my favourite poet. I take my cue from a poet like John Donne. One of his main interests was in making metaphors of striking originality, usually based on completely crazy connections between things. That is the thing I myself try to do – to be open to arresting ways of describing the world. Donne continues to be my single greatest influence.
I enjoy poems from all over the world, but I’m always drawn to the local – the Gaelic poets of south Armagh are important to me. People like Peadar Ó Doirnín, Séamus Dall Mac Curta and Art Mac Cumhaigh. They’re local poets I’m continually fascinated by. They’re mostly from the eighteenth century. There are a number of other poets associated with the region – W.R. Rodgers, Jonathan Swift – that I like.
In this its centenary year, the novel that continues to astonish and influence what I do is James Joyce’s Ulysses. The likes of which have not been seen since. Many writers think about themselves as being avant garde. In other words, “I want to do something that has not been done before.” That’s the basic impulse, setting out to create a text that is challenging, ground-breaking in its attempt to represent the world. Ulysses is a novel that is supreme in that regard. Joyce is an unimaginably brilliant writer. I can read most writers and pretty much know how they did it. With Ulysses, I don’t at all know how Joyce did it. And one thing’s for sure – I couldn’t do it myself.
A novel I found fascinating is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s brilliantly written. He’s such a great writer. If I was going to try to write a novel I’d try to write a novel less like Ulysses and more like Treasure Island. The story is extraordinary. More than that, the cast list – and the way the characters are presented – is one fascinating character after another. Be it the narrator Jim Hawkins; the old sea captain Black Dog; locals like Squire John Trelawney; the sea cook Long John Silver: the gunner Israel Hands; not to speak of Ben Gunn. This cast of characters is remarkable.
Leonard Cohen’s collected poems are exactly the same as his collected songs. The pressure per square inch in a Cohen song is very high. It’s one of the reasons his songs work so well. It’s not a pre-requisite – you can have great songs where you don’t even understand what the words are, but Leonard Cohen has that quality.
When I was a kid in Armagh, the way we studied plays was to put them on in class. The play I think is perfect is William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I saw it recently in New York – where I live – with Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. Ruth played Lady Macbeth. She was absolutely brilliant. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Macbeth. I would go to see Macbeth – it doesn’t matter who is doing it. It’s a play that is indestructible. It’s so beautifully constructed. It’s a masterpiece. It’s probably my single favourite play.
I saw the Dollars Trilogy by Sergio Leone when they came out in a cinema in Armagh. I love the fact that A Fistful of Dollars was based on Akira Kurosawa’s movie Yojimbo. Great artists begin by imitating. Most important cultural moments derive from fusion. The western as a genre in America; the Japanese component; then you had this Italian component of the opera buffa – there’s a comedic strain running through it, this tweak. They are horse operas in both senses of the word. And the music is extraordinary. I like their mongrel status. They’re drawing on very far-flung components that they manage to bring together to make something new.
I love the over-the-top aspect of musical theatre. Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street makes for an unlikely elevator pitch – an opera about a demon barber who kills people and his accomplice bakes pies out of their meat. I like to write poems that at some level people say, “You couldn’t be doing that. There’s no way you’ll get away with it.” To which I say, “OK, well, watch this.” You have to be prepared to fail. You can’t care about failing or what people think about you if you’re an artist. You just have to give it a whirl.
