Form, Deformity: On Pathology and Poetics in Paul Muldoon

Abstract

Paul Muldoon has long been labelled the epitome of poetic post-modernity: the all too apparent playfulness and ostensible off-handedness of much of his writing combines with citational practices that range from conventional quotation through deliberate mis quotation to outright parody. These, together with the referential instability in his writing, and the tension between emplacement and deracination on which his poems seem to thrive, have long made the ‘post-modern’ description as inevitable as it might seem deliberately sought after.¹ Muldoon’s poetic practice has accordingly been described as grounded on indeterminacy, and reflecting a pervasive scepticism regarding authorship. Intriguingly, though, his rare explicit acknowledgments of critical models have seemed to run contrary to such a diagnosis. In a 1998 essay that remains possibly his most sustained critical self-description, Muldoon, almost echoing Heaney’s own acknowledgment of belonging to a ‘New-Critically trained generation’ (Brandes 11), endorsed the tenets of American New Criticism with surprising candour (considering his ‘post-modernist’ reputation) and patent controversial gusto (in a critical environment in which New Critical close reading has long tended to be slighted for its formalism). The essay, pointedly subtitled ‘Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, includes a vocal plea for the poet’s responsibility (as the poem’s ‘first reader’) ‘to take into account … all possible readings of the poem’ (120). This ambition for critical totalization combines with a no less adamant assertion of authorial prerogatives in the face of post-structuralism: Barthes and Derrida are explicitly summoned and promptly dismissed (120). Indeed, Muldoon has recurrently shown his proneness to satirize post-structuralist criticism—his ‘Kristeva’ piece in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’ (1990), a sequence described by Tim Kendall as a ‘mad history of western philosophy’ (158), consisted merely of three anapaests between quotation marks, ‘“Signifump. Signifump. Signifump”’ (Poems 321).² In general, Muldoon’s approach to dominant stances in contemporary criticism has seemed to confirm Jeff Holdridge’s insight that he is fundamentally ‘beholden to the modernists for his poetic’, since ‘he celebrates relativism only to a point, and not to a point of no return’ (121).