‘Artmaking is a drug’ - interview with poet Paul Muldoon

A fellow festival-goer at the recent Calabash literary festival in Treasure Beach, Jamaica, enjoyed chatting to a gentle Irish poet called Paul. He told her he ‘dabbled’ in poetry, and she was seconds from asking if he was planning on reading any of his work at the open-mike session.

When Paul Muldoon, the poet in question, came to give his reading, it was soon quite clear that he is, in fact, a famous poet. He opened with ‘Comeback’, a poem about a washed-up rock band for ever on the brink of their next great hit: ‘We’d pay in cash/For a kilo of Khartoum/And come back to trash/Another hotel room/And make a comeback baby/A comeback don’t you see?/It’s time to make a comeback baby/Come back baby to me.’ One part Princeton professor, two parts ageing rocker, and with a strange and you might say characteristic mix of the deadpan and the tender, Muldoon had the audience eating out of his hand.

As a promising teenager, Muldoon was introduced by his English teacher to Seamus Heaney, to whom he later sent some poems. What should he do to improve them? ‘Nothing,’ Heaney is reputed to have replied. Fast-forward nearly 40 years and Muldoon’s papers not only live at Emory University in Atlanta, sharing space with those of Heaney, W.B. Yeats and Ted Hughes, but plainly belong there, too — ‘dabbling’ be damned. Just as Heaney and Hughes were the giants to Muldoon and his generation, there’s barely anyone writing now who hasn’t gone through a stage of aspirational ‘Muldoonery’: a playful allusiveness, and an insistence that you can rhyme cat and dog if you so choose.

Despite the confessional tone of a lot of his writing, he makes a big distinction between memoir and poetry. At what point does the poet force the memoirist aside, I wonder? ‘The poem is always more important, I think, because it has its own business in the world, it has its own things that it needs to do.