Paul Muldoon
Biographical information
For his contribution to Irish literature, Paul Muldoon was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College's convocation May 12.
Paul Muldoon was educated at the Queen's University of Belfast. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999-2004 he was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. Mr. Muldoon is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, and the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award.
Oration honouring Paul Muldoon, given by Dr. James G. Greenlee, Public orator
To see, where others merely look; to listen, when most only hear; to sniff and taste the absent, and to be, withal, just a wee bit "touched": such are the gifts, burdens, joys and obligations of the poet. Small wonder, then, that the Great Republican (Plato, not George "W") saw little room for one in a well-ordered commonwealth. After all, he argued, unlike philosophers, poets speak with disorderly passion, rather than strict reason. Still worse, they have a broader audience! All told, he concluded, as fanciful deceivers who could "sell an alibi to King Kong on the Empire State Building", they constitute a clear and present danger best left to the Guardians of homeland thought. We of the modern Academy, of course, might agree with Edmund Burke that ideal societies read better on the page than on the street. Even so, were platonic profilers on the prowl this very moment, their "Ideal Form" might well stand before you in the person of our honoured guest, Burke's fellow Irishman: poet, Paul Muldoon.
Master singer from the Land of Song, this literary minstrel boy appears to have skipped learned lectures on formal boundaries while studying at the Queen's University, Belfast. Or, perhaps, he was preoccupied, "flicking cosmic dandruff from his shoulders," as the masters of form droned on. Whatever the case, throughout an incomparably prolific career, he has meddled with meter and harried haiku; reworked the sonnet, and re-imagined rhyme. Utterly unclassifiable, he is, to paraphrase one reviewer, a subversive who subverts subversion itself. Thus, while perfectly comfortable standing where "the Way of Seeming and the Way of Truth diverge"; while delighting in misdirection, multiple meanings and manufactured words, he also takes great care to remind us of the sometimes strange, sometimes grim, and occasionally benign, reality that no wordsmith, however tricky, can playfully spin away. He has, moreover, grown from a stargazer at the grave of Irish greyhound, Master McGrath, into a writer of international renown who ruminates on "the metaphysicattle of Japan." Today, indeed, a reader is as likely to encounter Philip Marlowe as Wolfe Tone when leafing through Muldoon's hefty corpus. Perhaps, this is why the Times Literary Supplement has hailed him as the most significant poet of his generation, one whose works have been translated into 25 languages and feature prominently in every anthology worthy of note.
Poetic innovator, operatic lyricist, noted translator, editor, and essayist, he is also, according to unimpeachable sources, a would-be rock star in waiting. Meanwhile, he has had the great good sense to hold down a number of day jobs, just in case. Thus, over the last 30-odd years, he has been, in succession, a radio and television producer with the BBC who later turned his hand to teaching at sweatshops, such as Cambridge, Columbia, Berkeley and Oxford. Since 1995, he has earned his humble crust as H. G. B. Clark Professor of Humanities at Princeton. In short, Chancellor, he has nervously busied himself while awaiting the inevitable phone call from Rolling Stone.
Yet, busy as he is, he has always found time for others; Grenfell College not least of all. Indeed, the now flourishing cultural exchanges between Newfoundland and all Ireland, exchanges that so enrich the life of this college, university and province, came to fruition in no small measure thanks to the early participation and continued support of our celebrated guest. For this alone, he would merit recognition on this day. Of course, it also bears at least passing mention that this Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has, among other things, won the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the Shakespeare Prize, the Aspen Prize, and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.
Chancellor, given all this, I feel myself on rock solid ground as I present for the degree doctor of letters, honoris causa, Plato's worst nightmare, Paul Muldoon.
Address to convocation
The Dove Of Ut-Napishtim
"Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views..."
From Auden's commencement address
To students at Harvard, no less,
I'll take my cue
In terms of both content and form
As hoof-beats steal the thunderstorm
From which they flee.
For, I recall, when Auden spoke
In 1946, war-smoke
Still wreathed her trees
And Europe's bushes, stained with blood,
Were waiting for another flood
To wash them clean,
While now our own Bush leads us back
Toward the brink in North Iraq,
Now Byron's scene
In which the great Sennacherib
We knew from the cut of his jib
To be a wolf
Shifts to a bloody aftermath
In which God shows his righteous wrath
And him engulfs
In a wave of blood, a blood-tide
In which a steed's nostril's "all wide,"
Now dead horseflesh
Is what we know only too well,
Now we must meet that self-same swell
From Gilgamesh
Where Ut-Napishtim made his mark
By pushing off his pitch-seamed Ark
Into the pit
And putting that pit on the map.
For the great chasm, the great gap,
I would submit,
That lies before us on this day's
Not just between the "do" and "say"
Of public men,
Nor yet between the rich and poor
Be they in Upper School or Ur,
Nor yet the wren
And turkey vulture, thin and fat,
Nor from the shore at Barnegat
Or Beach Haven
To the great maelstrom in the East
Where once Ut-Napishtim released
Dove and raven
In hopes of finding solid ground.
No, that abyss is also found
Between oneself
And the massive inundation
Of Crash Bandicoot's PlayStation,
The unveiled Stealth
Bomber, U2 "hawking" iPods,
Whales still thrashing it out with cod
For H2O,
The moguls who mollycoddle
America's Next Top Model,
Guantanamo
On eBay, Proof out-grossing Doubt,
Captain Underpants grossing out
Bibliosophs,
A Senate that will pass muster
Only on the filibuster
While we're palmed off
With "wild" salmon that's raised on farms,
A teen with "the right to bear arms"
Shooting Santa,
The small coffee we know as "tall,"
The "direct flight" stopping after all
In Atlanta
Or Dallas-Fort Worth, the deluge
Of doubletalk and subterfuge
With which we cloak
The gush-gushings of the cloacal,
The Great Sewer's multivocal
Take on the smoke
And mirrors behind the tidal
Wave of American Idol
And Survivor,
Where the lewder and the ruder
And all their shrewder colluders
And connivers
See in bread and circuses bread
Mostly. Yet somewhere off Bay Head
Ut-Napishtim
Still searches for significance
And hopes that there will be a chance,
However slim,
Of the dove's finding out his mast
With an emblem of the steadfast
Against the splurge,
A sign that some of the ideals
That kept him on an even keel
Might re-emerge
From a sky in which every plane
Bodes ill, where every weathervane
Is quite at odds
With itself. That's why I, for one,
Prefer to think of the long run
And ride roughshod
Over Auden's adhortation
From that Harvard graduation
To think short term.
Ut-Napishtim, proto-Noah,
Complete with two protozoa,
Two pachyderms,
And one pigeon strutting its stuff
Has been at sea more than enough
And needs a sign
Of some green shoot, some little slip
Of a thing with a sticky tip,
A columbine
Which that pre-Columbian dove
Might take back, when push comes to shove,
As a token,
A columbine (or a cornflower)
Set to the peephole in a tower,
An unbroken
Line of cornflowers at eye-level
With an eye that loves to revel
In what's reviled,
In truth, in beauty, in its bent
For saying straight up what it meant,
In growing wild
While all about, even our corn,
Is engineered, our jeans pre-worn
By Calvin Klein,
The judge rehearsed, the jury rigged.
And look... Look how that cornflower-sprig
(Or columbine),
Holds out the possibility
To Ut-Napishtim that we, we
Ourselves attest
To the fact that, for what it's worth,
Life is sustainable on Earth,
That from our rest-
Less eye that sprig may be plucked out
And in Nineveh, crazed by drought,
May sprightly spring...
And listen... Listen... That flutter
In our heart's surely the flutter
Of a dove's wing.