Songs and Sonnets by Paul Muldoon: Poet Plugs In
By Joe Boyle
The title of 2012's Songs and Sonnets imparts to its readers more than just a concise description of its contents. As a title it asks us to consider a disconnect, a divide between traditions, as well as ties that hold them together. Is all poetry song, all song poetry? The book is a representation of an Irish voice in America, or maybe an old voice in a new world.
In more than one way, Songs is a dialogue. Without even cracking the book open, it's unmistakably one part of a conversation. The other part is contained in the recordings and live performances of Muldoon and various musical acts, including Rackett and Wayside Shrines, both Princeton-based groups that feature the award-winning poet as a vocalist and guitarist. In this sense, Songs and Sonnets could be a sort of libretto. In any case the book contains mostly songs, lyrics in the typical pop format of verses, choruses and bridges; and a handful of sonnets in unusual forms: split up into stanzas, sometimes numbered, with varying rhyme schemes –– in every case they differ from the textbook Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets with which we were so well-acquainted in secondary school.
Across the board, in Song or Sonnet, Muldoon employs a dizzying array of quirky, undeniably smart allusions. He plunders high culture and pop culture; appropriates slang in idioms current and outdated; makes dirty jokes; and drops names, plucking characters from history, art, literature, and current events who make cameo appearances. This is the work itself, a conversation that straddles the North Atlantic on a swinging bridge, an intricate pastiche of Western culture.
These are poems that can be as easy or as challenging, as catchy or as cerebral, as their readers would like them to be. There is no doubt about Muldoon's accessibility here, especially because of the apparent emphasis on the Songs. But while the Songs' language is equally zany and imaginative as the Sonnets' they are fastened to an almost unchanging pop song form. One may expect that in the moments when the clever verges on camp, the Songs would be greatly aided by their respective vocal melodies or instrumentation. After all, any fan of pop music who reads the lyrics to their favorite hits may appreciate that the 'sense' made by songs is inextricably, and mysteriously, part of their musical performance, not solely in the lyrics.
The staying power of Muldoon's Sonnets, the ability to continually release both lyricism and challenging poetic sense –– especially in the prime examples of "Pip and Magwitch," "A Dent," and "Shoot 'Em Up" –– is due to the fact that while the poet starts with a dusty old form, he makes room to subvert it in structure as well as language. They draw back slightly from the full-frontal assault of the Songs, opening up worlds in which Muldoon's readers can exist alongside his characters. Because of this the Sonnets truly comprise the more innovative half of Songs and Sonnets. The Songs remain intelligent and captivating, though they start to appear formal and conservative, dressed up to look subversive. A Monica Lewinsky joke here, or a Jimi Hendrix-Giovanni Boccaccio comparison there.
Much of Songs and Sonnets appears occupied by Muldoon's personal interaction with his adopted American home. Nearly every poem contains some sort of American sensibility –– not least in the Buddy Holly tribute sonnet "Honey," which underscores the origins of the American pop song form present in Muldoon's own Songs. Other fine examples are the fading echoes of outlaw country in "The Last Great Country Song;" the lament for a disappeared, and possibly mythical, individualism in "It Won't Be Anytime Soon;" and "The Hillbilly Hilton," a send-up of American redneck stereotypes that's by turns hilarious and hideous. In "3-Car Garage" the aging members of the love generation are now driving Toyotas, downloading "Spirit in the Sky" onto their iPods, and have exchanged LSD for dropping "amino acid / Like ancient hippies do." It's funny and incisive but too sweet to be an indictment, and its upper middle class, upper middle age world certainly must not be foreign to Muldoon's own.
Considering its cultural antecedents it's no surprise that Muldoon's collages and bizzaro mixtures of high- and low-brow echo some of Bob Dylan's finest mid-'60s work. Dylan exhibited a unique ability to use disparate, unequal parts and form a whole out of them. In his rambling, carnivalesque pieces –– take "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" for example –– he could take a Capt. Ahab look-alike; set pieces like diners, phone booths, flags, bums; dazzling and nonsensical geography; and a hallucinatory, or hallucinogenic, sense of humor and make the listener feel as if they were witnessing the birth of America in the span of 6 or 7 minutes.
Considering many of Dylan's chosen ingredients, Songs and Sonnets would appear as an answer of sorts. But unlike Dylan's fabricated or adopted characters, who gain real permanence in his songs (Ma Rainey, Paul Revere, Mr. Jones, Queen Jane, etc.), most of Muldoon's characters pop up briefly: Bill Clinton, Holden Caulfield, Hieronymus Bosch, and King Lear all show up as if to a casting call, but only on occasion do they stay for a while and make themselves at home in a poem; such excellent occasions include Buddy Holly in "Honey," Rachel in "Hey Rachel," and the unlikely yet true-life pairing of terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki and Dickens' own brain-children in "Pip and Magwitch."
But Songs and Sonnets hardly falls short of some arbitrary mid-20th century pop-art watermark. Perhaps the entire collection is a statement on 21st century affairs and anxieties; an argument that it is impossible now, as it may have been in Dylan's '60s, to continue to construct a generative whole from fragmented pieces; that all we can do now is exist within the swirl of attention span-challenged post-modernity and take the grossness, the crudity and banality, and instead of fighting it, simply laugh it off and turn up the volume.
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