This year’s Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading featured Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon, who spoke to an engaged audience on Sunday evening at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Muldoon is currently a professor at Princeton University, and he possesses a kind of academic charisma that commands a lecture hall. He has a compelling stage presence, even though for most of the show he stood below the stage in order to better interact with the audience.
Muldoon is perhaps best known to college students for his often-anthologized piece, “Why Brownlee Left.” At last weekend’s reading, however, he focused on some of his new and lesser-known works.
He read a series of poems on a variety of subjects, from lost love to a hole in the wall in his New Jersey home. His work is brief and striking. It’s also especially clever, using word play, puns and allusions to approach common subjects from a unique angle.
His poem, “Cleaning up My Act,” employs these techniques to a humorous effect. This piece contains the amusing yet insightful quotation, “I’m hoping to be filthy rich, that’s why I’m cleaning up my act.”
Another piece, “The Big Twist,” includes many classic film references.
But Muldoon’s most interesting material comes from his new book, The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics, which was released February of this year. In this collection, Muldoon takes inspiration from the tradition of Irish poetry as well as contemporary rock music. Many of the lyrics have even been put to music and recorded by a Princeton NJ band, The Wayside Shrines. (Muldoon is listed as their guitarist as well as lyricist.)
“Elephant Anthem” was the first piece Muldoon read from The Word on the Street. Like the other poems in the collection, it offers a synthesis of lyric poetry and popular song.
The best of these rock songs/poems is probably “Come Back.” It is full of evocative rock ’n roll imagery. Muldoon mentions “Bruce” at the “Stone Pony,” a reference to Bruce Springsteen’s time in Asbury Park, NJ. The poem also evokes memories of The Who in the 60s, when wild drummer Keith Moon drove his Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.
Then there’s the old band ready to make their comeback at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, even though they have “only two surviving members.” This may be another allusion to The Who — whose most recent tour featured two of the original musicians (the others having passed away) — but given rock stars’ tendency to die young, this line could refer to any number of reunited classic rock bands missing a few key members.
In addition to reading from his books of poetry, Muldoon also engaged in a conversation with the audience. He spoke about his late sister, whose death found its way into his writing.
He also offered some insights on poets and poetry. He revealed that he actually finds it harder to write the more he does it. As Muldoon says, the longer one does something, the worse one gets. This statement is somewhat discouraging for veteran poets, but also inspiring for young, inexperienced artists.
Since Muldoon serves as the poetry editor for the New Yorker, one audience member asked him to divulge some juicy details about the job. But Muldoon assured the crowd that he’d never been offered any bribes.
Muldoon also displayed a good amount of humor in his asides to the audience. When he was on the stage, he stood with his feet dangling over the edge. He commented on his precarious position by explaining that he likes to keep people on edge. This applies to his stance as well as his poetry.
The Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading is not the first event to bring Paul Muldoon to the Hopkins area. In fact, he gave the Turnbull Lecture for the Writing Seminars department in 2010. Since he is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the United States, he will hopefully be back in Baltimore soon.
