Horse Latitudes

Chapter 10 Horse Latitudes ‘Presto: we are in the horse latitudes of language, from which we’ll never get out,’ critic William Pratt writes of Horse Latitudes. His reservations echo clearly Jameson’s treatise, The Prison House of Language, and critique of Derrida’s philosophical project as a vortex of adlinguistic reduction.1 His comment also reveals that Muldoon’s poetry is as language-focused as ever, and that com- mentators have become increasingly sensitised to the language of Paul Mul- doon’s poetry. Muldoon’s tenth volume of poetry from Faber and Faber in the year he added the European Prize for Poetry to his extensive list of awards, 2006, continues the prominent interest in the functions, inconsistencies and complexities of language. The familiar subject matter of sorrow and despair and of Adornian existential crisis is still in evidence; the volume delves into cancer, death and war. The ambiguities of ‘keeping that wound green’ from Moy Sand and Gravel (3), in the sense of cultivating or curing crisis and trauma, with particular connotations of Irish issues, suggest one of the recurrent threads of this volume too. Questions of how to tackle and overcome individual crisis and public catastrophe prevail in the volume. From war on the very first page through disease and massacre in the following poems, the volume traverses a full gamut of woes: personal, social, political, historical and medical. This latter medical realm of adversity finds expression in pathological ter- minology, from ‘Hypersarcoma’ (a tumour-related bodily excrescence) to ‘mes- otheliomata’ – Muldoon’s coinage for the stigmata of malignant tumour of tissue, especially lungs and abdomen – on the last page. This time Muldoon’s sister is incorporated in the catalogue of death by cancer – ‘In Memory of Mau- reen Muldoon 1953–2005’ – as is his friend and fellow artist Warren Zevon, who died of pleural mesothelioma in 2003. Thematically, the verses include consid- eration of individual love and loss in the contexts of violence and war, and they commemorate family and friends while also, on occasion, reverting to Irish matters. Personal pain is always placed in a wider perspective in poker-faced avoidance of unchecked emotionalism, nostalgia and self-pity. Concerns of 1 William Pratt, ‘Review of Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon,’ World Literature Today 81, no. 5 (2007), 71; Jürgen Habermas, ‘Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derri- da’s Critique of Phonocentrism,’ in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Pol- ity Press, 1987), 161–184. © RUBEN MOI, �� | doi:10.1163/9789004355118_01� Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:51:09AM via free access <UN> Horse Latitudes 303 Ireland and America are always balanced by a larger world, which also suffers from pain and affliction. Muldoon’s language is nevertheless fresh in form. How to construe the longer units of langue remains one of the main guiding principles for this volume. Perhaps the sentence, in all its protean powers, runs even more smoothly now, and assumes ever more variegated contours of symbolic significance. Sentence-specific exhortations still decide prosody and composition, and augment the hermeneutic range. Some of the turns are new, some of them are es- tablished. How does the careful construction of sentences that reflect their own composition augment the individual poem’s significance? ‘The Outlier’ composes its own sentences with Euclidean logic and precision. How far can a sentence be stretched in a single poem while still retaining sense and cohe- sion? ‘Tithonus’ runs a single sentence across 28 lines. ‘Turkey Buzzards’ em- ploys a single sentence for over 100 lines in 25 quatrains. How short can a sentence be and how many sentences can you compress into a few lines? Many of the haikus in ’90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore’ include sentences, number ‘iii’ possibly seven – a sentence minimalism that mirrors the sonnet minimalism in the Sunlight Soap italicette in ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ (Q, 62). Haikus operate as prison cells for sentences and the instant messages series resembles another Muldoonesque alterrative, almost a Madoc in haiku form, an intergeneric splicing of Japanese minimalist form with the entangled narratives of Tom Moore’s art and life, and Muldoon’s own literature and life. If the Sunlight Soap italicette in Quoof remains the microscopic test cell for empowering the sonnet tradition by ultimate poetic economy, the tra- ditional Japanese form offers similar artistic motivation. In far less space. Muldoon’s three-line stanzas contain a number of sentences that run from one to seven, depending, naturally, on the definition of the sentence. If ‘sentence’ is defined along the standard lines of words in connected speech and writing that express a single thought between one full stop and the other, then haiku ‘iii’ includes seven sentences that tend to place themselves ambiguously across the ordinary categories of discursive functions from declarative and interrogative to imperative and exclamatory. The thought that Muldoon serves some sentence even though he is now free and no longer a prisoner, as the lines in ‘Two Stabs at Oscar’ (msg, 65) imply, also informs and illuminates Horse Latitudes. One-sentence sonnets – ‘Starlings, Broad Street, Trenton, 2003,’ ‘Now Pitching Himself Like a Forlorn Hope’ and ‘Hedge School,’ – appear again with their own compositional logic; ‘The Coyote’ turns a sentence over six tercets and a large number of one-sentence stanzas also occur. Striking refrains and repetitions characterise ‘At Least They Weren’t Speaking French,’ ‘Flags and Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:51:09AM via free access <UN> 304 Chapter 10 Emblems,’ ‘The Outlier’ and ‘The Old Country.’ Several poems continue the turning of the sentence: ‘Flags and Emblems’ starts with a wh-sentence and retains an interrogative stance, ‘Tithonus’ and ‘Hedge School’ start with a nega- tive clause. Numerous poems start with clauses and phrases of all kinds, any- thing but a full sentence. An incessant exploitation and questioning of diverse modes of poetic language – rhymes and rhythms, form and prosody, idioms and vocabulary, sentence and syntax – are characteristic of the volume as a whole, together with a refined capacity to prise open the hermeneutic possi- bilities of language variation in larger contexts. Such critical reviewing of the very medium of art maintains the connection between Muldoon’s language and the many contexts with which it interacts. His incessant auto-critical crea- tivity also retains ethical responsibility, and bears sentence upon self-glorify- ing and self-exonerating discourses. The man, who according to fellow poet Michael Longley can rhyme a cat with a dog, continues his aural extravaganza with ‘circus / Sargasso,’ ‘radiator / off-roader,’ ‘other / weather,’ ‘of palm / salaam’ (26), ‘undies / Sundays’ (38), ‘lieu- tenants / pennants’ (56), ‘raw recruits / parachutes’ (63) and ‘Izaac Walton / Coast subaltern’ (97).2 Decisive couplets, narrative haikus, deft tercets, com- plex quatrains, refined roundels and resourceful villanelles complement the reign of metamorphic sonnets. Sound and structure are paralleled by numerological specificity. ‘90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore’ (53–76) overlaps in numerological structure and intratextual technique with the 90 tercets in ‘Silly- how Stride’ (95–107). ‘The Old Country’ portrays familiar ground in a series of thirteen sonnets, an obvious numerological and formal combination of mis- fortune and love. Furthermore, despite its rejuvenations, the strings of solid rhymes, clichés and proverbs in this poem serve as a template for jaded spirits: ‘Every resort was a last resort / with a harbour that harboured an old grudge. / Every sale was a selling short’ (39). The poet who once renovated the status of cliché – ‘Yes, well clichés are clichés for very good reasons. There’s a hell of a lot in them’ – has a field day with linguistic, conceptual and national clichés that exploit the span between satire and seriousness that the serioludic ambiguities of ‘keeping that wound green’ opened up in ‘Hard Drive’ (msg, 3).3 Interwoven simile, used with such force in his earliest volumes, reappears in protracted form in ‘Eggs.’ A formidable formal dexterity, vocabulary beyond the Oxford English Dictionary, linguistic questioning, impossible rhymes, contextual awareness, intrapoetic orchestration and a final crescendo are some of the sta- ple standards Muldoon has set for his own art from the very beginning. Verses 2 Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian, 29; Haffenden, Viewpoints, 141. 3 Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon,’ 83. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:51:09AM via free access <UN> Horse Latitudes 305 also thrive on semantic confusion, for example over the beans and instruments of flageolet (69–70). Synonyms abound, for example ‘weasel,’ ‘whitrack’ and ‘whitterick’ in ‘The Old Country.’ Muldoon still masters the myriads of possi- bilities that language can draw from, but in Horse Latitudes, like in Moy Sand and Gravel, there tends to be more of a drive towards the polished and the constructive than towards the pitfalls and more deconstructive aspects of language. Many critics comment on the language of Horse Latitudes, both with admi- ration and in less favourable terms. Jason B. Jones notes that in his ability ‘to infuse the most arcane language and strictest forms with urgent meaning, Mul- doon unleashes the innovative force of repetition.’4 Langdon Hammer follows suit in his review, which pivots upon the discussion of the serious and ludic qualities of Muldoon’s poetry, and concludes: ‘In Anglo-Saxon “silly” meant “blessed,” and “sillyhow” is an archaic, probably Scottish word for a holy caul, or mask. Muldoon’s wit and wordplay can be seen as that, a mask.

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