Chapter 1 New Weather New Weather precipitated upon the poetic scene with ‘all the appearance of a monstrous refrain.’1 Wright’s comment echoes Shklovsky’s sense of alienation, Adorno’s attention to the radically dark and Derrida’s idea of monstrosity. His observation also singles out the position of language in Muldoon’s poetry. By a whimsical typographical mishap, Muldoon’s first and critically acclaimed vol- ume in 1973 ended up being printed in italics. This unfortunate error caused the ‘monstrous’ alienation. The misprint and its evaluation by Wright probably also funnelled Muldoon’s language energies, as misprisions and apparently un- accountable italics remain characteristic features of all his poetry. Certainly, this unexpected deviancy from ordinary print standards heralded the iteration in Muldoon’s poetry of the beastly, the alienated and the unheimlich, but it also occasioned his incessant incorporation of citations, whether they are acknowl- edged, as in some places, or not, as is frequently the case. Furthermore, the quirkiness of the extended italicisation and its many implications – citation, irony, otherness, distance – highlight the paradoxicality and aporetic opera- tions of language, all the moments when language communicates more or less than what is immediately apparent, when it turns against itself, contradicts it- self, and does not add up – all the incongruities of language that Muldoon so often deploys for unsettling and polysemous effects. The very graphic aber- rancy also points to his wayward imagination, to his proclivity for choosing concerns out of the ordinary, and to those instances that counteract the con- cept or tradition from which they depart. Strikingly, of course, the misprision salutes serendipity as an important factor in his creativity, just as much as the extended character of the anomaly intimates the type of mannerism for which he has often been critiqued. In all respects, this fortuitous happenstance high- lights Muldoon’s multifarious meanderings in language throughout his career, but also many of the specific features of New Weather itself. The social crisis in Northern Ireland of the 1970s raised questions about the moral responsibility of the arts, and about the capacity of language to express the chaotic situation and to address the unspeakable atrocities. Still, few poets seemed to doubt the solidity of language and its ability to refer, however obliquely, to the vagaries of politics and conflict without troubling the medium 1 Christopher Wright, ‘Vaguely Nouvelle: New Weather by Paul Muldoon,’ Times Literary Sup- plement, 20 April 1973, 442. © RUBEN MOI, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004355118_003 Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 License. from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:37:44PM via free access <UN> 20 Chapter 1 itself. Thomas Kinsella accepts, with an underlying tone of historical determin- ism, the displaced and fractured language position of the contemporary poet as ‘gapped, discontinuous, polyglot’ and resigns himself to pessimism: ‘I am certain that a great part of the significance of my own past, as I try to write my poetry, is that that past is mutilated.’2 But this unsatisfactory condition of lan- guage is a result of history, not a linguistic phenomenon in itself. As opposed to Kinsella’s acceptance of fractured conditions, Michael Hartnett attempted to overcome fissures by reverting to writing in Gaelic in the 1970s. In spite of his acute awareness of the two traditions of Irish language, Heaney distances him- self firmly from any conception of language as not always being identical to itself.3 Questions of identity, history and nation tend to exclude any scepticism towards language itself in these poet’s reflections on the artistic medium. Nor is destabilised language a prominent feature in Michael Longley, Derek Mahon or Frank Ormsby’s poetry. Even in the self-reflexive language of Ciaran Carson, frictions ensue more from historical contingency, national difference and so- cial conditioning than from the problematics of language itself. In Muldoon’s verses the reverse tends to be the case. Together with a grow- ing awareness and acceptance of the inconsistencies of his own artistic medi- um, his discontent with the soldering of poetic language to the imperatives of the political situation amounts to another occasion for resorting to a language that is split against itself. Like his fellow poets, Muldoon admits to the signifi- cance of Northern Ireland in his balancing of aesthetic awareness and social situation, but only with a wariness and distrust that set him apart from those fellow poets: Poems about the Irish ‘situation’? The Irish situation is a terrible alba- tross. Somehow if you don’t approach it, you’re copping out. If you do approach it, you’re cashing in. You can never win.4 Another comment acknowledges the same problem, but also proposes some strategies for dealing with it, many of which are deftly deployed in this volume, to avoid too direct involvement with the crisis: 2 Kinsella, ‘The Irish Writer,’ 66. 3 For Heaney’s reservations against deconstructionist thinking and Muldoon’s poetry, see ‘The Prenatal Mountain: Vision and Irony in Recent Irish Poetry,’ in The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 36–53. 4 Kathleen McCracken, ‘A Northern Perspective: Dual Vision in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon,’ Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 16, no. 2 (1990), 101. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:37:44PM via free access <UN> New Weather 21 Yes, a poem does make a comment, if you live in a society, you’re bound to reflect what happens in that society. That becomes complicated in the case of living in Northern Ireland. The poems I’ve written about the po- litical situation there tend to be oblique, and I think properly so: they tend to look slightly farther back at the society from which the situation erupted, at why we are how we are now.5 In this respect, all the citational incertitude, haunting self-alienation and ran- dom reality of the italicisation in the first edition of New Weather, ‘the mon- strous refrain,’ reflect the fractured conditions of language, but also give new impetus to the poetic language, in responding to the fraught conditions to which it relates. In 1973, at the peak of military conflict and in the wake of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, Muldoon articulates in New Weather an impatience with the orientations of his contemporary society, and presents new departures in the artistic temperament, which may also chart variations in the political climate. The beastly, strange and bristly texture of the italicised verses is also cap- tured with craft and cunning by the frontispiece hedgehog. In Irish nature po- etry, the hedgehog is a rare animal, but it survives from the hinterland of Ae- sop’s fable of canniness and compassion to make a rare appearance at the beginning of Muldoon’s writing, only to disappear in his metaphorical fauna of dogs, birds and cows and, first and foremost, his consistent fascination with horses. As opposed to the extinct Irish elk, the hedgehog still survives as a sym- bol of the human race at risk of precipitating its extinction by its own means of protection or unchecked technological progress. Sombre associations like these form a backdrop to the fragile customs and lore from which many of the poems in the volume take their inspiration. ‘Hedgehog’ itself retains a mytho- logical backdrop while it burrows into the individual psychology, collective mentality and religious atmosphere of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. However, it is as a creature of creative language, Muldoon’s in particular, that the metaphor assumes its most vital abrasiveness and vulnerability. Shklovsky regards language and horses as two vital types of alienation. This estranged combination runs continuously throughout Muldoon’s poetry. There is little doubt that this Muldonic manifestation of language and hedgehog offers unique, interrogative and recalcitrant ostranenie. Quite naturally, the hedge- hog works as a symbol of all the languages that have already been decimated by standardisation and global language processes. Even more, in its rarity and beastliness the hedgehog appears as a striking visual symbol of the scarcity 5 Haffenden, Viewpoints, 136–137. Ruben Moi - 9789004355118 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 06:37:44PM via free access <UN> 22 Chapter 1 and otherness of poetic language: an art which is often unseen by large strata of the society to which it relates with circumspection. We say, Hedgehog, come out of yourself and we will love you. We mean no harm. We want only to listen to what you have to say. We want your answers to our questions. The hedgehog gives nothing away, keeping itself to itself. (27) Silent, like a poem enfolded upon its own secrets, the hedgehog refrains from changing form, and resists the impositions of the crowd. The stern syntax and the pressing demands from a collective group reveal that the apparently inex- plicable reticence and incertitude of the frightened mammal may not be un- warranted. In its distinctiveness and silent secrecy, ‘Hedgehog’ could reflect in general the New Critical separation of the poetic from referential language and its hermeticism appears as an exemplary emblem of Empson’s self-inwoven simile, which occurs repeatedly in this volume.6 Similarly, the internal prob- lems of an aesthetic that turns inwards towards itself and away from represen- tational affinities at a time of war shares many similarities with Adorno’s aesthetic theories and his call for ‘a radically darkened art.’7 One might argue that the technical achievement, accessible imagery and broad vocabulary of Muldoon’s collection are incompatible with Adorno’s ideas of negative aes- thetics and ‘radically darkened art,’ yet as a symbol of poetry in general, and Northern Irish poetry throughout the Troubles in particular, the hedgehog cap- tures, from an alternative perspective, the panorama of Adorno’s ontological 6 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Hogarth Press, [1930] 1984), 160–161.