Maggots and Language in Paul Muldoon's Maggot

Abstract

‘Like the whorl of an out-of-this-world ear…,’ (74) run the first words of the one-sentence, four-stanza sign-centered sonnet ‘@.’ The most fluorescent language poem in Maggot appears as a very apposite sign of what can be termed Muldoonian ‘p@stmodernism.’ The term signals mainly post-Madoc poems in Muldoon’s poetry, from e.g. ‘Crossing the Line’ and ‘The Plot’ to several in this volume, which engage with the ethical consequences of what appears to be merely an issue of linguistic or technical interest. ‘@’ swirls with four subordinate clauses that never amount to a sentence in a very enigmatic, language-conscious ‘hacked’ sonnet that, in keeping with our digital era, reflects upon the history and consequences of new media. Undoubtedly, the digital reformation of the last few decades has entailed serious ethical dilemmas for our civilisation, dilemmas not unique to the current epoch of WikiLeaks, the Snowden case and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which have put these issues before the general public in unprecedented ways. Other poems in the volume delve more directly, i.e. in terms of Muldoonian language, into Adornian aspects of existential darkness. Lines like ‘Who knew that humus might lie beneath “humane”?’ (65) and ‘Maybe you’ll give me a sign?’ (73), for example, present two discrete sentences from the murder investigations in ‘The Humors of Hakone’ and the war, siege and starvation in ‘Love Poem with Pig.’ They highlight yet again the confluence of language and dark themes in Muldoon’s poetic language. The language in Muldoon’s eleventh volume in 2010 is still extraordinary, conspicuous and conducive to speculation on the human condition, way beyond Kennedy-Andrew’s binary evaluation that sees Muldoon as an ‘emotionally evasive joker’ who displays, nevertheless, a ‘profound ethical seriousness.’1 Self-reflexive quips and questions with ethical, existential and metaphysical depth, such as those quoted above, appear throughout the volume. Etymological detours, homonymic serendipity, subtle sound distributions, abstruse sonnets, circular sentences and semiotic superabundance, just to mention a few phenomena, still mark his poetry. Many titles, from the opening ‘Plan B’ via ‘Nope,’ ‘Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett,’ ‘Ohrwurm,’ ‘@,’ ‘Lines for the Quatercentenary of the Voyage of the Halve Maen’ to ‘Yup’ and ‘Balls,’ attract attention to letters, slang, syntactic units, other languages, signs, bawdiness, polysemantic undecidability and many other linguistic phenomena that creep and crawl, hop and stop, fly and flutter in and across most poems in the volume, including the poems without titles that flag their linguistic experimentation. Metaphorically, beasts and birds also suggest Muldoonian language, sentence, form and matter – not least the titular maggot. And as a beast of alienation and estrangement, maggots compare unfavorably with horses and tend to turn Shklovsky’s defamiliarising horses into apparently loveable pets.