By Michael H. Miller 2/12 4:11pm

books

Portrait Of Paul Muldoon

Poet Crossing: Regarding ‘Word on the Street,’ Rock Lyrics by Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon’s new collection of poems feels nearly inevitable: it is actually a book of rock lyrics, complete with an accompanying CD of a band called Wayside Shrines playing some selections. Mr. Muldoon famously collaborated with Warren Zevon, and much of the poet’s work has played with lyric in some way. The title poem of his last collection, 2010’s Maggot, is a cycle of nine modified Petrarchan sonnets, each woven together by a common refrain at the volta, which toys as much with pop-music sentiment as the rest of the poem does with lyric in the more classical sense of the word: “Where I’m waiting for some lover / to kick me out of bed / for having acted on a whim.” He’s also written a poem, loosely structured as a blues song with one short line repeating twice, about Bob Dylan receiving an honorary degree from Princeton, where Mr. Muldoon, who was born in Northern Ireland, now lives and teaches. The long poem “Sillyhow Stride” is a free-verse elegy for the late Mr. Zevon set at the 2004 Grammy Awards. Read More

By Michael H. Miller 8/01/12 9:30am

Music

Mr. Tyler.

Dude (Looks Like a Poet)! Backstage with Aerosmith and Paul Muldoon

Two summers ago, I went to a reading that the poet Paul Muldoon was giving in a black box theater on the third floor of a nondescript building in Hell’s Kitchen. He read from a galley of his 2010 collection of poems, Maggot, and marked copy errors with a pen as he went along. John Ashbery joined him, reading handwritten translations of Rimbaud scrawled out on a yellow legal pad. There were mice scurrying around and about 20 people in the room, who were polite and subdued. A month later I interviewed Mr. Muldoon, who has been The New Yorker‘s poetry editor since 2007, over the course of two days, at Robert Frost’s farm in Ripton, Vt., where he summers. On the second night, we attended a bluegrass festival at the foot of a mountain, which attracted the kinds of backwoods crowds that drive to concerts in beat-up RVs and all-terrain vehicles. We must have heard four renditions of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Mr. Muldoon heckled the bands by shouting, “Go electric!”

I was only vaguely taken aback, then, when I received an email from him in June that read: “I think we need to continue our tradition of going to cheesy shows. Aerosmith and Cheap Trick on July 24? P.” Read More

6/22/10 9:21pm

PoetrySave the Arts

A Poem Is No Less Sacred

Earlier this month, I saw poets Paul Muldoon and John Ashbery read at a small, 60-seat venue in Hell’s Kitchen called Medicine Show Theatre. I’d never heard of the place. There was no sign on the door and scaffolding shrouded the entrance. I paid $5 and sat in a room with about 40 Read More