In this new collection, the title work finds Mr. Muldoon rewriting “Heard It Through the Grapevine”: “It’s all still sweet / It’s all hunky-dory / But the word on the street / That’s another story.” “The word on the street,” he continues, “Is you’re splitting.” He restrains himself here, structurally at least, punching up his humor and making his lines catchy. “Jersey Fresh” is a giddy recollection of buying fruit at “a roadside stand / Off I-78.” “It’s never too late for rock ’n’ roll,” he offers in one poem.

Of course, this is still Paul Muldoon. While these lyrics follow a more rigid, verse/chorus/verse structure than many of his poems, there are lines that are heavy with allusions and obsessed with their own creation, as is characteristic of the poet. “Dream Team,” for instance, is the only ostensible rock lyric I know of to make use of “petard,” a 16th-century French term derived from the Latin peditum, which is a kind of mild explosive used to open castle gates. The poem references a number of famous duos—Lennon and McCartney, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, strawberries and cream—in order to contextualize a lost friendship:

We used to be buddies

In our college days

The spine and the shudder

The Mets and Willie Mays

The petard on which we’re hoist …

That last line became a proverb after its use, in different form, in Hamlet, when our titular hero replaces his name on a death warrant with the names of his double-crossing school pals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It’s basically a complicated way of saying their plan has backfired, though petard’s other meaning—“to break wind”—brings to mind all the hot air Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spout in Shakespeare’s play. Its inclusion here, despite the breezy (get it?) rhythm and nostalgic refrain (“We were a dream / We were a dream ...”), suggests a darker side to the dying friendship than the poet reveals on the surface.

Shakespeare notwithstanding, the work in this book mostly resembles the wordy lyrics of another New Jersey poet, Bruce Springsteen. “Jezebel Was a Jersey Belle” is something like “Kitty’s Back”—Mr. Springsteen’s anthem of a Jersey chick who falls for a “city dude”—mixed with the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” Mr. Muldoon lists female companions from across the country—Delilah from Delaware, Ilana from Illinois (“she wasn’t at all double-dealing / though she dealt heroin”)—before going into the refrain: “Even the dogs in the street could tell / Jezebel was a Jersey belle.”

“Comeback,” one of the strongest poems in the book, begs to be compared to the hustlers, losers and two-timers of Mr. Springsteen’s songs. The first lines are, “We were introduced by Bruce / At the Stone Pony,” the venerable Asbury Park music venue, and it continues with a blistering critique of the music industry:

All that concentrated juice

Standing room only

You were with some suit

From EMI or Sony

Who was so full of toot

He called for “Mony Mony”

It brings to mind the bridge of Mr. Springsteen’s first single, “Blinded by the Light,” which failed to launch the Boss’s career in 1973, but hit No. 1 on the Billboard pop charts when it was covered a few years later—despicably—by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: “Some silicone sister with her manager’s mister told me I got what it takes / She said, ‘I’ll turn you on, sonny, to something strong if you play that song with the funky break.’”

What both Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Muldoon seem to realize is that a rock lyric does not have to force its poetic prowess. The “go-cart Mozarts” and “racket boys” on the boardwalk of Mr. Springsteen’s lyrics occupy the same place as the fact-checker who can’t properly trace the root of pilus in Mr. Muldoon’s “News Headlines from the Homer Noble Farm,” or the barley farmer who abandons his land without a word in “Why Brownlee Left.” They are symptoms of a larger sadness brewing in the space between the philosophical and the mundane. They want to escape—their town, their class, their lover—but sense the futility of retreat. The nameless band at the center of “Comeback” had “no sooner said farewell / Than it was time to reunite.” They end up back in Jersey, playing the Meadowlands, “just another band / With only two surviving members.”

Mr. Tyler.

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.”

I was aware of Mr. Muldoon’s penchant for what he calls “schlock rock.” After we’d parted ways in Vermont, he had driven to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to attend a Bon Jovi concert. His poems are filled with as many allusions to pop culture as they are with memories of his native County Armagh in Northern Ireland. In “On,” for instance, a poem from Moy Sand and Gravel, his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection from 2003, he writes about sitting in a theater just before the curtain rises, a moment that makes a section from a Gaelic eulogy pop into the narrator’s head:

I make my way alone through the hand-to-hand fighting

to A3 and A5. Red velvet. Brass and oak.

The special effects will include strobe lighting

and artificial smoke.

 A glance to A5. Patrons are reminded, mar bheadh,

that the management accepts no responsibility in the case of theft.

Mr. Muldoon.

“Sleeve Notes,” probably his most famous poem, is explicitly about rock and roll, each stanza arranged like liner notes for a canonical classic rock album. Aerosmith does not figure in it, but Mr. Muldoon does address the sort of leveling that takes place at a stadium show, where the experience of seeing one band at its peak is not so different from seeing another one far past its prime:

U2: The Joshua Tree

“When I went to hear them in Giants Stadium

a year or two ago, the whiff

of kef

brought back the night we drove all night from Palm

Springs to Blythe. No Irish lad and his lass

were so happy as we who roared and soared through yucca-scented air. Dawn brought a sense of loss…”

ROLLING STONES:Voodoo Lounge

“Giants Stadium again …Again the scent of drugs.”

Aerosmith has sold tens of millions of records worldwide and has been making music for more than 40 years. I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of the band beyond believing “Love in an Elevator,” “Living on the Edge,” “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” and a variety of other “hits” were indefensibly stupid songs.

That said, the back-to-back albums Toys in the Attic (1975) and especially Rocks (1976) are underrated American rock albums, at least among those who were not yet born when they were released and have probably had no occasion to revisit them. Unlike a lot of what came before and after, neither album sounds like feathery versions of the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. Released several years before Van Halen’s debut, and a solid decade before Guns N’ Roses, they nevertheless carry the black mark of having influenced a generation of terrible hair metal. By mere coincidence, those albums, along with their first album in 10 years, forthcoming this November, were produced by my editor’s father, Jack Douglas, who left Mr. Muldoon and me two backstage passes.

UNLIKE IN AEROSMITH’S younger days, the backstage experience now happens before the show rather than after it because they get tired. Around 7 p.m., we found ourselves in a narrow, white brick-walled, fluorescent-lighted hallway somewhere in the bowels of the IZOD Center in East Rutherford, N.J. We were introduced as “a reporter who works with Jack’s daughter” and “a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet,” a label the very humble Mr. Muldoon continuously blushed at. “It’s hard to explain to people that the Pulitzer doesn’t really matter,” he whispered to me. Mr. Muldoon is almost absurdly low key about his accomplishments—later in the night he told the guy sitting next to us that he does “a lot of things—I teach, I write some,” which seems to be roughly equivalent, at least in this scenario, to Steven Tyler saying, “I sing from time to time.”

Rick Nielsen, the guitarist from Cheap Trick, was wearing a black-and-white checkered bow tie and matching cap and handed us some guitar picks, which is his signature move at concerts; he throws handfuls of them out into the crowd. He also had sunglasses on, which, despite the hallway’s soft lighting, somehow felt necessary and appropriate. We were rushed to the catering room, where we ran into Darryl McDaniels—“D.M.C.” from Run D.M.C. He was so casual and friendly that we both felt comfortable right away.It felt oddly natural when he went right into talking very personally about how at age 35 he found out he was adopted. He had tracked down his birth mother—whom he praised for “getting me out into the world” (he said that with a forward thrust of both his hands)—but that his adoptive parents taught him everything he knows. He was wearing a t-shirt with Jim Morrison on it and looked much younger than a man approaching 50, and he seemed to register some level of disbelief that he was the same man responsible for “Tricky” and “My Adidas,” not to mention raising Aerosmith’s clout considerably by covering “Walk This Way,” a song he would join in on, onstage later in the night. When Mr. Muldoon’s Pulitzer was mentioned, Mr. McDaniels nodded solemnly and said, “Keep up the good work.” He grabbed Mr. Muldoon’s hand and told him “I need some of that poetic energy.”

Backstage.

Down the hallway toward the exit, Steven Tyler was standing near a doorway. He had on a sheer white blouse unbuttoned about halfway and low-waisted jeans that, when you followed the skinny length of his leg down to the floor, frayed out at the bottom revealing a pair of studded flip-flop sandals with socks underneath. The jewelry hanging from his neck jingled and clanged whenever he moved. This was his casual look.

When I was introduced (“This is a reporter who works with Jack’s daughter”), he said “Oh, cool!” with an enthusiasm that was either genuine or so perfectly rehearsed that I couldn’t tell the difference. He shook my hand and I noticed his nails were painted black. “Jack’s in Paris right now. You know, it was nice of our producer to tell us he was leaving the country while we’re in the middle of doing a record.” He smiled. For Steven Tyler, this meant that the bottom half of his face turned into a dark crescent shape.

“And this,” said the publicist who’d been introducing us, “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.” I registered a slight grimace on Mr. Muldoon’s end.

“A poet, huh?” Mr. Tyler said, walking closer to him. “You’re kidding.”

As if on cue, the lead singer of Aerosmith began reciting the opening stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky:”

“‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the—”

He pointed at Mr. Muldoon to finish the line.

“Well,” Mr. Muldoon exhaled, “it’s: ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe, or something to that effect.”

Mr. Tyler told Mr. Muldoon that he wished he had become a poet because he would have remembered more. “I don’t remember anything, man,” he said. But, he countered, he would have gotten laid a lot less.

“Not so sure about that,” Mr. Muldoon said. The two exchanged a look of intense—albeit brief—disagreement.

Someone further down the hallway shouted, “Steven, I want to introduce you to my friend”—and the person paused here for effect—“John Varvatos.”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Tyler said cordially and disappeared down the hall.

A ROCK CONCERT at a stadium is by its very nature populist, in the kind of accidental way that a poetry reading—even if its participants are two of the greatest living poets—is exclusive. All sports stadiums look more or less the same and there’s always the inevitable smell of a lit joint and cheap beer. What happens onstage is different each time, but the experience of watching does not change much. Everyone knows when to stand up and when to sit down, when to pull out a Zippo or a cell phone to wave in the air slowly to the rhythm of a ballad, when to stomp one’s feet for the encore, when to leave just early enough to beat the traffic.

Mr. Muldoon and I watched about five songs of Cheap Trick before retreating to get food from a lady who coughed wetly into her hand before serving us.

“So why Aerosmith?” I asked before biting into my room-temperature hot dog.

“I go to concerts instead of watching television,” Mr. Muldoon said. “I’ve always found stadium concerts to be fascinating.”

We heard the opening chords of “I Want You to Want Me” and ran to an entrance to listen, sang the words of the chorus along with everyone else, stamped our feet in unison with the crowd and then went back to talking. Next year, Mr. Muldoon will publish a book called Word on the Street, a collection of rock lyrics that will also be available as recordings made by Wayside Shrines, a band Mr. Muldoon helped put together. He’s no stranger to the form, having penned the lyrics for “My Ride’s Here” with his friend Warren Zevon. The song is like a structurally restrained version of one of Mr. Muldoon’s poems:

The Houston sky was changeless

We galloped through bluebonnets

I was wrestling with an angel

You were working on a sonnet

You said, “I believe the seraphim

Will gather up my pinto

And carry us away, Jim

Across the San Jacinto

My ride’s here.”

Aerosmith started right on time. The lights went down and a spotlight hit the stage. Mr. Tyler and Joe Perry, the lead guitarist, who has a conspicuously perfect silver streak in his hair, rose on a platform from a hole in the floor, back to back, Mr. Perry clutching a guitar, Mr. Tyler holding a microphone stand like it was a guitar. Earlier, backstage, I’d asked Mr. Tyler if he was excited to be on tour again and he’d said, “The two hours before a concert, I’m the most excited. I get to do my hair, try on outfits, put on some makeup.” He’d changed into white bell bottoms, a sequined shirt and a long, white, glittering coat with a voluminous collar. He made approximations of the fluid motions you’d recognize from the band’s music videos, but his movements were slower and choppy. They played “Love in an Elevator” and he walked to each of his bandmates, bumping them in the hip with his ass, catching the band’s second guitarist, Brad Whitford, off guard and causing him to stumble slightly. They both laughed. Two young women and a keyboard player, half-obscured by amplifiers, sang along with Mr. Tyler, whose 64-year-old voice doesn’t quite hit the high notes like it used to. There were two large fans at the base of the stage positioned just so and at any given moment at least one band member’s hair was wind-blown.

“I bet you’re wondering what we’ve been doing the last 10 years,” Mr. Tyler said between songs. “Were we busy getting fucked up?” A pause. “Or were we busy making another record? I think the latter is true!” The air around where Mr. Muldoon and I stood smelled like beer and pot. The stadium was cheering.

mmiller@observer.com

"Well," he says. "It's quiet enough."

This month brings Mr. Muldoon's 11th book of poems, Maggot. The 59-year-old Irish native writes poetry to read with the Oxford English Dictionary in hand. His stanzas are seas of subtle puns. He has been a major poet since his first collection, New Weather (published when he was just 21 years old), because of the quiet perfection of lines like, "What was he watching and waiting for/ walking Scollop every day?/ For one intending to leave at the end of the year/ who would break the laws of time and stay," from "February." He is either referring to his own memory or anyone's or creating a new myth entirely. It could be all three.

It is Mr. Muldoon's ability to walk the line between comedy and tragedy, autobiographical and universal themes, colloquial and stylized language, all with equal grace, that has made him influential. It has also branded him with labels like "postmodernist" and "difficult." Indeed, he is a jester, but only in the sense of Lear's Fool: Though he's not as grave as John Ashbery or theatrical as Anne Carson, his jokes and tricks are among poetry's most serious and illuminating examples of beauty.

In 2007, David Remnick appointed Mr. Muldoon poetry editor of The New Yorker. The choice caught some off guard--he is not American, and Alice Quinn's exit from the position was unexpected. But Mr. Muldoon has brought a freshness to the magazine's poetry section that only he could. Yes, he publishes Mr. Ashbery and C.K. Williams, but he also leaves space for emerging poets like Michael Robbins, who broke in with a controversial poem titled "Alien Vs. Predator," or for Dave Musgrave's single-line poem, "On the Inevitable Decline Into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age" ("O Sting, where is thy death?").

"One of the great things about this moment, and one of the reasons I was even interested in doing the job, is that there are many styles," Mr. Muldoon told me. "I don't have to go desperately looking for a range of poems."

Maggot is Mr. Muldoon's first collection since 2006's Horse Latitudes. He considered retiring after that book, but the impulse to write did not fade. Still, Mr. Muldoon is reluctant even to call himself a poet. "Generally," he told me, "the people who come out of the woodwork and say, 'Hey, I'm a poet. Here's a poem for you.' You say, 'Oh my God. When's the next bus?'"

Back in the moth-covered screens surrounding the porch of Homer Noble Farm, the deer flies buzzing around us, I sat and sipped coffee with Mr. Muldoon and his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. Every summer Mr. Muldoon comes here to Ripton, Vt., to teach poetry to high-school teachers at Bread Loaf (named for Bread Loaf Mountain, on which the campus rests). The corners of Mr. Muldoon's mouth are perpetually turned up in a half-smile. His eyes look red and tired, but always attentive, nearly hidden behind a pair of thin glasses and a thick mop of unruly hair.

"The phones that connect the cabin were used for Frost and the secretary to get in touch with one another," he explained.

"He was shtupping the wife," said Ms. Korelitz. "There's a phone line that connects from the house to the cabin so the wife could call up there and say, 'My husband is away.'" She raised her eyebrows.

"You say that," Mr. Muldoon said, "with such authenticity."

Mr. Muldoon was raised Catholic in Northern Ireland. His father was an illiterate farmer, his mother a schoolteacher. The house where he grew up was largely barren of books, save for an encyclopedia for children. In grammar school, he encountered a slim volume, Book of Verse for Young People, which collected the most famous stanzas of Burns, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Yeats and others. Donne's "The Flea" remains Mr. Muldoon's favorite poem ("It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,/ And in this flea our two bloods mingled be."). His interpretation typifies the seriousness with which his own poetry employs humor and sex--attributes of Donne as well: "It's the greatest pickup line in the language," he said.

He left Ireland at age 35 to teach part-time at Princeton. After a stint at Oxford, he returned to Princeton, where he is director of the Lewis Arts Center. His on-campus office, where he does much of his writing, is stacked floor to ceiling with the collected works of Auden, Bishop, Keats and every other major poet since Homer. The complete volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary sit close to his desk. Mr. Muldoon told me that when he writes, he enters something like a literary fugue state and prefers "to have absolutely no sense of what I'm doing"--echoing T.S. Eliot's belief that poetry is a giving over to the unconscious. He writes every day, as he has for nearly a half a century.

"That's the sort of phrase you read and think, 'My God! Didn't he have something better to do?'" he said. "Unfortunately, the fact that one has attempted to do it for 50 years is completely immaterial. One of the questions I have for myself is, 'Is it time to quit?' There's no point in doing it unless it's sort of half-interesting. If you're a chef, the more often you make sushi, the better you might get at it. Maybe even that's not the case, but it sure as hell isn't the case in poetry. One tends to get worse at it, if anything. And here's the thing: Even one's best friends probably wouldn't even tell you that it's not interesting."

This worry was particularly palpable with Maggot, a collection that Mr. Muldoon has his doubts about, even after it flowed out of him following a rare period of not writing poems. To be fair, Mr. Muldoon had other things to think about: raising two children, being a husband, his job as an administrator and teacher at Princeton, curating the poetry in The New Yorker. People have debated poetry's importance since Plato, but the question remains: Is poetry worth the effort when there is a life to be lived?

"Is washing one's socks worth doing?" Mr. Muldoon says. "I think poets are often their own worst enemies, engaging in these debates about 'Does poetry matter?' Really why not just get on with it? It does matter. It does matter."

Jonathan Galassi, Mr. Muldoon's publisher at FSG, told me about how Mr. Muldoon wanted to quit writing after Horse Latitudes.

"He was tired out, and yet here we are with a new book," Mr. Galassi said. "His mind is just zapping all the time with linguistic games and connections. Maggot is like a kind of résumé--a reprise of many things he's done as a writer. What it's telling you is that he can't stop writing."

"What do you think about Paul saying he's getting worse with time?" I asked.

Mr. Galassi let out a loud laugh.

MR. MULDOON BEGAN his career with these lines: "The early electric people had domesticated the wild ass/ They knew all about falling off." 

At once archaic and forward-looking, optimistic and hopeless, the words already predict and characterize Mr. Muldoon's style: He electrifies language. He uses each word not only aware of its entire history, but also activating it. With Maggot, one of his most consistent, enthralling collections, he creates a quietly connected series in which every syllable is packed with meaning. In it, he rhymes "dork" with "Scythian torc"; composes a lengthy ethereal sequence about traveling in Japan and struggling to write the poem that the reader is reading; and, in "Balls," creates poetry's greatest sex joke since Donne's "Loves Progress." The very title, Maggot, suggests myriad understandings: As a noun, the word signifies those off-putting creatures that arise hopefully out of a corpse, the single sign of life among death--but also in the word's verb form, "to fret," a word that can also mean "to gnaw," in the manner of a maggot. 

The entire book is a kind of maggoting, in every sense imaginable, predominantly derived from the paradoxes of life continuing on both in spite--and because--of death. Consider, as Mr. Muldoon would want his readers to, the etymology of the word "metaphor"--itself the operative function of any poet's work, but also the dominant linguistic technique of the recurring signifier "maggot," a sustained metaphor throughout the collection. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek metaphero, meaning "to carry over," suggesting, at once, the literal connotations of the noun maggot (organic life "carrying over" as a result of death), but also the symbolic nature of such reciprocity as a poetical trope.

Such a delightfully antithetical (and antithetically delightful) notion repeats itself in the strange contradictions of Maggot's best images: "maggots, for their part,/ are content to be in a crowd scene from which they'll nonetheless depart/ about as gracefully as Swift would retire/ from a debate on the slave trade," or a girl with a tattoo that reads, "I REGRET THIS." For all his claims of ignorance, Mr. Muldoon has crafted a highly nuanced, interconnected text, one that demands to be appreciated at all levels of interpretation.

THE DAY I left Vermont, Mr. Muldoon was on his way to a Jon Bon Jovi concert in Saratoga Springs. We were driving in his Prius.

"Are you a Bon Jovi fan?" he asked.

"No."

"Me neither. But I feel like I should go to this. It's a sociological experiment."

He drummed on the steering wheel of his car, singing Bon Jovi lyrics, hiding his Irish accent beneath an approximation of Mr. Bon Jovi's Jersey croon.

"You give love a bad na-ame!"

There is a potential poem here.

He said he "takes a stab or two at playing guitar."

It was strange to hear him say this. He talks of his poetry with a similar air of informality: a hobby he takes a "stab" at. I recalled a conversation we had in his office the previous month. We sat surrounded by the collections of influential poets, his own books buried away on the shelves.

"I don't think of myself as a professional poet at all." His voice was serious, but his face was still half-smiling.

"Do you think there are any professional poets?" I asked.

"Um." He paused for a long time.

"Because that begs the question: If you are not a professional poet--"

"Who would be, is that it? There's something about being a poet that's different from being a physician. If I were a physician and I were to say to you, 'Yeah, I sort of try to be a physician,' you would think, 'Well I better find somebody else to do this.' If one could pass oneself off as not just a poet, but a good poet, maybe it would be easier to say, 'I'm a poet.' But because I wouldn't want to be a poet at all unless I were a good one, and I think this is true of many people, one would tend not to say it. Maybe it's just time to embrace it and say this is what I do. For better or worse. This is what I do."

mmiller@observer.com

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 other people as two of the great living poets read from their work.

Only in New York, I thought. But maybe not for long-as massive budget cuts threaten New York culture's beating heart.

The looming devastation to the city's arts budget is even more frightening in light of England's comparably anticlimactic cuts late last week. Arts Council England (ACE) announced it would be cutting just 0.5 percent of funding for each of the 808 organizations that it supports every year. This amount-far less than expected-comes as "a relief" for everyone, as The Guardian reported. It still means a £142,000 loss for the Royal Opera House and £80,000 for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The average cut was £2,000.

ACE's budget was £575 million for fiscal year 2009/10. It has been chopped by a total of £23 million this year. The cuts were mitigated using £9 million in the council's reserve funds; they're now at a relatively meager 0.5 percent across the board. These British institutions will stay in business, most with little change to the daily routine for now. New York should be so lucky. If the proposed cuts go through July 1, the New York State Council on the Arts will see a 40 percent decrease in its budget, from $41.6 million to $25.2 million. The Public Theater's city funding would drop from $700,000 to $450,000, forcing it to stage one less week of Shakespeare in the Park this summer, and possibly to consider layoffs. Brooklyn Academy of Music would lose $1 million-the largest single-year drop in funding in the organization's history. BAM has no plan in place, but such a drastic decrease will undoubtedly cause changes in programming and freeze positions within the organization.

And as for the far smaller Medicine Show Theatre? It receives roughly $10,000 annually from the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council combined. If that money is cut back significantly, "I don't know what we're going to do," said Barbara Vann, Medicine Show Theatre's artistic director. "You either have to be rich or beg."

At the end of Mr. Muldoon and Mr. Ashbery's reading at Medicine Show Theatre, Ms. Vann made a plea for donations, lamenting the fate of the small performance space. A line from one of Mr. Muldoon's poems stuck with me as I walked out onto West 52nd street.

"It was too late to insist that the body of a poem is no less sacred than a temple."

Let's hope not.

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