Madoc: A Mystery

Stephen Colbert read from this with Paul Muldoon. I didn't really care for the poem, but if Stephen Colbert reads it it must be a 5/5.

While I have never actually read this, or heard of this guy before he appeared on the Colbert Report, it must be pure genius because Colbert said so. If anyone disagrees, you have the Colbert Nation to contend with. In my humble opinion, or at least the one Colbert gave me, this should be the number one poetry book in the nation by tomorrow morning. Talk about a Colbert bump.

I'd put off this work fearing its opacity. Muldoon's progressed into ever more difficult territory in his collections, and for a poet still relatively young (just over 50), he reminds me of a musical prodigy (first volume at 23) who's not fallen victim to trends, nostalgia, or predictability. I tackled these 250 poems ready for a challenge, and received one. The headings with a major Western thinker helped me in the way that Joyce's scheme aided readers of Ulysses: the titles are detached from the work--in brackets--yet need to be integrated into the poetic sequences. Like Joyce's Homeric template, how each thinker fits into the poem below remains rather obscure to those of us lacking a knowledge of 250 big names in Western thought. Puns, wordplay, imagery, and content sometimes surfaced recognisably, but many of the names were only vaguely recalled by me or not at all. Surely a thesis awaits on their correspondences. Meanwhile, the narrative itself remains clever throughout. Its fragmentation depicts well the colonial utopian dream being shattered by Native and post-colonial realities, although I was disappointed that the whole Madoc-Mandan-"Welsh Indian" topic remained, as the subtitle perhaps indicates, a "mystery" barely acknowledged. Muldoon's more engaging, IMHO, than his near-counterpart in age and origin Seamus Heaney, for PM possesses less of a gravitas and more intellectual playfulness in his concentration of an almost cinematic, and non-agrarian, employment of myth, action, and reaction within the mind of his characters. He's set himself a grand canvas upon which to paint his masterpiece here, and he's not so transparent that he easily exhausts close readings. Like musicians in it for the long haul, he's still improving after decades of honing his craft, and this work, while surely for a rather recondite reader, rewards and entices in its flirtatious teasing of what we can know and what remains enigmatic, a mystery despite manifest destiny and all the philosophies we can accumulate, in books or in life's own battle.

An Irish poet who has become, or must be becoming, an American poet does more than bridge the Atlantic with this grand work, singlehandedly with it he redefines American literature. Monticello through Lewis and Clark to Chomsky, Detrrida and Hawking, he, phrasing in its final lines, "...has sent a shiver, de dum, de dum,..." The poem's complexity pushes the sum of all Western tradition from the Classical Greeks to sinter in the American crucible. It is a poem about our history.

Even as a longtime fan of Muldoon's, expecting a certain amount of obscurity, I found this book-length poem unexpectedly difficult. The text is studded with obscure historical and poetic references, no doubt intentionally producing a constant feeling that one is missing some of the point. But the sheer virtuosity of the work more than makes up for it -- the profundity and humor it provokes in its reader, the formal and technical excellence, and the sheer hubristic ambition of it all. (Who writes book-length poems anymore?) Muldoon is perhaps the greatest living poet writing in English, Nobel or no Nobel. Do read this.