Customer Reviews

Maggot: Poems

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"It seems all youthful rebels tire / of their youthful spirits," Muldoon writes in the (alarmingly) penultimate poem, dedicated to Ashbery, and it certainly applies to this collection here. I mean there's a world-weariness in many poems, and a distinct feeling that the chief interest is everywhere etymological. What's a rebel who becomes the poetry editor at a certain magazine whose unmentionable name rhymes with screw corker? The sonnet and sonnet-like sequences that are the bulk of poems here chase and end up swallowing their own tails. The process is repetitional. Phrases and lines are repeated and repeated, but not in the manner of thematic development. It's linearly associative, when it doesn't double in on and consume itself, a neat trick that seldom pays off. I don't mind the delaying of meaning, but sooner or later the poet must show his hand - that's when the game's up.

I admit some of this is a matter of taste. Lord knows Muldoon has enough admirers. For me, quite a few of the poems try way too hard to be cool and with it (which is the Pew Porker's aesthetics), and the effort clearly shows. "The Watercooler," for example, is about office gossip and drama as might be overheard around the, well, watercooler (are coworkers ever this gossipy?), but I only hear the creakings of the poem's construction. "@" (as in pmuldoon@lewdgawker.com) is also quite painful; and "Balls" is embarrassing for everyone involved. But I'm not being fair. Muldoon can certainly rhyme; he can be guileful, funny; and there are bright spots. "The Sod Farm," about a young woman who crashes her car by a sod farm, suffering 3rd degree burns, is sneaky in its economy, and is a successful poem. "Ohrwurm" (German for "earworm," meaning a catchy tune you can't get out of your head. for God's sake, I would've just called the poem "Earworm"!) is a little charmer that reads, in its entirety:

Just as I'm loading up on another low carb pork rind snack
I spot in my wing-fuselage connection a fatigue crack.
It bears out my suspicion this low-level hum's a soundtrack
and everything I've seen so far I've seen so far in flashback.

A hum's not quite an earworm, but the poem kind of is! It's time to say it: the book is entitled "Maggot," and it's suitably morbid. Lots of images of decay, forensic processes, insects, etc. I find "The Humors of Hakone" - which reads like a CSI episode - puerille and fetishistic. Some of the images are disgusting, but it's the 21st century, and we've seen much worse on TV. I think it's just a convenient thing to organize a collection around - the poetry isn't about death or dying or decomposition or decomposing per se. Just the usual sleight-of-hand, with some success. Mr. Muldoon, get serious! But maybe he's too serious, and should only be light. In any case, he should get a grip, and quit the Few Dorkier, before he's nothing but a joke. But on the more positive side, I did enjoy this collection much more than other somber and weighty books of poetry from the past year. I don't think there are great poems here, but at the same time, I don't think there are any real duds. It's entertainment, folks!

Warning! If you have not yet read Maggot, this review will make absolutely no sense to you. Nevertheless, if you are crazy enough to press on and read it anyway and it piques your curiosity (or even if it doesn't), I encourage you to buy the book. You won't regret it.

Up a Latvian creek
with a gaggle of Greek
mythological freaks
in a rampaging Gaul's worthy saga,

you'll find Wilbur and Ed
with the dolphin that sped
past the Penguin of Dread
and the freaks and the geeks going gaga.

It's got death on a quag, it's
got rusk in a bag, it's
got flesh-eating maggots
that feast on our eyes.

Down an Antrim back road
with a frog (not a toad)
in full sap-bilking mode
as he thickens the milk in your bucket,

you'll find Sammy and Chuck;
ever down on their luck,
lacking ducat or buck,
they say, "Morons they are so just f___ it."

It's got spirits that flag, it's
got pork as a gag, it's
got gift-bearing maggots
with stars in their eyes.

On a green, grassy knoll
with a mob of French trolls
as the motorcade rolls
into history that's already written,

you'll find Pliny and Franc;
one confused and one blank,
both with no rope to yank,
they say, "Twice shy upstages once bitten."

It's got porcupine slag, it's
got pus (what a drag!), it's
got cheer-leading maggots
that suck out our I's.

For want of a mayfly
the universe was lost.

Perhaps you were at the AP Lit and Comp reading in Louisville three years ago and heard Paul Muldoon read.

Perhaps you teach Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"; if so, get thee to his poem about it
in this book for many fine poems and his "Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett":
even after close reading in the classroom, students commonly don't see "What's it all about,
Didi." Here's Muldoon:

"Only now do we see it's outselves who skim
determinedly through the dim
of evenfall . . . "