Hi friends,
It’s poetry weeeeeek! Today I’m looking at Cuba by Paul Muldoon.
I’ve long held a soft spot for the Northern Irish poetic confederation known as the Belfast Group: Heaney, Longley, Mahon, et al. But Muldoon, one of the younger poets of the scene, has always been a tricky one for me. So much of Muldoon’s work is increasingly heavily experimental and, to be honest, can be difficult to crack into on an embodied level despite being terribly exciting—and irreverent, and quite funny—on the intellectual level. He’s extremely deft with meter, slant rhyme, word choice. And I imagine he derives a sense of pleasure out of pushing the boundary of what can be considered, in terms of form and construction, to be a poem at all. I’d be hard-pressed to name a contemporary English-language poet with a more mutable, expansive, slippery command of language.
It’s notable that Seamus Heaney—half a generation older, and already established—was Muldoon’s mentor. Something I adore about Heaney is his deep interest in linguistics and the way cultural histories manifest in the texture of our vocabulary. I see this clear influence in Muldoon’s early works. Perhaps it’s prosaic of me (or perhaps I’m just a Seamus Heaney stan!) but as much as I respect Muldoon’s later experimental forays, my knee-jerk emotional reactions are strongest to his early works, including 1980’s collection Why Brownlee Left. These are poems which tap into the same experimental tendency that he has carried throughout his career since—but do so behind a deceptively staid face. The subtlety of this interplay intrigues me.
Poems refract the light of their surroundings; like prisms, they often require to be held at a specific angle for their full spectrum of resonance to emerge. I’ve loved Cuba for many years but returning to it this week feels especially apt. As armchair historians will note, this is a poem which situates itself clearly in a political moment; namely, 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis is unfolding an ocean away, yet the tension it creates spans no geographic bounds, trickling into the fictionalised household of Muldoon’s childhood. Christopher Spaide describes Muldoon’s early poems as ‘miniaturist, spring-loaded gizmos.’ It’s a familiar feeling: that pervading, anxious sense that global actors are right now making big decisions that will have ripple effects the world over. I’d hazard a generalisation that this is what many of us have been feeling during this past week, following along with the COP26 conference. More generally, with regard to climate change, I absolutely feel a consistent tension roiling under the surface as current events spiral out of individual control.
On the existential level, how to hold dual truths: that individual actions hold collective weight, as well as the nauseating truth that large corporations and policy-makers are the ones with the real power to shape the future of the planet. Everyone I know recycles, and abstains from plastic straws, and signs petitions, and gives up red meat, and feels guilty about getting on an economy-class flight. These things are important, but they’re also not. And meanwhile a consortium of the world’s most powerful political players came to Scotland by fucking Learjet to spend a fortnight in rooms together and ultimately got nowhere tenable on climate policy—in the process, emitting 102,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide, 60% of it caused by international flights, the carbon equivalent to total average annual emissions for more than 8000 UK residents. What’s a gal to do in light of news like that—scream into a pillow, and then keep on diligently sorting my paper and plastic recycling every week and telling bartenders that no, I actually don’t need a straw?
In Cuba, Muldoon similarly asks: what choices do we make, on the human level, when confronted with vast entropy? This is a poem that hinges on Catholic guilt—which takes on a kinetic, alive quality. So often, we construct—as does the authoritarian father in the poem—fallacious causations between individual choices and large-scale impact. Where is the line in the sand, though? The poem contains a very Hibernian cocktail of religious purity culture and simmering political anxiety. It’s not surprising for these elements to blend together in the mind’s eye.
The inspiring part of COP26 to me were the young climate activists who participated and protested in Glasgow: Millennial and Gen-Z individuals like Vanessa Nakate, Nina Gualinga, Elizabeth Wathuti, Mya-Rose Craig, Xiye Bastida and groups like Earthrise Studio, Fridays For Future, Advaya, etc, who are speaking truth to power and refusing to be cowed by the status quo put forth by older generations. To be young is a chaotic experience. To be young and staring down an uncertain future—in which the world itself may be ruined by a faraway president ‘only to say the word,’ or in the case of today’s leaders, to not say the word—is exponentially more chaotic.
The speaker’s teenage sister in Cuba, staying out all night presumably at a party or on a date, is experiencing the locus of these elements. And so here’s what I see as the poem’s other question: how do we show up for small moments of intimacy within a landscape of shame and fear? This is something else that is so beautiful about this poem, in a quieter way: large-scale, seismic world events have a ripple effect on the personal sphere, but so too do personal events hold weight and import. May is shamed into the confession booth by her father and his apocalyptic fear, but the event she confesses to the priest is soft, sweet, gentle. It’s a tiny moment, and innocent. How real that is: the youthful and romantic way in which the slightest brush of the arm is enough to get chills, enough to merit diarising, enough to remember and recount. And narratively, there’s a bit of a bait-and-switch here. The speaker, much younger, is in fact the one whose innocence is corrupted—made aware of the adult world in more ways than one.
How lovely to defuse the poetic tension this way. How powerful, too, to situate the poem from the vantage point of the youth. Both authority figures of the poem—one paranoid and paternalistic, the other prurient if relatively beneficent—are seeking to police May’s bodily autonomy and to frame her personal choices in a larger contextual framework. As Stephen Burt writes, there is a sense of youthful solidarity: ‘We identify with the more benign snooping represented by the poem’s young narrator… Though it plays on our adult sense of poignancy, the poem positions its readers and itself on the side of youth.’ So, too, should we all be.
Small stuff:
I recently finished reading Luster by Raven Leilani, which was fascinating and brilliant and tough and complicated. This interview with Leilani in Lux, a feminist socialist magazine, is an insightful read.
The Great Irony-Level Collapse: Used to be you could tell what people were like by what they liked. Not anymore by Hanson O’Haver for Gawker. Excellent overall, and contains easily the best infographic I’ve ever encountered.
Really loved this past week’s episode of The Messy Truth podcast, in which host Gem Fletcher speaks with photo editor Emily Keegin. Through this I’ve also started following Keegin on Instagram, where she posts lengthy and extremely clever story threads of analysis on photo/fashion/politics/cultural commentary as they intersect with one another. Highly recommend.
Finally, this meme.
That’s all for today, peeps! Thanks for reading, and catch you next time.
Maddy