Cheese and Death with Paul Muldoon – Meanderings (II)

What is the purpose of a poet? It's probably not to get you to try a new cheese. Yet that's exactly the sort of thing that happens when you read Paul Muldoon. You are sent on detours that are unexpected, often delightful, and always instructive. He has caused me to listen closely to the 'gut-wrenching viola' in Benjamin Britten's Lachrymae; he's had me comparing the facial features of Van Morrison and the Irish poet Padraic Fiacc (he claims they are the 'dead spit' but I can't see it); and most recently in the poem 'Superior Aloeswood', scrambling around a Waitrose cheese-hall seeking out the much-lauded French cheese Époisses de Bourgogne.  

'Superior Aloeswood' is a wonderful elegy to the late Leonard Cohen. As a huge fan of the singer, it was the first poem in Muldoon's latest collection Frolic and Detour that I reached for. It tells the story of Muldoon's final meeting with Cohen. The singer, sick and close to death, had invited Muldoon and someone called Professor Bob, to come over to his LA house and listen to his latest album You Want It Darker. The conversation turned to cheese:

There was a little flourish on the violins

when you so graciously offered myself and Professor Bob

some Cheddar or aged Gouda

and I happened to ask if you were a fan of Époisses —

the “King of Cheeses”

according to Brillat-Savarin. I must have been in manic

mode when I’d have Murray’s FedEx you a round

only hours after getting back to New York. A Cistercian monk

has been known to obsessively rinse the rind

in the pomace brandy that gives it such extra pizazz.

The 'King of Cheeses'? Let me be the judge of that, I thought. Although, the fact that it was the epicure and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who was declaring for Époisses, and that he had provided the name for my current fromage préféré, Brillat-Savarin, meant that I was halfway sold already. Incidentally, it might say much about me that Brillat-Savarin only found its way to my taste-buds because it was flagged up in Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. I'm a very suggestible reader, particularly where cheese is concerned.

Époisses de Bourgogne

I found the cheese in question, purchased some charcoal and rye crackers, and headed home. It was a lovely drop of cheese. The rind, saturated in pomace brandy, was essential to the tangy hit that it left in your mouth and its subtle (thankfully) hint of a barnyard was very much appreciated. Cheese should never taste too clean. If something is going to be your downfall - and cheese will certainly be mine - you don't want it to be worthy. The only thing that was missing was the recommended accompaniment, a flagon of Trappist beer. Instead, I finished off a bottle of Malbec that I'd opened a few days earlier. What did Leonard make of the cheese, though? Muldoon continues:   

“Trouble is,” you emailed

in October of your new favourite, Époisses,

“it’s the only thing I want to eat.”

Clearly a hit. However, a few weeks later, a day before the election of Donald Trump, Leonard Cohen was dead. That parts of this poem have Muldoon and the singer bemoaning the direction that the world is taking, describing Trump as 'our vain, vindictive Pompadour' is a reminder of my own elegiac blog-post to Cohen, one that draws on the irony signalled in some of his more prophetic songs. That he didn't stick around for a single day of the Trump administration is apt. Indeed, this poem is much more than a quest for cheese. Politics and the parlous state of the world are very much to the fore.

So too, with Cohen's final album. I had not given over much time to You Want It Darker. Indeed, as I write, I'm surprised to find that there is no question mark in the title. To that question, in mourning for a cultural figure that had accompanied me for most of my adult life, I would have answered 'Not just yet!' Oh, I'd certainly intended to return to this album, but three years or so on, I found that it had completely slipped my mind. I listened again in full and was taken aback by the startling title track. Three times Cohen sings 'I'm ready, my Lord' and on each occasion you feel a shiver course through your body. Who knows what an individual feels as they approach death. Notwithstanding that we would all like to imagine facing up to the end steely and prepared, surely for most of us that would be an exercise in bravado. Listening to Cohen's exhortation, though, you do not feel that. He sounds very prepared.    

'If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game'

There are other ways to face death, of course, and it's curious that the other song that the title track reminded me of was Warren Zevon's 'My Ride's Here'. Curious and coincidental, in that it was co-written with Paul Muldoon. It is Zevon's own swan-song – he succumbed to cancer a year or so later – and this is a lyric that is brimming with bravado, and a confidence boosting roll-call of other major cultural figures who have crossed the bar. It ends with a glorious battle-cry, a readying that is both similar to Cohen's, and also very different:

I was staying at the Westin

I was playing to a draw

When in walked Charlton Heston

With the Tablets of the Law

He said, "It's still the Greatest Story"

I said, "Man I'd like to stay

But I'm bound for glory

I'm on my way

My ride's here..."

Zevon finds solace and common glory with those who have already made this journey: Jesus, John Wayne, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Milton. Bravado and wit and a touch of hotel based bathos are what is needed here. We get Moses, but only in the guise of Charlton Heston playing him. That bathos is very Warren Zevon, particularly when you remind yourself of the answer that he gave to David Letterman's question about how to approach life and music in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis. "Enjoy every sandwich!" is Zevon's immortal answer. Or, indeed, every piece of cheese.

Paul Muldoon

As you might have guessed, music pervades Muldoon's poetry. It's no surprise to find out that in addition to his work as a lyricist, he also plays guitar in a band called the Wayside Shrines. In fact, the first of Muldoon's poems that I ever looked closely at contained a reference to the 1980s synthpop band A Flock of Seagulls and a gig that they had played at the University of East Anglia Students' Union. Trying to get to grips with 'Saffron', a poem that certainly gave Tarantino's Pulp Fiction a run for its money in referencing the band behind 'Wishing (If I Had A Photograph Of You)', was no easy task. The way that its spiralling narrative would break off from a half-formed thought, head in another direction, before returning back to the original theme, was dizzying. I found it much easier to pick at parts of the poem that resonated. And those parts were invariably linked to music.

Sometimes I'd happen on Alexander and Cleopatra
and several of their collaborators 
tucking into a paella 

I could not help but sense that Muldoon was channelling Morrissey's famous beginning to 'Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others' in his own opening to 'Saffron'. Antony and Cleopatra had moved on from their 'crate of ale' to paella.  Except, reading it back years later, I see that Antony isn't even in the equation, and it's actually a reference to Cleopatra of Macedonia, sister to Alexander the Great. So much for close-reading.  

Simple and straightforward are not words that you associate with Muldoon. He has a reputation for difficulty, no doubt about it. But if you are prepared to dig and delve - and I don't know if I'd have enjoyed him in the same way pre-Google - he is one of the most rewarding writers working today. It is something of a Muldoon cliché that his poems are almost like cryptic crossword puzzles, ones that take time and effort to solve. And truth be told, there are very few of his poems that I have 'solved' in their entirety. But therein is a category mistake: poems are not to be solved. Great poetry will often reveal things much later, sometimes at random; it will, more often than not, hint towards something that is always slightly out of your reach.

Take my favourite of Muldoon's poems 'Incantata' – and I urge anyone within even a passing interest in modern poetry to read it. Again the subject is death. Again it is an elegy, this time to the artist Mary Farl Power, Muldoon's lover who died in her early forties from cancer. It is honest, critical, heart-rending, life-affirming, and stunningly beautiful. And as I have already hinted, if you are to attempt its forty-five stanzas, you will need to be seated next to the internet. Here's the opening stanza:

I thought of you tonight, a leanbh, lying there in your long barrow

colder and dumber than a fish by Francisco de Herrera,

as I X-Actoed from a spud the Inca

glyph for a mouth: thought of that first time I saw your pink

spotted torso, distant-near as a nautilus,

when you undid your portfolio, yes indeedy,

and held the print of what looked like a cankered potato

at arm's length-your arms being longer, it seemed, than Lugh's.

On a first reading I didn't know that 'leanbh' is the Irish word for 'young child'. Or that Francisco de Herrera (the 'younger' or 'elder', I forget) was a Spanish Renaissance artist who could paint a mean fish. Or that Lugh was a long-armed Irish god. Or – no surprise here as I'm not very practical - that an X-Acto is a hobby knife. What I did know, though, was that 'distant-near as a nautilus, / when you undid your portfolio' were some of the most evocative and sexually charged words that I had ever read, and that persevering with this work would bring rewards. You fill in the gaps, and trudge slowly through those allusive and often obscure references – and then, as with all good poetry, you read it again. You are better equipped, you are much brighter. And on the second, and third and fourth reading, the magic is revealed. 

Mary Farl Powers, Emblements (1981)

 

Muldoon gets me to eat cheese. He returns me to Leonard Cohen's later work. He also, more controversially, reminds me that the internet is perhaps humankind's most sublime creation. What once, at best, could have taken hours, days or weeks to work out, or at worse, could have remained inaccessible and elusive forever, can now miraculously appear in a second. How long, for instance, might it have taken me to find out that Thomas Jefferson's favourite wine was Meursault? Even in the confines of a biography, that could have been a tricky fact to pin down. Or, indeed, returning to that cheese, would I have been nibbling on it in a matter of hours, if I hadn't had a search engine at the end of my fingertips? Probably not. But just as importantly, would I have even bothered if Muldoon hadn't brought its 'raunchy essence' to mine and Leonard Cohen's attention in the first place. Definitely not!  

Only when a gold-orange

bloom of bacteria is allowed to seep

through a rind-washed cheese is its raunchy

essence revealed.