1In 2002 the Northern Irish poet, Paul Muldoon said of his poetry: “The poems now reflect the variety of language to which I’ve been exposed, and also to which many readers have been exposed”.1 This essay proposes close readings of three poems by Muldoon, “The Country Club”2 (1977),” The Rowboat” and “Extraordinary Rendition”, the last two both published in the 2009 collection Plan B.3 All three poems contain intertextual elements. These range from references to specific texts and their authors to a broader interpretation of intertextuality, defined by Barthes as “un champ général de formules anonymes”.4 This essay will focus on Muldoon’s mise en œuvre of the intertexts, specifically how they influence and interact with poetic form and how, in the context of these three poems, language and form combine to construct meaning.

2A number of critics have pointed out the influence of Robert Frost on Paul Muldoon’s early poetry. Muldoon himself has said, “I think the writer who excited me most at university was Robert Frost: an apparently simple, almost naïve, tone of voice and use of language, underneath which all kinds of complex things are happening”.5 Nowhere is Frost’s influence more evident than in “The Country Club”, which contains lines from an early poem by Frost, “The Mountain”, published in the 1914 collection, North of Boston.

3Commenting on Edward Thomas’s review of North of Boston, Muldoon writes, “As we know to be so often the case with writers’ comments on other writers, the very insight Thomas affords into Frost’s poetic practice affords an even greater insight into his own”.6 Applying this notion to Muldoon’s 2006 analysis of Frost’s “The Mountain” in The End of the Poem7 we would therefore expect to discover as much about Muldoon’s own poetic practice from his analysis as that of its subject, Robert Frost.

4As Rachel Buxton points out, early drafts of “The Country Club” did not contain any references to Frost and the lines from Frost’s poem, “The Mountain”, were only inserted in later drafts.8 To understand why these quotes were inserted, it is first necessary to consider certain elements of “The Mountain”. Frost’s poem describes an encounter on a mountain path between two men, one a local, the other not. Much of the poem is written in the form of a conversation between the two men, a conversation in which the outsider asks questions about the mountain and learns that there is a brook/spring at the top that is “cold in summer, warm in winter”. Their conversation moves onto other local features but the visitor keeps returning to the subject of the spring. In “The Country Club” Muldoon employs a cut-and-paste technique borrowing only the sections of the conversation from “The Mountain” that refer specifically to the spring. As we know “spring” is a synonym for “source”. In other words, Muldoon acknowledges the source of the intertexts, by inserting a text that is itself about a spring or source.

5Asked about “The Country Club”, Muldoon replied, “[...] the first eight lines of that poem are taken directly from Frost’s ‘The Mountain’”.9 This is almost true. As can be seen from the opening stanzas of “The Country Club”, seven of the first eight lines are indeed direct quotations from Frost’s “The Mountain”:

“But what would interest you about the brook,
It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter.”
“Warm in December, cold in June, you say?”
Doc Pinkerton was a great one for chapter and verse.

“I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it’s warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm,
But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”

6However in line four of “The Country Club”, Muldoon inserts his own line into the citation: “Doc Pinkerton was a great one for chapter and verse”.10 To understand the significance of Muldoon’s incursion into a quote from Frost, it is necessary to consider the meaning of “chapter and verse”. This is given in OED P2: “the exact reference to a passage of Scripture [and figuratively as] exact authority for”. In other words by inserting “chapter and verse” into a citation from “The Mountain”, Muldoon is commenting both on his use of the citation and at the same time acknowledging his indebtedness to Frost’s poetic authority.

7Given that Muldoon inscribes himself into an imaginary conversation of Frost’s, it is necessary to consider the conversation in “The Country Club” between Doc Pinkerton and the poem’s first person narrator. Here it is worth noting that, for a time, Frost taught at the PinkertonAcademy in New Hampshire, which suggests that Pinkerton is a pseudonym for Frost. Furthermore, in the seventh verse of “The Country Club”, we learn that Doc Pinkerton’s first name is Lee, linking him once again to Frost via the poet’s middle name, Robert Lee Frost. Thus the conversation in “The Country Club”, between a first person poetic narrator and a character indirectly named after Frost parallels the poetic dialogue between Muldoon’s poem and that of Frost.

8There are, however, further layers of significance in Muldoon’s indirect naming of Frost. Here we return to Muldoon’s analysis of “The Mountain” in which he argues that Frost’s middle name, Lee, “missing like the ‘stars in the west’”,11 is notable for its absence in the poem and that this absence reflects the looming absence of “The Mountain”’s author. Muldoon’s argument is that the absence of Frost’s name forms part of a larger picture in “The Mountain”, one in which “the ‘absences’ and ‘omissions’ […] are the subject matter of Frost’s poem”.12 Emphasising the complicity between form and content in “The Mountain”, Muldoon goes on to suggest that “the ‘blank’ form of the poem is indivisible from its ‘blank’ content”.13

9Muldoon’s observation of the relationship between poetic content and form is significant. To paraphrase an earlier quote, “the very insight [Muldoon] affords into Frost’s poetic practice affords an even greater insight into his own”.14 Muldoon’s assertion of the complicity between form and content in Frost’s poem is suggestive of a similar complicity in his own poetry. As we have seen Muldoon’s use of intertextuality in “The Country Club” is a comment on that self-same process and in doing what it describes, “The Country Club” displays a complicity of form and subject similar to that of “The Mountain”.

10There are however differences between the two poems. Muldoon borrows Frost’s conversational tones and blank unrhymed form, not in order to evoke absence, rather by copying “The Mountain”’s formal features, Muldoon pays further homage to Frost’s poetic influence. This leads us to return to Muldoon’s analysis of “The Mountain” where he describes “the influence of one poem on another [...] whereby the ‘gaps’ or ‘blanks’ in one poem are completed or perfected by another”.15 Muldoon is referring to the complementarity between “The Mountain” and a much later poem by Frost, “Directive”. However Muldoon’s comments could equally refer to the complementarity between “The Country Club” and “The Mountain”. For, if “The Mountain” is about Frost’s absence as Muldoon suggests, then “The Country Club” is an overt declaration of Frost’s presence.

11This presence occurs, not just through quotations, the indirect naming of Frost, and Muldoon’s imitation of “The Mountain”’s poetic form, but also through transposed images from “The Mountain” as can be seen in the penultimate stanza of “The Country Club”:

Cicadas were clipping the lawns and ornamental bushes.
I was coming back down onto the highway
When I met Lee Pinkerton’s Chevrolet.
We drew up close. He rolled down his window.

12The table below illustrates how Muldoon’s transposition of images forms part of a larger picture of correspondences between the two poems:

13 Here we will see that Frost’s “lake” is transposed by Muldoon into “Veronica Lake”; Frost’s interlocutor in “The Mountain” is a farmer while in “The Country Club” it’s Doc Pinkerton; in Frost’s poem he drives an ox-cart, in Muldoon’s a “Chevrolet”; Frost gives us “the mountain”, Muldoon “the Heights”; Frost describes “grassland” and “driftwood”, Muldoon “lawns and ornamental bushes”; Frost talks about a “path”, Muldoon a “highway”.

14Given the importance Muldoon places on Frost’s sly omission of his own name, it would be reasonable to ask whether Muldoon is up to the same tricks in “The Country Club”. If we consider the images above we will see that Muldoon’s “the Heights” corresponds to Frost’s “mountain”. In a 2009 interview Muldoon said “At the age of fifty-eight I realised it’s something that’s been staring me in the face for some years, that the ‘doon’ component of my name refers to a hill fort”.16 The unfortified “villa / On the Heights” could thus be read as a variant on “doon”.

15Returning to Muldoon’s analysis he states that “a major concern of this poem will be one thing being overshadowed by, or sheltering behind, another – town overshadowed by mountain, writer overshadowed by writer, poem overshadowed by poem”.17 Muldoon is here referring to “The Mountain” but his Bloomian18 comments on poetic influence could equally apply to “The Country Club”, a poem that quite self-consciously sits at the foot of “The Mountain”.

16Commenting on “The Country Club”, Muldoon states, “It’s a strange poem. I was trying, I suppose, to write about being implicated in a society – implicated by being simply on the sidelines”.19 Muldoon’s use of the word “implicate” as defined by OED 2b: “to involve (a person) in a charge, crime etc.”, may be a general comment on Northern Irish society but specifically refers to the final stanza in which the narrator is somehow “implicated” when Stafford takes “a shot at his wife”. But the word “implicate” has further resonance when one considers the OED 1.a definition: “to intertwine; to wreathe, twist, or knit together; to entwine, to entangle”. In his analysis of “The Mountain” Muldoon argues that Frost has effectively woven himself into the text through wordplay regarding his name. In other words Frost has implicated himself in “The Mountain”. If we return to the fourth line in “The Country Club”, by inserting his own line into Frost’s conversational lines Muldoon effectively “implicates” himself into a conversation with Frost. As Muldoon notes, “[...] all poems [...] are in a dialogue with other works of art. That’s obvious, I think”.20 In this context, “Club” in the poem’s title, meaning “an association of persons [...] of a common vocation”,21 can be understood to refer to Muldoon’s association with Frost, through their shared vocation of poetry.

17“The Country Club” can therefore be considered as being in dialogue with Frost’s “The Mountain”. Given that it cites the lines from Frost’s poem that specifically refer to the mountain spring or source, it is, at the same time, a commentary on poetic influence. Just as the “blanks” in Frost’s poem find their echo in the blank verse of “The Mountain”, so Muldoon’s intertextual use of formal and thematic features from Frost’s poem serves to acknowledge their source. Given that “The Country Club” enacts that which it describes, it can be said to be autological. This dialogue between form and content is a feature of a number of Muldoon’s poems including his 2009 poem, “The Rowboat”, published in the collections Plan B and Maggot (2010).

18In the first verse of “The Rowboat” Muldoon sets up a contrast through two verbs: “sunk” at the end of line one and “float” at the end of line three:

Every year he’d sunk
the old, clinker-built rowboat
so it might again float.
Every year he’d got drunk

19A poem that “floats” the idea of sinking brings to mind Alexander Pope’s spoof ars poetica, entitled Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry.22 Here, Pope mocks the aesthetic ideal of the sublime in which “Vast Objects occasion vast Sensations, and vast Sensations give the Mind a higher Idea of her own Powers”.23 Citing examples of poems that fall well short of this ideal, Pope’s tongue-in-cheek treatise proposes a new aesthetic, based not on the lofty heights of the sublime, but on the profound depths of bathos, defined by the OED as a “ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech”.

20 If Muldoon’s poem does indeed refer to Pope’s Bathos, then we would expect to find a corresponding movement between different registers of language. Beginning with the first of the poem’s four sections, we can find two examples of commonplace speech – firstly, the cartoon-like onomatopoeia “kerplunk, kerplunk”, and secondly, the purposefully vulgar “chunk / of change this bitch”:

as if he might once and for all write off
every year he’d sunk,
kerplunk, kerplunk
one after another into a trough

no water would staunch.
Like a waterlogged tree trunk,
every year he’d sunk
just as he was about to launch

into a diatribe on the chunk
of change this bitch
was costing him, the debt into which
every year he’d sunk.

21There is a shift of register in the second section as it introduces the slightly more elevated “shriveled strakes” and “ice-tote”, followed by the very White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) outdoor clothing brand, “L. L. Bean”, and the select Irish whiskey “Crested Ten”. However the shift in linguistic register moves not from that elevated to the commonplace as in bathos but in the opposite direction from the commonplace to the more elevated.

22To understand the relationship between “The Rowboat” and Pope’s Bathos, we need therefore to look, not just at language, but at the poem’s form as well. Speaking on the interaction between language and form, Muldoon has said: “I’m in awe of the language. But I’m not just in love with words, they’ve got to take on shapes that mean something”.24

23The shape of “The Rowboat” comprises four sections of four quatrains, with each quatrain using a different abba rhyme. Quatrains that use this rhyme sequence are called envelope stanzas and all sixteen of the poem’s stanzas are envelope stanzas. There are two things to notice here. Firstly as can be observed in the above quotations, the opening line of the poem is repeated in all four stanzas to begin and end section I. This links the whole section to the four envelope stanzas it contains. Secondly and more importantly, it does this by progressively sinking the opening line, “Every year he’d sunk”, from quatrain to quatrain. Note that this pattern is repeated in subsequent sections so that section II begins with the second line of the opening quatrain, “the old clinker-built rowboat”, and that this too sinks a line for each of the remaining stanzas to end the second section.

24The contrast between the rising diction and the falling structure creates a tension, one that reflects the struggle of the poem’s protagonist as he tries to keep his rowboat afloat. Furthermore Muldoon plays on this tension by framing the verbs of the opening quatrain, the antonyms “sunk” and “float”, in opposing tenses – the unalterable past perfect of “had sunk” vying with the modal and optimistic future of “might float”.

25To find out which prevails, we need to turn to the poem’s two remaining sections. In the third section, the formal pattern of the first two sections is repeated through the sinking of the third line of the poem’s opening quatrain so that section III begins and ends on “So it might float”.:

So it might again float
the possibility one must expand
with Coutts and Co. (without the ampersand),
misquoting them as one might misquote

the price of Paramount stock
so it might again float.

26There is a certain irony in sinking a line that expresses the hope of staying afloat. Furthermore this sinking movement is in sharp contrast to the increasingly elevated diction of the section with its use of the impersonal pronoun “one”, “ampersand”, “promissory note”, “assuage” and “imbued”. Here the narrator’s use of elevated language is itself an attempt to assuage his creditors given, as we now learn through a return to an appropriately lower-register expression, that he has “put himself in hock”.

27“The Rowboat” was published in 2009, shortly after the global financial crisis of 2007-8. Muldoon has said of the relationship of poetry to society: “I think one can only be faithful to the language and the way in which it presents itself to you, and to the world in the way it presents itself to you… faithful in the sense of the meeting between language and experience”.25 The meeting of language and the external world is demonstrated here by Muldoon’s inclusion of the exclusive private bank and wealth management service Coutts & Co. The banker-bashing pun of “Coutthroats” for “cutthroats” thus serves as a playful reference to the banking crisis as experienced by the poem’s protagonist.

28Social and political references aside, Muldoon’s poem is essentially narrative. As he has said:

I look on each poem as being a little world in itself. I’m very interested in the narrative, the story, and in wanting almost to write novels in the poem, I like to think that a whole society is informing the lines of a poem, that every detail is accurate. And I’m interested in the dramatic persona. I like using different characters, to present different views of the world.26

29The dramatic persona of “The Rowboat” is a man who attempts to keep his boat afloat and, as in any drama, there is conflict. Muldoon creates this tension through a contrast between the sinking movement of the poem’s form and its rising diction, as well as through the juxtaposition of verb tenses and competing linguistic registers. Together all of these embody the man’s conflict and thus serve as metaphors for the man’s struggle to keep himself physically and financially afloat.

30In accordance with the structure established in the preceding sections of the poem, the fourth and final section begins with the fourth line of the poem’s opening verse: “Every year he’d got drunk”:

Every year he’d got drunk
and railed at this one and that,
the baseball birdbrain, the basketball gnat,
the gin-soaked punk

he threatened with a punching out of lights
every year he’d got drunk,

31Again the line sinks incrementally in each quatrain to end both section and poem. By now we will have realised that the man’s alcoholic and financial demise was prefigured, formally at least, from the start. However there is an important difference in linguistic register between the fourth and preceding sections. Having raised the diction in the earlier sections, Muldoon has set the stage for a bathetically “ludicrous descent” in the fourth section. This can be illustrated by the rather absurd: “He threatened with a punching out of lights”. By mixing the colloquial phrase: “I’m gonna punch out your lights” with the elevated and impersonal gerund: “punching out of lights” - Muldoon creates a humorously unstable register, one that is in complete concordance with the man’s unstable social, financial and undoubtedly inebriated status. In fact, a sharp linguistic descent is apparent from the first stanza of the fourth section, through the terms “baseball-birdbrain”, “gin-soaked punk” and later, “basketball-gnat’s slam dunk”. It should be noted that a “slam dunk” is a basketball term, which according to the OED refers to “a forceful shot in which a player jumps and slams the ball down into the basket”. In “The Rowboat”, Muldoon has achieved his own “slam dunk” by raising the linguistic register with the express purpose of slamming it down afterwards.

32Rather than sink the register completely in section four, Muldoon retains dramatic tension by including vestiges of heightened language. “Quidnunc” in the second quatrain asks: “what’s next?”. What happens next is, of course, that the line “Every year he’d got drunk” sinks a line in both the third and final quatrains. This inevitable sinking of the line suggests the protagonist will get drunk next as he has done “every year”. “Quidnunc” is followed by the equally elevated “inure”. Like “Quidnunc”, “inure” can be read as the protagonist’s attempts to inure himself against his inevitable demise through habits of language. However this last gasp attempt to retain an elevated status linguistically, socially and financially is ultimately struck down by Muldoon’s cartoon-like knockout blow, “kerpow”.

33The resulting triumph is one in which linguistic register, form and subject all descend to the depths of bathos. The sinking lines and shifts in linguistic register mimic the sinking rowboat, which in turn functions as a symbol of the protagonist and his declining social status. In US slang he, like his boat, is a “clinker”, in other words, “an incompetent or unsuitable person”.27

34To quote Samuel Beckett, “form is content, content is form”.28 This suggests that the concordance of form and content is a two-way process. As such, the poem’s title, “The Rowboat”, is as much a reference to the poem’s form as to its content. Given that a rowboat is a vessel made up of regular lines or rows – the title can be understood to refer equally to the poem itself as it does to a type of boat. Here again the reader is presented with an autological poem, in that it demonstrates self-awareness by enacting that which it describes. In “The Rowboat”, this concordance of subject, form and language creates a poem which, in dealing with bathos, manages to achieve the sublime.

35If “The Rowboat” combines indirect references to Pope with cartoon language, another poem, “Extraordinary Rendition”, takes its title from an expression coined in the aftermath of the September 11^th terrorist attacks of 2001. As an intertext this can be understood in terms of the previous quote from Barthes, as “un champ général de formules anonymes”. As in the poems discussed earlier, the poem’s title and intertext, “Extraordinary Rendition”, provides clues not just to poetic content but also to the poem’s form. In 2013, Muldoon said of the term:

Big Brother is here and “newspeak” is what we speak. I mean it’s terrifying, and we all go along with it […] Don’t you think that really there’s a culture in which we accept that this kind of doublespeak is okay, is one in which, I’m afraid we also accept that the term “extraordinary rendition” may be used of shipping out people whom we might be having tortured somewhere.29

36“Extraordinary rendition” was added to the OED in 2006 and is defined as: “the seizure and transportation by authorities of a criminal suspect from one country to another without the formal process of extradition”.30 According to former CIA agent Robert Baer, this meant: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt”.31

37Taken in isolation, the word “rendition” means according to OED 2: “The action of giving back or returning something”. This may be by means of a performance or interpretation, through transliteration, or as a visual, representation. Ostensibly, Muldoon’s poem is a rendition (in the sense of an interpretation or reproduction) of a couple separating and is set against the background of an American mining town. To represent the couple, the poem is structured as two paired sonnets, the second of which renders (in the sense of giving back) formal features of the first. This can be seen by comparing the opening stanzas of both sonnets:

I
I gave you back my claim on the mining town
and the rich vein we once worked,
the tumble down
from the sluice box that irked

38Beginning with the rhyme scheme, the end rhyme of line one in the first sonnet “town” is a full rhyme with “down” in line three. Furthermore the rhyme scheme works across the sonnets so that “town” in the first sonnet rhymes with “frown” at the end of the first line of the second sonnet as well as “renown” at the end of the third line:

II
You gave me back your frown
and the most recent responsibility you’d shirked
along with something of your renown
for having jumped from a cage before it jerked

39 The pattern continues so that the second sonnet faithfully renders in its entirety the first sonnet’s rhyme sequence. This even extends to the enjambed double rhyme across lines four and five ( “irked / you”) of the first sonnet and echoed in the fourth and fifth lines of the second sonnet’s “jerked / to”. Moreover, the opening words of the first octave and sestet, “I gave you back”, are themselves “given back” or rendered as “You gave me back” in the corresponding sections of the second sonnet, so that each sonnet can be seen as representing one half of a couple. Here again, Muldoon’s use of poetic form is autological in that it enacts that which it describes.

40As we have already noted, the poem is not simply about a couple, but about a couple who are separating. Given Muldoon’s predilection for using language which, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s phrase, is “so close to the object that the two are identical”,32 we would expect the poem to deliver the linguistic and formal equivalents of a couple separating. Appropriately, these can be found in the first sonnet’s final line “the last night we lay by the old spur track”. This bifurcation of the mine’s railway line occurs in the break between the two sonnets so that the divergent paths of the separating couple are rendered linguistically and formally.

41Given that the couple’s separation is due to the “irks”, “frowns” and “responsibilities shirked” – these reproaches are all too ordinary and certainly not “Extraordinary” as the title would suggest. Here we must return to Muldoon’s comments on “Newspeak” and the term “Extraordinary Rendition”, which make it impossible to ignore the poem’s political subtext. “Extraordinary rendition” is, as Muldoon points out, about legitimising (or more precisely, providing an extra-legal framework for) torture. In this context the man’s shirking of his “most recent responsibility” can also be read as an allusion to governments’ disregard for fundamental human rights. Following the September 11^th attacks, governments’ collusion in human rights abuses, their “wild rampage”, greatly increased, notably in connection with the Iraq war. And like the poem’s mining town, Iraq was also a repository of mineral wealth – in this case oil. There is a further reference to conflict at the end of the first octave in “beyond the Falls” which, given Muldoon’s Northern Irish background and the fact that Belfast’s Falls Road has been the scene of sectarian violence, suggests a parallel between the violence of Northern Ireland and that of the allies’ invasion of Iraq.

42The language of “Extraordinary Rendition” provides some striking visual images. In the second sonnet “the speed of that falling cage” conjures up images of declining standards in prisons, images and issues present in the media at the time. The basic living conditions of inmates are: “hard tack” or dry biscuits, “tin plates and mugs”. Tin is of course a metal that tarnishes, much as political and romantic ideals become tarnished. More disturbing perhaps is the “burlap bag”, which evokes horrific media images of hooded prisoners in Abu Ghraib subject to torture. In this context “the echoes of love-sighs / and love-screams” could be read as references not just to the couple’s love-making but to the sexual abuse and rape inflicted on inmates.

43The “wild rampage” of the Iraq war was, of course, never presented as such to the general public. Instead the public were given “silver falderals”, “Newspeak” not unlike glittering nonsense of song refrains repeated over and over. Governments and media used “Newspeak” to justify the “war on terror”, presenting the invasion as a “coalition of the willing” whose aims were to find and destroy Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and “win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis”. But like the poem’s silver and tin, and the couple’s relationship, it too became tarnished: “Newspeak” turned out to be an empty and ultimately meaningless refrain.

44However it would be simplistic to present “Extraordinary Rendition” as just another critique of the Iraq war. The poem renders, in visual imagery, American landscapes that could come straight out of Maine or Utah: mining towns, “the staidness of our canyon walls” and “lake-skies”, landscapes far-removed from those of the Iraq war. In this way “Extraordinary Rendition” renders, since it gives back, a complex picture of twenty-first century America. Furthermore through the poem’s title and form Muldoon gives us back a complex picture of our relationship to language.

45Speaking of the relationship between politicians, poets and language, Muldoon has said:

[…] the public health of the nation would suffer if poets didn’t resist the insidious impulse of others to use language to their own ends.
The poet’s job is to clarify rather than obscure […] [T] he poet must shoulder his responsibility to the language, getting rid of the garbage, cutting through the clutter wherever he might find it, be it in the advertising slogan, the newspaper article, the politician’s speech, the preacher’s sermon.33

46This raises the question: does Muldoon’s poem fulfil these aims? Does he clarify or obscure? Criticised for being “difficult”, Muldoon has responded by saying that if poetry attempts

to be equal to our era [i] t’s almost inevitable that it will be difficult. You know being here is difficult and it’s getting more and more difficult […]. Why should we expect poetry to be easier than geometry? It’s just a version of geometry or calculus; it’s a way of making sense of things.34

47“Extraordinary Rendition” can therefore be understood as a complex poem that deals with complex subjects. It is autological because Muldoon presents the reader with a poem that demonstrates the complicity of content and form. By using the term “Extraordinary rendition”, Muldoon provides a just rendition (in the sense of representation) of American society, war, relationships and language. If it is difficult, it is because the world it describes is itself difficult. Regarding the poet’s responsibility to language, “Extraordinary Rendition” renders (gives us back) language distorted by “Newspeak”. And in autologically rendering the word “rendition” Muldoon creates out of language something that is in itself “extraordinary”.

48To conclude, we shall return to the “The Rowboat” and reflect on another meaning of the word “sublime”. As a chemical process “to sublime” means to extract or purify a substance. In his poems, Muldoon mines the language to which we are all exposed. Some words, such as “rendition”, have been distorted through misuse. Through a process of transformation, specifically that of poetic form, Muldoon condenses these disparate elements into poems. His achievement is not just the alchemist’s trick of turning (in this case) tarnished silver and tin into poetic gold. Instead he mines the rich vein of language, whether from other poets, the media, cartoons, literature or indeed dictionaries, and renders through poetic form, language sublime and extraordinary.