The Word on the Street

Paul Muldoon, winner of the Pulitzer, Griffin and TS Eliot prizes and  highly acclaimed for his many poetry collections, including Quoof (1983) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), has returned to poetry’s lyrical roots with the publication of The Word On The Street.  Written to be set to music, many of these rock lyrics have been recorded by the Princeton music collective Wayside Shrines, of which Muldoon is a member.

The book is shaped and formatted like an insert for a CD; inside are 30 lyric-poems, arranged in alphabetical order.  They deal with many of the traditional themes of popular song – love, war, drugs, sex.  But this being Paul Muldoon’s work, it is highly imaginative, wry and knowing, with more than a touch of music hall, blues and ballad influences.  Infused with references to icons of popular culture – Buddy Holly, Blade Runner, Darth Vader – it is also packed with classical allusions to figures such as Julius Caesar, Oedipus and Sophocles.

Muldoon’s poetry has always ranged widely in form and style and some of his most rhythmic work lends itself to being put to music.  But in these rock lyrics, as he describes them, refrains and repetitions abound as never before. So in “Badass Blues”,
T. S. Eliot simply never dared
To capitalize the “J” in Jew
T.S. Eliot simply never dared
To capitalize the “J” in Jew
T.S. Eliot simply never dared
To challenge Albert Einstein’s E=MC²
Thought they’d both got the badass
blues

Muldoon makes his point succinctly with the juxtaposition of Eliot’s anti-Semitism and Einstein’s achievement. Most readers will hear their own blues music as they read these infectious rhythms – like nursery rhymes for adults.

There are some memorable refrains throughout the book.  For example, from “Black Box”: “I don’t know what happened along/the way/To make me come up with you” and from “It Won’t Ring True”, “..if a promise isn’t hollow/You know it won’t ring true”.

The stories told are all the more poignant for the wry jokiness in the telling and Muldoon has fun playing with words in ways he probably couldn’t quite get away with without that “rock lyrics” tag. In “Cleaning Up My Act”,

There are no gentlemen
In a gentlemen’s club
No room for nuclear families
In a nuclear sub
A flight may run from Reno
To a renal ward

Muldoon knowingly pushes beyond what he can reasonably get away with in several lyrics.  The opening verse of “Julius Caesar Was A People Person” continues,

He knew how people felt
He knew it took a little coercion
When the people were the Celts
In a mountain pass he’d kick some ass
Then hightail it back to the gym
Till the top brass got fed up en masse
And had their knives out for him

These are richly intelligent poems, ranging widely in their themes across contemporary politics, Western society and culture, as well as forging links across centuries of corruption, degradation and war.

The Word On The Street is consistently streetwise, sardonic, menacing and strange.  However, for me, there’s something missing in the collection –  the music.  It is, indeed, like buying a CD with the lyric sheet intact but the CD missing. I strongly recommend a visit to www.waysideshrines.org to hear many of these lyrics at their very best. The musicians lift them to an altogether different level.  And maybe, when everything’s said and sung, that’s the sign of good lyrics.

Lindsay Macgregor