Why Brownlee Left

Abstract

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License. Chapter 3 Why Brownlee Left Although Muldoon relishes 'the rhyme on "Aristotle" and "bottle"' in Byron's epic Don Juan, he still claims 'Beppo' as 'my own favourite.'1 His savouring of the palatable and alphabetic rhyme, his unconventional preference (in canonical terms) for Byron and his idiosyncratic choice of 'Beppo' are indicative of the rhyming panache and the canonical negotiations of his own language and poetry. Muldoon's identification with Byron indicates other similarities and signals an, as yet, unexplored framework for his own poetic priorities. Both Byron and Muldoon write of solemn concerns in irreverent form and they adopt radical attitudes while maintaining allegiances to traditional form. Furthermore, Byron's peregrinations, both in literature and life, posit a very viable template for Muldoon's language and concerns in Why Brownlee Left, which overlap, develop and differ from Mules. In Mules, language contains its own alterity and continuously transforms its own conditions and consequences in a double take on the reality it both acknowledges and distances itself from. Bestiality of many sorts, eroticism too, not least linguistic, paronomasia, ekphrastic oscillations and a mulish resistance to ordinary directives and orders of language weld and wrench new meanings in this volume. Such intransigent and intransitive language seems pertinent to a condition that does not yield itself easily to representation of any kind-linguistic, musical or visual-a condition which Muldoon's poetic language refracts and refigures as much as it represents. Whereas Mules imagines hybrid identities and mixed cultures, and tends to release the spontaneous as well as the sterile of compressed spaces, whether these are considered to be geographical, traditional, political, poetic or linguistic, or a composite of these, Why Brownlee Left seems to reflect upon the complexities of origin, ancestry and identity, and to explore the terrains of exit, emigration and effacement. Evidently, these two clusters of themes are connected in terms of time, place and self and the whole volume traces these interrelations. In fact, the notions of trace and tracing inform the volume. Tracing, a comprehensive search for evidence, addresses adroitly the mystery the title (Why Brwonlee Left) articulates, but also has much wider implications. The act of pursuing non-material dimensions of an event that seems to be lost but which still bears upon the past and the present and the future, brings into question the understanding of

Foreword: ‘Crumpled metal’ and ‘A Gift of a Melon’: The Future in Northern Irish Culture

“…Indeed, to some extent, 'A Gift of a Melon' can be thought of as a lovingly ironic rewrite of 'Snow', and, in that, also an ironic rewrite of other Northern Irish poems which have rewritten MacNeice's 'Snow' -Paul Muldoon's 'History', for example, and Ciaran Carson's 'Snow'. 10 If MacNeice's poem 'arises from the culture it [has been] held up to as a focus for aspiration' (by President Clinton, for example), 11 its slantwise 'historicisation' in Muldoon's poem, and its translation into Carson's Belfast, confirm that the poem's declensions are generational revisions and its place in Northern Irish poetic discourse is fluidly revised. Padraig Regan's re-imagining of 'Snow' in 'A Gift of a Melon' is tangentially related to MacNeice's original (whereas Muldoon's and Carson's poems depend on MacNeice's for their intertextual purchase) and Regan chooses not 'history', and not the unstated class and social privilege which allows MacNeice's poem to come into being (which underpins Carson take on MacNeice), but instead its central sensuality, its interest in the visually spectacular, and its appeal to taste as evidence of being alive as the poem's point of purchase on this intertext.…”