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PAUL MULDOON
"Poetry begins with little glimmers -- the sense that there might be an interaction between two things, two often quite unlike things that come together in a metaphor or an image."
Born in Northern Ireland in 1951, Paul Muldoon was a radio and television producer with the BBC before moving to the United States in the late 1980s. His passion for exact description grows from his awareness that what is apparent often contains a deeper, stranger story. He currently teaches at Princeton University and was recently elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
"Symposium"
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it hold
its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds.
Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You've been
sold
one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.
A bird in the hand is better than no bread.
To have your cake is to pay Paul.
Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.
For want of a nail the sky might fall.
People in glass houses can't see the wood
for the new broom. Rome wasn't built between two stools.
Empty vessels wait for no man.
A hair of the dog is a friend indeed.
There's no fool like the fool
who's shot his bolt. There's no smoke after the horse is
gone.
"The Sightseers"
My father and mother, my brother and sister
and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July
in his broken-down Ford
not to visit some graveyard -- one died of shingles,
one of fever, another's knees turned to jelly --
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.
Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle
and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home.
What story has made the context of its telling unforgettable to you?
Questions
1. Look up the definition of "symposium." How is Muldoon's poem similar to and different from the definition? Explain why you think the title works or doesn't work.
2. Based on the setting of "The Sightseers," what are the "B-Specials," and why did they stop Uncle Pat and terrorize him? Why do you think Muldoon juxtaposed the story of the roundabout with Uncle Pat's story of brutality? What does an "o" have to do with it? What are some other stories of recurring violence?
Activities
1. Create your own verbal "symposium," using parts of well-known aphorisms, proverbs, or folk sayings. Create your own visual "symposium," using widely different kinds of images from magazines, newspapers, and photographs.
2. After listening to Paul Muldoon read "The Sightseers," write about a family event you experienced and describe it in relation to a place in your neighborhood or city.
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