Paul Muldoon is touring Ireland, but anyone looking for his poetry will have to wash it down with a stiff measure of rock'n'roll, writes Belinda McKeon
It's a sunny Saturday afternoon in Princeton, New Jersey, with students slowly beginning to drift back to the campus of spires and towers for another year of learning. Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who has taught at the university for more than 15 years, and who currently holds two professorships there, is talking about his earliest influences - and those influences are not what you might expect.
"I was very, very interested in the Dubliners when I was a teenager," Muldoon says, one eyebrow already beginning to arch in wry amusement. "So I got a couple of banjos along the way; I got a G banjo and a tenor banjo. And for a while I tried to model myself on Luke Kelly. And then for a while on Barney McKenna. And then I decided that really neither of these was a role model. And I ended up trying to play T.Rex on a banjo."
Around the table, there is raucous laughter at the very idea. Through the laughter, though, there's an unmistakable glimmer of interest, as though Children of the Revolution, as picked out clawhammer-style on a pre-war Gibson, is just about due a revival - and could slot very nicely into the repertoire of a self-dubbed three-car garage-rock band. I'm having lunch with Rackett, the six-member band which Muldoon formed in 2004 with fellow Princeton professor Nigel Smith, and which has enjoyed a startling ascent to acclaim since then, with sold-out gigs in the most kudos-conferring of Manhattan venues - Joe's Pub, the Knitting Factory and the Bitter End among them - and excitable mentions and reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times.
With Muldoon as lyricist, that attention is perhaps not surprising; his stature and popularity are arguably even greater in the US than in Ireland or the UK. And a great deal of the positive attention bestowed on Rackett has focused on the clever, quirky, chameleon-like unpredictability of his lyrics - Charles McGrath, in the New York Times last year, compared the band in one breath to the accomplishments of Van Morrison, Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter - but there is genuine enthusiasm, too, for the voomph and vigour of the Rackett sound, which flaunts its Stones-via-Cream-via-Hendrix influences with great pride.
Along with Muldoon, who plays "rhythm guitar" (read: who's indulged by the others and allowed to tote a Telecaster onstage as a sort of thank-you for his inimitable lyrics) and occasional maracas, and Smith, who writes the music and plays bass, the band consists of: an entertainment lawyer, Stephen Allen, who plays keyboards; a choirmaster and Princeton PhD candidate in musicology, Lee Matthew, who sings and plays guitar; and an IT expert, Bobby Lewis, who plays drums. They've just released their second album, Resistance - their first to be recorded in a professional studio - and on Sunday, Rackett will embark on their first Irish tour.
On these stages, the bandwill do their tweed-cum-Telecaster thing, working the gleeful, exuberant and slightly shambolic brand of rock which they've made their own over the last three years - a sample lyric: "Like Holden Caulfield in spotting phonies/ or Stephen Sondheim in winning Tonys/ You're a sort of pioneer". Resistance, the title track of the new album, combines, as its subject matter, the tragedies of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Marian and Robin Hood, Heloise and Abelard, with the shadows of the Cold War and the Pentagon, the SS and the Gestapo. Especially if Muldoon breaks out the maracas, it's safe to say that Rackett's Irish audiences are in for a couple of interesting nights.
It's clear that the band are looking forward to the idea of a week on the road, too. "We've got a special bus for our groupies," Allen chimes in helpfully, which leads to a long and typically Muldoon-esque story about the band's lyricist approaching a random bus driver in Dublin this summer to ask about the layout of a splitter bus. "We were offered a splitter bus," explains Smith, "but we still don't know what it means, so when Paul was in Ireland he did some on-the-ground research, found some drivers and asked them."
"Don't you want to hear about our contract riders?" Muldoon says, with a grin. They're very demanding, it seems. They want sausages, dogfish, Noble & Cooley drums, and single Irish girls, according to Allen, who has the look of the band's Casanova about him, though that's quickly adapted to a request for single Irish malt by Matthew, the youngest of the Racketteers. And Muldoon? He wants Silvermints. Lots of Silvermints. "Whatever happened to Silvermints?" he asks. "We used to love going over to buy them in Donegal."
"This is turning into a rock'n'roll interview," groans Smith, whose contract rider is looking a little more demure: he hopes every green room will provide them with a copy of the complete works of WB Yeats. Meanwhile, Matthews is insistent on the other side of the table: "Bushmills and Smithwick's and a case of Sierra Nevada." Watch out, Ireland. This lot could make the Stones gig at Slane look like an ashtanga yoga convention.SMITH AND MULDOONhave been friends since they both taught at Oxford in the late 1990s - Muldoon was professor of poetry there, while Smith taught 17th-century poetry - and, aware of each other's love for rock music, not to mention each other's impressive collection of electric guitars, they had long toyed with the idea of starting a band. But things became serious for Muldoon after a fan letter to the American musician Warren Zevon turned into a writing collaboration, which led to the song My Ride's Here, subsequently recorded (on a tribute album made after Zevon's death in 2003) by Bruce Springsteen. Before long, he was sending lyrics to Smith and asking him to set them to music ("I irritated a very grand person at Harvard that day by writing a song instead of replying to their e-mail," says Smith, and you get the sense that he doesn't regret it) and before they knew it, they had a band - and more lyrics than they could get around to turning into songs. It seems the prolificacy which Muldoon displays as a poet has extended easily to his work as a lyricist; he's even come up with a couple of song ideas over lunch today, he confides.
"It's something I love doing," Muldoon says, simply. "I scribble all the time . . . I find myself prompted by all sorts of little phrases." "He knows a lot of words," says Lewis, which is certainly one way of putting it, and gets the others listing some of the idiosyncratic nuggets which Muldoon has added to their mutual vocabulary. "Like eclept," says Matthew - it means "called", apparently. "And what do you call the word for shearing the lubber off a whale?" asks Allen. "To flense," it seems. "And how do you pronounce that word you made up?" interjects Matthew ("which one?" says Allen, in what sounds like a slightly weary tone). "The one about the hot brick in the sock?" "Oh, quoof?" answers Muldoon, referring to the title sonnet of his 1983 collection. It's clear that his steady flow of lyrics has ensured that there's never a dull moment in the Rackett rehearsal garage.
"I was fairly sure this was going to be special because of Paul's lyrics," says Smith, "and that's why I thought it was worth committing time and creativity and energy to it." Lewis, meanwhile, is the one member of the band who was unfamiliar with Muldoon as a poet before he encountered his lyrics and became part of Rackett.
"Steve occasionally would mention this Paul Muldoon guy," he says, "but I didn't know much about him beforehand. But the first lyric I read really struck me, and I still get very emotional about the words at times when we're playing, and the complexity of it too. There are times when all of a sudden I'll get it, and say, 'oh, that's what he means', or at least I think I know what he might mean. And he's okay with that, and I think that's the beauty of poetry, to me anyway."
THE LINE BETWEEN poetry and song lyrics is a fluid one for Muldoon, who sees the song, in any case, as belonging to the world of poetry; the old Irish tradition made no distinction between the two, he says, so nor will he. Which is not to say they draw on the same energy, or even follow the same rules; surprisingly, he believes that song-writing is an even more demanding task than the battle to give form to an emerging sonnet or villanelle. He was staggered, he says, by the things he learned in the course of his collaboration with Zevon. "I had no idea, and most people who haven't tried it will have no idea, I think, of how long a song is, for example. Or of what it looks like on the page. Basically it's a very, very short medium. And you've got to get a lot into it. And that's true of course of many poems also, but it's just a fascinating structure, it's a kind of revelatory structure. It seems very fixed but in fact one can do so much with it, it's a fascinating formula. Because it corresponds to some very profound aspect of how we are in the world, of how we think. And I'm endlessly intrigued by what can be done with that. It's so much fun."
Smith agrees. "Paul's lyrics are quintessentially Paul," he says. "They have these complex levels of allusion, but they're also enormous fun. Very witty. And if you take a bunch of them, they interconnect in a variety of ways, with little sub-themes in there.
"They're very inspiring, and very easy to write music to, because the music just comes. I think that's because he invests a lot of attention in what you might call chiming. He gets the sounds right as well as the conceptual content and ideas."
"The seam fights shy of the seamstress along the inner thigh," quotes Matthew, by way of illustration. Muldoon looks bemused. "There's so much wordsmithing going on in rock'n'roll," says Allen. "And I think the great asset we have is that our lyrics are well beyond that. It's not just a matter of finding words that rhyme in some way." By now, though, Muldoon is looking a little uncomfortable at this stage with all of this chat about his lyrics.
"At the end of the day, it's only one component," he says. "It'd be nice to think that it held its place, but it is, after all, a combination of words and music. And they have to be working together." As for his guitar playing, which, he maintains, has long been so "basic" that the others have essentially been allowing him to stay "on sufferance"; well, that's coming along.
"Nobody's going to pretend I'm a great guitarist," he says, shrugging with a smile. "But I plug away." "He does his thing," says Allen. "What happens to that thing I brought you back from my holidays?" says Smith. "The thing that makes a snake noise?" "I get all the odd jobs in this band," moans Muldoon.
And another rock'n'roll argument is underway.
Rackett play Triskel Arts Centre, Cork on Sun, and then tour to Listowel, Galway, Sligo, Navan, Belfast and Dublin. www.rackett.org
