What I Found Most Interesting

in Moy, Sand and Gravel was Paul Muldoon's playfulness with form, of which Joel makes brief mention in his post. I'm particularly interested in form because I am so incapable of experimenting with it myself, so after reading this collection I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand why he writes into a form so often and so well.

On one level, a lot of the consistencies of the book, such as rhyme and coupletting and the occasional alliteration seem to be working internally, within the confines of what it means to actually produce manuscript that is entertaining and lively and fun to read. Muldoon has a fantastic awareness of the sonic value of words and language, one that I think is often overlooked by a lot of poets because it calls for a sacrifice of emotion or meaning. For instance, on page 13, "The Braggart" (I don't know for sure if we were even supposed to read this particular one), he writes,

He sucked, he'll have you know,
the telltale sixth toe
of a woman who looked like a young Marilyn Monroe,

her hubby getting a little stroppy
when he found them there in the back of that old jalopy.
Other papers please copy.

The satirical content of this piece cannot be overlooked and it is so easily incorporated into this AAA rhyme scheme that I kept wondering if maybe it was a song or something extremely pop culture. He loves this juxtaposition of serious and funny, the formal and the informal. I wonder if his use of form and rhyme is intentional so that readers who are not typically moved by poems about Marilyn Monroe (or the like) will become more instantly engaged with the piece and want to know more.

Looking at the book as a manuscript/a group of pages all linked together into a book (as I suspect we were supposed to do also), I was pretty fascinated by his choice of font and titling, as well as his cover art. Muldoon's poetry (I've only read one other of his books) has always resembled something beautiful but grey and elusive. It's a rabbit-like sort of catch-me-if-you-can style of writing and I love to see myself trying to grab at it and fail. Even though he has fantastic and obviously complicated language and word choice (Kate and Shannon's entries both involve definining words that are basically unknown to 90% to the rest of universe) he always manages to create sort of uncomplicated images...he's got mad talent.