Someone Else 
Adam Phillips
Paul Muldoon excluded himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the poem was dedicated to him, or indeed whether it is in any sense about him. It is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead:
Widgeon
For Paul Muldoon
It had been badly shot.
While he was plucking it
he found, he says, the voice box –
like a flute stop
in the broken windpipe –
and blew upon it
unexpectedly
his own small widgeon cries.
Muldoon has said often enough in interviews that he likes ‘ventriloquising’ in his poetry, likes being able to do himself in different voices; but I take this poem to be, among other things, a warning and a question to Muldoon from the poet who was once his teacher, and about whom, at least on paper, Muldoon has the most genial and admiring of mixed feelings.
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Adam Phillips’s Intimacies, written with Leo Bersani, is out now. A book on the pleasures of kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is due in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
No reason for not asking · Empson’s War on God
Remember me · Bret Easton Ellis
What You Really Want · Edmund White
Bored with Sex? · Nasty Turns
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