“Unapproved Road”: Poetic Roadblocks and Animal Traffic in Paul Muldoon

Abstract

I. Cross-border Traffic and Roads Paul Muldoon's Unapproved lifts its title from the official word on Irish border traffic. Four years after partition created a land border between the newly formed Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1922, and three years after the 1923 customs barrier instituted a parallel economic partition (Nash and Reid 272), the Free State's 1926 Statutory Rules on Road Signs and Traffic Signals Regulations declared that Where a road crosses the frontier the approach to the frontier shall be indicated by a direction sign to be erected ... at a point one quarter of a mile from the frontier. Whether traffic is or is not permitted to cross the frontier on the road shall be indicated ... by the words road, or unapproved road, the case may require. (Government of Ireland) The repetition of specific words in these rules and regulations is already complicit with material circulation, given their apparent power to make the border itself visible (from a distance of one-quarter mile) and to permit or prevent cross-border traffic, whether human, automobile, or other. (1) By importing its title across the border's troubled history, Muldoon's Unapproved itself smuggles into lyric poetry the persistent political tensions and capital motivations of border traffic and so presents the two crossover critical opportunities that I take up in this paper. The first is generic; the second topical. At least since John Stuart Mill's definitive and defensive What is Poetry? (1833) and culminating in New Criticism a century later, the genre has been defined habitually and read lyrically if separate and separable from any historical, material, and economic contingency. (2) But rather than remove Muldoon's border poem (among others) from circulation by reading it an autonomous or even autopoietic lyric (Jackson 56), I will read it to reveal the genre's inevitable traffic in a larger economy, approved or not. (3) Correlated to this generic traffic, Unapproved also pre-empts any immobilization of the Irish border if exclusively political or statically symbolic. In their recent Border Crossings, Catherine Nash and Bryonie Reid address the border's changing cultural, material, and economic significance throughout the twentieth century and encourage a reading of its double meaning as material and imagined, literal and (267). I add a literary and theoretical register to their call by focusing on the ways in which poetic and capital traffic in words and goods--especially of the illicit or invisible kind--crosses or remains stalled at the Irish and Muldoonian borders. Besides redirecting genre and border studies, crossing poetic with capital traffic at the border can reveal the inevitable accidents and effects of their shared but ironically inverse logic: a desire for automobile circulation if natural and perpetual (without borders), yet perpetually foiled by its own vehicle made visible. I examine this cross-border traffic particularly through the vehicle of the animal, which figures doubly in the logics of poetic and capital circulation: in the movement of animal figures or alongside vehicles within Muldoon's poems (4) and against the background of smuggling material animals and goods--from cows and cigarettes to electronics and guns--across the Irish border (also in and vehicles). The animal and animals appear a common and largely invisible means to poetic and capital ends, otherwise imagined to be self-starting and self-perpetuating (that is, automobile). (5) In the same way that material animals grease the wheels of capital's cross-border circulation, so their figurative counterparts seem to ease linguistic traffic, specifically vehicles through which to render their poetry in motion natural or primal. Critically and poetically, each of Muldoon's poems dramatizes the tensions (and collisions) within this fantasy of perpetual and autonomous motion by literalizing it in the otherwise allegorical vehicle, be it animal, automobile, or both. …