First published in Prospect (Issue 195)
Poetry Parnassus
Southbank Centre, 26 June-1st July
What is the difference between a poem and a song? In a spoof YouTube
video the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon wryly claimed to
detect an allusion to King Lear in the lyrics of Ke$ha’s hit song “TiK
ToK” (sample lyric “oh oh oh”). But he will reflect on the question
more seriously this year when he delivers the Poetry Society’s Annual
Lecture, “The Word on the Street—Parnassus and Tin Pan Alley.”
Muldoon’s poetry, laced with obscure words and far-flung puns, has
earned him the nickname the “Puck of Princeton” (where he teaches) and
he is just as bracing as a lecturer.
His address will be a highlight of the Poetry Parnassus, a six-day
festival of poetry at the South Bank Centre, presided over by Simon
Armitage. Planned to coincide with the Olympics, poets from all 204
countries represented in the games will gather for a marathon of
readings, essays and workshops. Fittingly, there will be a tribute to
Ted Hughes, who championed foreign writers as co-founder of the journal
Modern Poetry in Translation. “The amazing boom of translation,” Hughes
told The Paris Review in 1995, had had the greatest effect on poets
after the war, including his wife Sylvia Plath: “And she never heard
the Beatles.”