Paul Muldoon Reads "Anseo" | Big Think

Paul Muldoon Reads "Anseo"

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When the master was calling the roll

At the primary school in Collegelands,

You were meant to call back Anseo

And raise your hand

As your name occurred..

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Paul Muldoon:

Paul Muldoon is a writer, academic and educator, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for this work, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Muldoon: So, this is a poem called Anseo. Anseo was the first word of Irish I learned. It means "here." It was a word that we learned at primary school as the role was being called. Here. Anseo, Anseo.

Anseo

When the master was calling the roll

At the primary school in Collegelands,

You were meant to call back Anseo

And raise your hand

As your name occurred.

Anseo, meaning here, here and now,

All present and correct,

Was the first word of Irish I spoke.

The last name on the ledger

Belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward

And was followed, as often as not,

By silence, knowing looks,

A nod and a wink, the master's droll

'And where's our little Ward-of-court?'

I remember the first time he came back

The master had sent him out

Along the hedges

To weigh up for himself and cut

A stick with which he would be beaten.

After a while, nothing was spoken;

He would arrive as a matter of course

With an ash-plant, a salley-rod.

Or, finally, the hazel-wand

He had whittled down to a whip-lash,

Its twist of red and yellow lacquers

Sanded and polished,

And altogether so delicately wrought

That he had engraved his initials on it.

I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward

In a pub just over the Irish border.

He was living in the open,

in a secret camp

On the other side of the mountain.

He was fighting for Ireland,

Making things happen.

And he told me, Joe Ward,

Of how he had risen through the ranks

To Quartermaster, Commandant:

How every morning at parade

His volunteers would call back Anseo

And raise their hands

As their names occurred.