Between the Bittern and the Café du Monde: Paul Muldoon’s The Prince of the Quotidian

The article focuses on Paul Muldoon’s 1994 collection The Prince of the Quotidian. The pamphlet is regarded as a poetic autobiography that takes its impetus from a dual drive towards particularising of experience on the one hand and iterative multiplication of its textual representation. Taking cue from Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, I argue that Muldoon sets up a network of connection that his speaker functions within, thereby positioning himself on the threshold between centripetal focus on life, however mundane it should be, and centrifugal textuality, motivated by intertextual references.