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E-mailRackett rocks the Bowery in New York
Pulitzer prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon's band an eclectic mix
On a Saturday night last month a rather special band performed at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York. The rockers wore faded jeans and looked both relaxed and intense. Sandwiched between a young jazz act and a burlesque show promising “extreme audio visual stimulations,” this was Rackett, a five-man band that performs at the Bowery Poetry Club on the third Saturday of every month until December. Three of the band wore spectacles, all were well over thirty. Rackett includes amongst its members a world expert on Milton and a scholar of renaissance polyphony, but most famously its songs are composed by Pulitzer prize-winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon.
Rackett first came into existence in 2004. In spring 2005, Muldoon’s wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, wrote an article entitled “Sleeping with the Guitar Player” for the New York Times, telling how, while she was pregnant, her husband came home one day with a guitar and began to practise, initially causing her nausea. Soon though, that changed. “I remember vividly the first time I realized they were going to be good,” she says, sitting by the stage. “It was so humbling.”
But not surprising. Muldoon is after all, a brilliant and prolific poet. In the band’s early days, he would write three or four songs a week; now that has slowed to about two per month, but it’s still a rate that most songwriters would envy. “The beauty of this band is Paul’s creativity,” says Nigel Smith, a professor of English at Princeton University, where Muldoon is Howard G. B. Clarke ’21 professor of poetry.
Indeed, the band seems abrim with talent. Smith may be a professor now, but as a young teenager in London, he was a member of Benjamin Britten’s choir, and he featured on the original soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar. Later, he fell in love with prog rock and new wave, but then academics took over. Smith went to Oxford and studied English, and he didn’t return to rock until he met Muldoon at Princeton.
“When I came to Princeton, Paul looked after me and took me out to dinner occasionally,” Smith says, “and I realized he was a rock fiend. We started writing to each other in the personae of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.” In January 2004, Muldoon sent Smith a commanding email: “We’re having a band. Set this attached song to music.”
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