Aysegul Savas Walks With Paul Muldoon in Tepoztlán

At Paris Review Daily, Aysegul Savas spoke with poet Paul Muldoon while the two were in Tepoztlán, Mexico for a writing program. Savas told Muldoon, upon their first meeting there, "about [Hart] Crane’s visit to the Tepoztlán monastery eighty-three years before. Crane had written his last poem 'The Broken Tower' shortly afterward." From there:

...In a letter, [Crane] described the religious ceremony he attended, very similar in its shades and echoes to “The Broken Tower”: the churchyard at dawn, the ringing of the bells, the steep, terraced cliffs.

Before Muldoon got up to go to the garden, I asked timidly if he would join me for a walk that week to retrace Crane’s footsteps. We could visit the church, walk around the monastery, go up to the terrace. Then we would sit down to read “The Broken Tower.”

I would write an essay for my workshop afterward, about Muldoon’s reactions to the poem and the landscape. Two great poets, I told him, meeting years apart in the monastery.

I added that the bell tower was currently closed for restoration—to me another strange sign—as if the poem were reenacting itself:

The bells I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where …

Read on at PR Daily.