Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon
</gallery> Paul Muldoonis an Irish poet. He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. At Princeton University he is both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has also served as president of the Poetry Society and Poetry Editor at The New...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 June 1951
writing trying firsts
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up
political trying levels
Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level
book writing trying
It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.
along equals people simple violence
I think it's too simple to say that violence equals energy; people have said that along the way. Violence is debilitating as much as anything else.
despite key people poetry side
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
best inspire quite teachers
The teachers I had myself, the best of them were quite extraordinary, and really did inspire one into reading, or indeed, writing.
buoys sometimes cliche
The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with
reading people reason
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry
use television rhyme
I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme
years judging lasts
Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.
eye feet noses
The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.
engagement poet edges
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
interesting chance destination
If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.
want chimes
Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect