Paul Muldoon Quotations

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry

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

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

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

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time

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

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place

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.

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.

The teachers I had myself, the best of them were quite extraordinary, and really did inspire one into reading, or indeed, writing.

The center only exists in a metaphysical sense at the moment. There are no bricks and mortar involved now. And indeed, in a strange way, I'm rather glad that it's not related to a specific building; in some way, I don't think it ever can be. I think there's going to be an expansion and a consolidation so that arts aren't ghettoized in a single building, but can instead interact across the campus.

It's an opportunity to do something we've never quite managed before: to get our programs going in the same direction, under the same aegis, under one form of leadership. I think, in many ways, that the focus this will give us is going to allow us all to give the students a much better service.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini,

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

I do a lot of readings.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

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.

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.

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.