Paul Muldoon Quotes

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Paul Muldoon

Profession : Poet

Birth : June 20, 1951

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

Paul Muldoon

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

I do believe that we've a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what's happening in poetry in English. I'm interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I'm not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.

Paul Muldoon

The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That's the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish.

Paul Muldoon

One is constantly trying to figure out what came together in one's childhood. Lots of people spend significant portions of their lives in therapy - especially in the States - trying to work out who they are. I'm certain there is a little of that in the business of writing. That would explain why certain images and themes recur.

Paul Muldoon

I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'

Paul Muldoon

I don't shape trends, I'd say. I merely reflect them. I think the emphasis is on 'them.' I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.

Paul Muldoon

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.

Paul Muldoon

I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

I do a lot of readings.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon