Paul Muldoon Quotes

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Paul Muldoon

Profession : Poet

Birth : June 20, 1951

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.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

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.

Paul Muldoon

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.

Paul Muldoon

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.

Paul Muldoon

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

Paul Muldoon

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Paul Muldoon

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.

Paul Muldoon

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.

Paul Muldoon

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

Paul Muldoon

I met Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley on the same day in 1968. I was sixteen at the time. Very exciting. They were reading at Armagh. One of my teachers brought me to meet them, introduced me, and I became friends with them.

Paul Muldoon

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

Paul Muldoon

I spent about five years stuck in a room between the ages of 16 and 20 while I wrote the first book, which came out when I was 21. I should have been out playing tennis.

Paul Muldoon

Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.

Paul Muldoon

Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.

Paul Muldoon

I love adventure stories.

Paul Muldoon

I was reared on American TV and films. There was a huge sense of occasion about going to the cinema in Moy in the late 1950s and early '60s, and I absolutely loved those Hollywood sword-and-sandal movies like Ben-Hur and the dime-a-dozen cowboy-and-Indian films, as we then referred to them.

Paul Muldoon