Paul Muldoon Quotes

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

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

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

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.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry

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

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 do a lot of readings.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.