Paul Muldoon Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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. — Paul Muldoon

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

I do a lot of readings. — Paul Muldoon

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

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

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

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. — Paul Muldoon

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read. — 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'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. — 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

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. — Paul Muldoon

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

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. — 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 certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy. — Paul Muldoon

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

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future. — Paul Muldoon