Top 25 Paul Muldoon Quotes

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

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.

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.

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 love adventure stories.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I do a lot of readings.

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

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.