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All Quotes by author - Paul Muldoon
" 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. "
High School
Laziness
Teacher
" 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. "
Believe
Lake
First
" For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry. "
People
Read
Poetry
" Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. "
Brilliant
People
Poet
" I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language. "
Language
Repetition
Believe
" I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy. "
Am
Clarity
Accessibility
" I do a lot of readings. "
Lot
Readings
" 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. "
Try
Believe
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. "
Think
Love
Poetry
" I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too. "
Live
Say
Living
" I love adventure stories. "
I Love
Love
Stories
" I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish. "
May
Irish
Me
" 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. "
Meet
Reading
Time
" I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. "
Percent
Television
Use
" I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on. "
Ninth
Irish
Lot
" 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. "
Playing
Years
First
" 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. "
Down
Door
Accusation
" 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.' "
Want
Suffering
Think
" It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. "
Too
Seems
Structure
" I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987. "
Born
My Life
Life
" 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. "
Cinema
Movies
Loved
" Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent. "
Living
Some
Something
" 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. "
Try
Sense
Political
" Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read. "
Course
Going
People
" 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. "
Business
Why
Childhood
" One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. "
Poetry
Look
Never
" 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. "
Place
Some
Hand
" 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. "
School
Society
Poetry
" 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. "
Kind
Editing
Me
" 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. "
Poetry
Turn
Great
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