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" 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. "
Paul Muldoon
High School
Laziness
Teacher
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" I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987. "
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" For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. "
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" It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. "
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" 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. "
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You
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" Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. "
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Things
Find
" I do a lot of readings. "
Paul Muldoon
Lot
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" 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
Playing
Years
First
" 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. "
Paul Muldoon
Try
Believe
Poetry
" 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
Place
Some
Hand
" I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. "
Paul Muldoon
Percent
Television
Use
" We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. "
Paul Muldoon
Poetry
Kept
Simply
" 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
Believe
Lake
First
" I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy. "
Paul Muldoon
Am
Clarity
Accessibility
" 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
Try
Sense
Political
" 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. "
Paul Muldoon
Think
Love
Poetry
" I love adventure stories. "
Paul Muldoon
I Love
Love
Stories
" I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on. "
Paul Muldoon
Ninth
Irish
Lot
" The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world. "
Paul Muldoon
Back
Best
Go
" Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read. "
Paul Muldoon
Course
Going
People
" 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
Poetry
Turn
Great
" 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
Kind
Editing
Me
" The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives. "
Paul Muldoon
Reach
Moments
Poetry
" 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
Meet
Reading
Time
" 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
Without
Going
Go
" One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. "
Paul Muldoon
Poetry
Look
Never
" 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.' "
Paul Muldoon
Want
Suffering
Think
" 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
School
Society
Poetry