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" 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.' "

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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

" 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. "

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

Paul Muldoon

May

Irish

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

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

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

Paul Muldoon

Clarity

Accessibility

" The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That's the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish. "

Paul Muldoon

Against

Done

" I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I do a lot of readings. "

Paul Muldoon

Lot

Readings

" 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

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

" I love adventure stories. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

Paul Muldoon

Back

Best

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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