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" I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987. "
Paul Muldoon
Born
My Life
Life
Related Quotes:
" Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. "
Paul Muldoon
Want
Things
Find
" Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent. "
Paul Muldoon
Living
Some
Something
" 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
" 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
" 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 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 read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on. "
Paul Muldoon
Ninth
Irish
Lot
" 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
Live
Say
Living
" 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
" 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
" The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world. "
Paul Muldoon
Back
Best
Go
" 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
" 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 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. "
Paul Muldoon
Cinema
Movies
Loved
" 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
Film
Time
Song
" 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
" I do a lot of readings. "
Paul Muldoon
Lot
Readings
" 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
You
Up
Sometimes
" 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 love adventure stories. "
Paul Muldoon
I Love
Love
Stories
" It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. "
Paul Muldoon
Too
Seems
Structure
" We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. "
Paul Muldoon
Poetry
Kept
Simply
" For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry. "
Paul Muldoon
People
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. "
Paul Muldoon
Think
Love
Poetry
" I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish. "
Paul Muldoon
May
Irish
Me
" I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. "
Paul Muldoon
Percent
Television
Use
" 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. "
Paul Muldoon
Business
Why
Childhood
" I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy. "
Paul Muldoon
Am
Clarity
Accessibility
" 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
Down
Door
Accusation
" I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language. "
Paul Muldoon
Language
Repetition
Believe