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" 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
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" 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
" 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'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. "
Paul Muldoon
Percent
Television
Use
" 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
Me
Against
Done
" I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on. "
Paul Muldoon
Ninth
Irish
Lot
" 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 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
" 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
Go
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read. "
Paul Muldoon
Course
Going
People
" Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. "
Paul Muldoon
Brilliant
People
Poet
" 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
" I love adventure stories. "
Paul Muldoon
I Love
Love
Stories
" 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
" 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 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
" Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. "
Paul Muldoon
Want
Things
Find
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. "
Paul Muldoon
Poetry
Kept
Simply
" Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent. "
Paul Muldoon
Living
Some
Something
" It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. "
Paul Muldoon
Too
Seems
Structure
" 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
" 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