Paul Muldoon

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Paul Muldoon (born 20 June 1951) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland as well as an educator and academic at Princeton University.

Contents

[edit] Life and work

Paul Muldoon was born on a farm outside the Moy, in County Armagh. His father was a farmer, his mother a school-mistress. He went to Queen's University Belfast, and worked for many years (including the most bitter period of the Troubles as a radio producer for the BBC in Belfast, before moving to the United States

His poetry is known for his difficult, sly, allusive style, casual use of obscure or archaic words, understated wit, punning, and deft technique in meter and slant rhyme. [1]

Muldoon has lived in the United States since 1987; he teaches at Princeton University and is an Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for the five-year term 1999–2004, and he is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University. In addition, he teaches in Vermont at The Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College's graduate program.

Muldoon's work has usually been overshadowed by that of his friend and mentor, Seamus Heaney. Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, is better known and has enjoyed more popular success, while Muldoon has been referred to as 'the poet's poet', whose work is frequently too involved for a more casual readership. However, Muldoon's reputation as a serious poet was confirmed in 2003 with his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

He has been awarded such honours as fellowships in the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize; the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry.

In September 2007 he was hired as poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Muldoon has contributed the librettos for four operas by Daron Hagen: Shining Brow (1992), Vera of Las Vegas (1996), Bandanna (1998), and The Antient Concert (2005). His interests have not only included libretto, but the rock lyric as well, penning lines for The Handsome Family as well as the late Warren Zevon whose titular track "My Ride's Here" belongs to a Muldoon collaboration. Muldoon also writes lyrics for (and plays "rudimentary rhythm" guitar in) his own Princeton-based rock band, Rackett. [2]

On June 18th 2009 he appeared as a special guest on 'The Colbert Report'.

[edit] Family

Paul Muldoon is married to the writer Jean Hanff Korelitz. He has two children - Dorothy and Asher - and lives in Griggstown, New Jersey.[3]

[edit] Publications

By 2009, Muldoon's published books (with major collections starred*) were:

  • Knowing My Place (1971)
  • New Weather (1973)*
  • Spirit of Dawn (1975)
  • Mules (1977)*
  • Names and Addresses (1978)
  • Immram (1980)
  • The O-O's Party, New Year's Eve (1980)
  • Why Brownlee Left (1980)*
  • Out of Siberia (1982)
  • Quoof (1983)*
  • The Wishbone (1984)
  • Paul Muldoon: Selected Poems 1968-1983 (1986)*
  • Meeting the British (1987)*
  • Madoc: A Mystery (1990)*
  • The Annals of Chile (1994)*
  • The Prince of the Quotidian (1994)
  • Six Honest Serving Men (1995)
  • Kerry Slides (with photographs by Bill Doyle) (1996)
  • New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996)*
  • Hopewell Haiku (1997)
  • Hay (1998)*
  • Poems 1968-1998 (2001)*
  • Moy Sand and Gravel (2002)* (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2003 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • Medley for Morin Khur (2005)
  • Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore (2005)
  • Horse Latitudes (2006)* (shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize)
  • General Admission (2006)
  • When the Pie was Opened (2008)
  • Plan B (2009)

Most of these volumes were collections of shorter poems. In his principal volumes a pattern that was soon established was the inclusion of a long concluding poem. As Muldoon produced more collections these long poems gradually took up more space in the volume, until in 1990 Madoc: A Mystery took over the volume of that name, leaving only seven short poems to appear before it. Muldoon has not since published a poem of comparable length, but a new trend is emerging whereby more than one long poem appears in a volume.

Madoc: A Mystery is among Muldoon's most difficult works. The poem narrates, in 233 sections (the same number as the number of American Indian tribes), an alternative history in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey come to America in order to found a utopian community. (The poets had, in reality, discussed but never undertaken this journey; the title comes from Southey's poem Madoc, about a legendary Welsh prince of that name.) The poem is complex, including as 'poetry' such non-literary constructions as maps and geometric diagrams. Although some critics have considered it Muldoon's masterpiece[citation needed], others, such as John Banville, have professed themselves baffled.[4]

Muldoon has also edited a number of anthologies, written two children's books, translated the work of other authors, and published critical prose. These are, respectively:

  • The Scrake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1979)
  • The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986)
  • The Faber Book of Beasts (1997)
  • The Oxford and Cambridge May Anthologies 2000: Poetry (2000)
  • The Best American Poetry 2005 (with David Lehman) (2005)
  • The Last Thesaurus (1996)
  • The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt (1997)
  • The Astrakhan Cloak (translated into English the work written by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in Irish language) (1992)
  • The Birds / adaptation after Aristophanes (1999)
  • The End of the Poem: 'All Souls Night' by WB Yeats (lecture) (2000)
  • To Ireland, I (2000)
  • The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry (2006)

[edit] Awards

Muldoon has won the following major poetry awards:[5]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wills, Clair (1998). Reading Paul Muldoon. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. ISBN 1852243481. 
  2. ^ Val Nolan, ‘Lets go make some noise!’, The Stinging Fly, Volume 2, Issue 8 (Dublin: Winter 2007/08), pp. 11-13; Feature on Paul Muldoon’s band Rackett, specifically their concert at the Róisín Dubh, Galway, during their 2007 Irish tour.
  3. ^ "Making history in Griggstown", Princeton Packet, 27 November 2007. Accessed 23 December 2007. "Two presentations by John Allen, president of the Griggstown Historical Society, were made. Mark Alan Hewitt, project architect, received an autographed copy of “Moy Sand & Gravel” by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, a Griggstown resident."
  4. ^ "Madoc by Paul Muldoon". completereview.org. http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/muldoonp/madoc.htm. Retrieved 2009-05-27. "I cannot help feeling that this time (Muldoon) has gone too far -- so far, at least, that I can hardly make him out at all, off there in the distance, dancing by himself." 
  5. ^ From Paul Muldoon at Contemporary Writers

[edit] External links

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