English - Poet | June 20, 1951 -
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.
Paul Muldoon
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.
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I love adventure stories.
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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.
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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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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.
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I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.
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