Paul Muldoon Quotes

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

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

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

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

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.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

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

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

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.

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

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.

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

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

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.

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

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

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

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

I do a lot of readings.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry