Quotes by Paul Muldoon
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I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
But geneticists will tell you that there are certain things about our lives and our deaths that we can't do anything about.
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
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.
But I don't think that's a problem at all - all poems, including those of Seamus Heaney (which Carey would especially valorise), are in a dialogue with other works of art. That's obvious, I think.
Well my mother was a teacher, so there was always this sense that teaching is a noble calling, which I think it is.
I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.
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.
Well, 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.
One has to learn to read these poems, just as one has to learn to read a three-line, little imagist poem, just as the writer had to learn to write it.
I always go to England quite a bit, at least three times a year, because I have this honorary appointment at Oxford now.
On the one hand we're terrifyingly complicated things, but on the other hand, we're very simple creatures, very basic organisms, and so much about us is pre-programmed and determined.
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.
Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.
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.
Poetry is not being taught to the extent it used to be - and various aspects of memorizing poetry are not being taught.
The teachers I had myself, the best of them were quite extraordinary, and really did inspire one into reading, or indeed, writing.
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.
I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.
I read virtually everything, certainly by the obvious candidates, published in this country and across the water.
The fact is that where I am now is where I was a month ago; which is however cliche-ridden it might seen, facing the blank page and probably finding it as difficult and maybe even slightly more difficult to keep on going.
I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.
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