Quotes by Paul Muldoon
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I'm not an expert in physics or cosmology or any of these matters, but the more we discover about how the world works the more we see these unpatterned patterns - all these orbits and orders and, within them, these variations.
Finally, I suppose, I'm interested in poems where one isn't stopped or where one is only stopped for a good reason.
I suppose I tend to prefer concrete imagery rather than more analytical language.
I think it's too simple to say that violence equals energy; people have said that along the way. Violence is debilitating as much as anything else.
One of the kinds of poems I'm interested in writing is one which gives the impression that it had to be the way it is.
I do a lot of readings.
On the one hand there's the wonderful chanciness and randomness of things, and on the other hand there's a terrifying predictability.
Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Although I read some fiction, I don't even try to keep in touch with it!
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Let's face it, confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day.
One would have liked those titles to be almost invisible, to only flash up, as it were, for a moment on the screen.
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.
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.
I don't say it idly that Frost is a big influence on me - though there are other influences.
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.
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.
It's something which has always been an element in my poems: you know the notion that Brownlee's end is somehow in his name, nomen est omen if you like.
Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.
Well, I think of rhyme as being intrinsic to the language, integral to the language.
While I lived in Ireland I worked for BBC Radio - and did a little bit of television at the end.
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