Paul Muldoon

Poetry

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University of Belfast.

From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark’ 21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.

Paul Muldoon’s main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War’.

“The poems I’ve written about the political situation ... tend to be oblique, and I think properly so: they tend to look slightly farther back at the society from which the situation erupted, at why we are how we are now. What can you say about how we are? What I have to say about the politics of Northern Ireland is no more significant, probably less informed, than what A, B or C has to say; it’s pure opinion. Of course there is a place in poetry for opinion, but there’s no place for the opinionated. If I believed there were a revolution, for example, and you can take it that I don’t – I don’t believe that Catholics are good guys and Protestants are bad guys, or vice-versa – if we were living in a banana republic and were being truly, monstrously oppressed, one can imagine pamphleteering, but not in Northern Ireland. The society is much too complex.”
Paul Muldoon, from In The Chair, Salmon Publishing 2002

Selected Poetry:
The Word on the Street, Faber and Faber, 2013
Maggot, Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Faber and Faber 2010
Wayside Shrines, Gallery Press, 2009
Plan B, Enitharmon, 2009
When the Pie Was Opened, American University of Paris/Sylph Editions, 2008
Horse Latitudes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 Faber and Faber, 2006
Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore, Modern Haiku Press, 2005
Medley for Morin Khur, Enitharmon Press, 2005
Moy Sand And Gravel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002 Faber and Faber, 2002
Unapproved Road, Pied Oxen, 2002
Poems 1968-1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 Faber and Faber, 2001
Hay, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998 Faber and Faber, 1998
The Bangle (Slight Return), Princeton: The Typography Studio, 1998
Hopewell Haiku, Warwick Press, 1997
New Selected Poems 1968-94, Faber and Faber, 1996
Kerry Slides, Gallery Press, 1996
The Annals of Chile, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994 Faber and Faber, 1994
The Prince of the Quotidian, Wake Forest University Press, 1994 Gallery Press, 1994
Incantata, Graphic Studio, Dublin, 1994
Selected Poems 1968-86, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993 Ecco Press, 1987
Madoc: A Mystery, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 Faber and Faber, 1990
Meeting the British, Wake Forest University Press, 1987 Faber and Faber, 1987
Selected Poems 1968-83, Faber and Faber, 1986
The Wishbone, Gallery Press, 1984
Quoof, Wake Forest University Press, 1983 Faber and Faber, 1983
Out of Siberia, Gallery Press, 1982
Why Brownlee Left, Wake Forest University Press, 1980 Faber and Faber, 1980
Immram, Gallery Press, 1980
Names and Addresses, Ulsterman Publications, 1978
Mules, Wake Forest University Press, 1977 Faber and Faber, 1977
Spirit of Dawn, Ulsterman Publications, 1975
New Weather, Faber and Faber, 1973
Knowing My Place, Ulsterman Publications, 1971

Drama:
Special Pleading (after Racine)
Vera of Las Vegas (An opera in one act with music by Daron Hagen.) Gallery Press, 2001
Bandanna (An opera in two acts with music by Daron Hagen.) Faber and Faber, 1999
Six Honest Serving Men (A play in one act.) Gallery Press, 1995
Shining Brow (An opera in two acts with music by Daron Hagen.) Faber and Faber, 1993
Monkeys (A television play, directed by Danny Boyle.) British Broadcasting Corporation, 1989

Essays and Criticism:
The End of the Poem (Oxford Lectures) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Faber and Faber, 2006
To Ireland, I, The 1998 Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University Press, 2000
Getting Round: Notes towards an Ars Poetica, Essays in Criticism, April 1998

For Children:
Reverse Flannery (Magical Tales of Ireland) Random House, 2003
The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt Faber and Faber, 1997
The Last Thesaurus Faber and Faber, 1995
The O-Os Party Gallery Press, 1981

Translation:
The Drowned Blackbird, Princeton University Press
The Hebrew Book of Psalms (with Michael Thomas Davis), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Faber and Faber
The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Gallery Press, 2007
The Birds by Aristophanes (with Richard Martin),Gallery Press, 1999; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999
The Astrakhan Cloak by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Gallery Press, 1993