Quotes from Paul Muldoon

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.

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.

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

I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.

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

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

I love adventure stories.

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

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

Short, narrow streets run far and wide / as if they were homesick.

I who have been at the mercy of the cider-press / have also been known to trifle / with the affections of a dryad in a sacred grove, / a judge's daughter and a between-maid to Lord Mountbatten / among others from beyond my clan

The spirit of those men of steel, / their gray-eyed wives and daughters

On Sackville Street, a girl who seemed to be about to choke coughed up something from her very core. / She wipes her mouth on her jute cloak / and reloads her father's four-bore. / The sky is full of coal dust.

Leave your jewels in the bank," / the Countess told the girls. "The only thing worth / wearing's a revolver." It seems she shot one officer point-blank. / The whole world's foundering. A smoke trail tells / of the fates of Caesar, Alexander. Those who kissed their hems. / Tara's plowed under. Troy eventually fell. / Surely the English will get what's coming to them?

Those who can't afford a uniform may wear a blue armband / from which the meadow pipit filches a single strand / to bind its nest. The rest of us are bound / by honor alone.

our lietenants knew those splotches in the rafters / were splotches of gangrene and gore / and opportunity was "rife" rather than "ripe." / The rank and file had fallen silent / since we'd held out the idea of heaver or the hereafter.

Now we're known less for snipers' nests / than nests of singing birds

and bacon rind they've set in store / against our winter wants

Our painters, too, have seen the light / where water meets the sky / Cadmium red. Titanium white. / How often have they vied / for supremacy in the air?

The belt / worn by a Benedictine was made of leather / but a Franciscan's cincture was rope. The gaudy sleeve / I once put on is fraying by the hour.

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.

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.

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

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.