Paul Muldoon Reads "The Coyote" | Big Think

Paul Muldoon Reads "The Coyote"

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Veering down the track like a girl veering down a cobbled street in the meat-packing district, high heels from the night before, black shawl of black-tipped hairs…

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Paul Muldoon:

Paul Muldoon is a writer, academic and educator, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland. 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. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for this work, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).

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 recent awards are 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."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Muldoon: So this is a poem called The Coyote, or The Coyote, depending on where you are brought up, and it has do with a coyote I came across--saw--one evening in Vermont. And my dog didn’t seem to notice the coyote, and that's really at the core of this poem--trying to make sense of that moment. I mentioned the game of marbles, keepsies, the marbles weren't kept.

The Coyote

Veering down the track like a girl veering down a cobbled street

in the meat-packing district,

high heels from the night before, black shawl of black-tipped hairs,

steering clear of that fluorescent ring

spray-painted on an even stretch of blacktop

like a ring in which we might once have played keepsies,

veering down the track without the slightest acknowledgement from Angus,

the dog lying in a heap on our porch

like a heap of clothes lying beside a bed,

Angus who had himself been found wandering by the highway

somewhere on the far side of Lake Champlain,

slubber-furred, slammerkin, backbone showing through,

and, though we didn't know it when we brought him home,

blind in one eye, the right one,

the one between him and the coyote,

the cloudy, flaw-fleckered marble of that eye

now turning on you and me,

taking in the spray-painted ring where you and I knuckle down.