When did you become a poet? Paul Muldoon | Big Think

When did you become a poet?

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Muldoon talks about how meeting the great poet Seamus Heaney.

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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:

Question: When did you become a poet?

Paul Muldoon: I don’t remember this, but I probably wrote some thing, when I was age of nine. Most people do. And in fact most people are at their absolute best in the poetry business, when they were in that age. Because they have no preconceptions, i.e. misconceptions, about what a poem is. They no idea what they are doing. And I believe, for that reason alone, and have a much stronger chance of actually doing it.

And the most circumspect in the great thing, the more one knows actually, the more dangerous, difficult it becomes, in the strange way.

I remember early on, when I was twelve, writing a poem about a fort called Charlamont Fort, near I was brought up, which has been burned down in fact, in the 1920s. Of the tunnels, referring to early on and it. I was comparing and contrastingly glories, as it were, of that hero and my innocence, and I was unless beat and start forge.

Of the time that they built in Jamestown, for example, and I was astonished relevant to the reconstruction and [inaudible] for every qualities of the Jamestown site, to see on the wall aid depiction of this very Fort, were that was built would right for I was brought up.

So I was comparing and contrasting the glories of the age, and with that beats, would go, let's goes the filthy modern times. And I used this place again up on, the reek of gasoline and the teacher said to me, "Gasoline? I suppose you mean petrol?"

So in other words and one of the other components that I didn’t quite go on like around mentioning there in terms of the back of the mind and when I was being reared in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, was the huge influence of American culture; British culture of course. But also American culture. Television; we watched all the television and serious, particular western of course. We saw all the new American movies and read books of course, reared on those also. So that, gasoline, was likely have component than our speeches as petrol.

So I started there was the first poem that I remember writing, I don’t have it or any thing but then what those of a teenager started adverting in earnest does were and in the way that only with all the earnest in this that only a teenager can muster, when you are 15 or 16 years, you are a serious person.

But I was very lucky, early on, that I met a number of people. I was encouraged by my teachers. They were quite wonderful in that sense. They really encouraged me and others many others, not just me many others they encouraged to write. They introduced us contemporary poetry and classes for example and also they introduced us physically to contemporary poems. When I was a teenager of about 16 and invite it’s 1960 yet, it for almost 40 years ago and to but 40 years ago most of the day, I was introduced to Seamus Heaney. He was very welcoming to me. And, funny enough, I was talking with them yesterday, I think the most of day before and just the read in the little poem for him, he was given a medal by the Royal Irish academy, which was founded by a man called Lord Charlomon and which is after whom the Fort that I mentioned any how on this whose names comes rhyme in some way, ......

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