Which poetry is overrated? Paul Muldoon | Big Think

Which poetry is overrated?

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Muldoon believes that a great poem can come out of nowhere.

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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: Which poetry is overrated?

Paul Muldoon: Do you have witness protection program? Can you provide me with a couple of those big guys, they can keep an eye on me after that.

I honestly don’t. I think one has to say honestly that for anyone to go into the poetry business one has to respect the right they are trying to do at all.

I would just I haven’t been, I wouldn’t be interested in, a part from the fact that it would not be politically smart of someone who has a certainly as a measure to poetry to New York or probably be an appropriate for me to say I hate so and so.

The fact of the matter is that there is no one I hate. I am really open to the really open to the possibility that great poem will come down the pike from anywhere. It's a fact of life that they do. It's is a fact of life that for example writers who often may not have been able to produce scintillating work, actually one day will. That goes from students. One does not write off anyone.

That is, largely, because apart from anything else, on a good day Ideally it is not even they are doing, it is not the doing of the person, when the only when the person I deeply believe only when the person has given herself or himself over to the idea that their part in writing a poem is actually quite small. They have to rely for something beyond them sense to happen and we know that experience, we know that experience from, even if we are reading a letter.

We wrote six months ago, never mind a paper one wrote at college and you look at it and you think who wrote that, did I write that? No couldn’t have, couldn’t have been wrote the that is too smart is to go to have learn to whatever.

And it is that sense actually that one has taken over by some thing, ideally, that one must never loose sight of.

I am interested in poetry in many manifestations.