Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon (born 20 June 1951) is a writer, academic and educator, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland.

Life and work

Muldoon's poetry is known for difficulty, allusion, casual use of extremely obscure or archaic words, understated wit, punning, and deft technique in meter and slant rhyme. Fact|date=December 2007

Muldoon has lived in the United States since 1987; he teaches at Princeton University and is an Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for the five-year term 1999–2004, and he is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University. In addition, he teaches in Vermont at The Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College's graduate program.

Until recently, Muldoon was often thought of as the second-most-eminent living poet in Northern Ireland, in the shadow of Seamus Heaney Fact|date=December 2007, but Muldoon's reputation has grown dramatically since he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

Honours include fellowships in the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 "Irish Times" Poetry Prize, and the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry.

In September 2007, he was hired as poetry editor of "The New Yorker".

Muldoon has contributed the librettos for four operas by Daron Hagen: "Shining Brow" (1992), "Vera of Las Vegas" (1996), "Bandanna" (1998), and "The Antient Concert" (2005). His interests have not only included libretto, but the rock lyric as well, penning lines for the Handsome Family as well as the late Warren Zevon whose titular track "My Ride's Here" belongs to a Muldoon collaboration. Muldoon also writes lyrics for (and plays "rudimentary rhythm" guitar in) his own Princeton-based rock band, Rackett. [ Val Nolan, ‘Lets go make some noise!’, "The Stinging Fly", Volume 2, Issue 8 (Dublin: Winter 2007/08), pp. 11-13; Feature on Paul Muldoon’s band Rackett, specifically their concert at the Róisín Dubh, Galway, during their 2007 Irish tour. ]

Family

Paul Muldoon is married to the writer Jean Hanff Korelitz. He has two children - Dorothy and Asher - and lives in Griggstown, New Jersey. [

[http://www.packetonline.com/articles/2007/12/15/the_princeton_packet/lifestyle/doc474c97359d08e693545914.prt "Making history in Griggstown"] , "Princeton Packet", 27 November 2007. Accessed 23 December 2007. "Two presentations by John Allen, president of the Griggstown Historical Society, were made. Mark Alan Hewitt, project architect, received an autographed copy of “Moy Sand & Gravel” by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, a Griggstown resident."]

Publications

By 2006, Muldoon's published books (with major collections starred*) were:

* "Knowing My Place" (1971)
* "New Weather" (1973)*
* "Spirit of Dawn" (1975)
* "Mules" (1977)*
* "Names and Addresses" (1978)
* "Immram" (1980)
* "The O-O's Party, New Year's Eve " (1980)
* "Why Brownlee Left" (1980)*
* "Out of Siberia" (1982)
* "Quoof" (1983)*
* "The Wishbone" (1984)
* "Paul Muldoon: Selected Poems 1968-1983 " (1986)*
* "Meeting the British" (1987)*
* "Madoc: A Mystery" (1990)*
* "The Annals of Chile" (1994)*
* "The Prince of the Quotidian" (1994)
* "Six Honest Serving Men" (1995)
* "Kerry Slides (with photographs by Bill Doyle)" (1996)
* "New Selected Poems: 1968-1994" (1996)*
* "Hopewell Haiku" (1997)
* "Hay" (1998)*
* "Poems 1968-1998" (2001)*
* "Moy Sand and Gravel" (2002)* (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2003 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
* "Medley for Morin Khur" (2005)
* "Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore" (2005)
* "Horse Latitudes" (2006)* (shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize)
* "General Admission" (2006)

Most of these volumes were collections of shorter poems. Often a single and considerably longer poem is placed at the end of a volume. Muldoon's most recent collections have, however, included more than one long poem.

"Madoc: A Mystery", among Muldoon's most difficult works, is a book-length poem, which some consider Muldoon's masterpiece. It narrates in fractured sections an alternate history in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey come to America in order to found a utopian community. (The poets had, in reality, discussed but never undertaken this journey; the title comes from Southey's poem "Madoc", about a legendary Welsh prince of that name.)

Muldoon has also edited a number of anthologies, written two children's books, translated the work of other authors, and published critical prose. These are, respectively:

* "The Scrake of Dawn: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland" (1979)
* "The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry " (1986)
* "The Faber Book of Beasts" (1997)
* "The Oxford and Cambridge May Anthologies 2000: Poetry" (2000)
* "The Best American Poetry 2005" (with David Lehman) (2005)
* "The Last Thesaurus" (1996)
* "The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt" (1997)
* "The Astrakhan Cloak" (translated into English the work written by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in Irish language) (1992)
* "The Birds / adaptation after Aristophanes" (1999)
* "The End of the Poem: 'All Souls Night' by WB Yeats (lecture)" (2000)
* "To Ireland, I" (2000)
* "The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry" (2006)

Awards

Muldoon has won the following major poetry awards: [From contemporary writers|id=126]
* 1992: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for "Madoc: A Mystery"
* 1994: T. S. Eliot Prize for "The Annals of Chile"
* 1997: Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for "New Selected Poems 1968–1994"
* 2002: T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) for "Moy Sand and Gravel"
* 2003: Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) for "Moy Sand and Gravel"
* 2003: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "Moy Sand and Gravel"
* 2004: American Ireland Fund Literary Award
* 2004: Aspen Prize for Poetry
* 2004: Shakespeare Prize

ee also

*List of Northern Irish writers

References

External links

* [http://www.paulmuldoon.net/ Paul Muldoon's official website]
* [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2183300.htm] Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show , ABC Radio National, March 2008
* [http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2003.php?t=5 Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio clip]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19muldoon.html Word Freak - Profile of Muldoon in the New York Times Magazine]
* [http://nigelbeale.com/?p=244 Audio interview with Paul Muldoon]
* [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3886602.ece "When the Pie Was Opened"] : a poem by Paul Muldoon from [http://www.the-tls.co.uk TLS] , May 7 2008.
* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/incomingFeeds/article670080.ece "Sillyhow Stride"] : a poem by Paul Muldoon in memory of Warren Zevon from [http://www.the-tls.co.uk TLS] , May 31 2006.