16 Paul Muldoon Quotes

Paul Muldoon quotes

1. Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

2. The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

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

4. Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

1. It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

2. Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

3. The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

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

5. There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

6. 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.

7. Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

8. I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

9. Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

10. That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were

11. We simply have not kept in touch with poetry

12. 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