Paul Muldoon

“I do a lot of readings.”

“Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.”

“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.”

“I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'”

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

“Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.”

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

“Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.”

“Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.”

“For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.”

“I was reared on American TV and films. There was a huge sense of occasion about going to the cinema in Moy in the late 1950s and early '60s, and I absolutely loved those Hollywood sword-and-sandal movies like Ben-Hur and the dime-a-dozen cowboy-and-Indian films, as we then referred to them.”

“I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.”

“I spent about five years stuck in a room between the ages of 16 and 20 while I wrote the first book, which came out when I was 21. I should have been out playing tennis.”

“I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.”

“Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.”

“I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.”

“I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.”

“The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.”