Paul Muldoon

The poet Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland in 1951 and grew up in the rural region of the Moy. He studied English language and literature at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he later worked for the BBC, pr oducing mostly radio broadcasts before moving on to television. From the very first volume of poems, »New Weather« (1973) he was hailed as a poet of note and was frequently compared to the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, whose student he was. Following a period as Writer in Residency at the University of Cambridge, Muldoon moved to the USA in 1987, where he has lived ever since, teaching at Columbia University and Princeton. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1999 to 2004. The lectures he gave there on the art of poetry were published under the ambiguous title »The End of the Poem« (2006). The lucid, playful, horizon-broadening analyses of poems from the last two centuries also pr ovide a glimpse into Muldoon’s own aesthetic means of pr oduction. By way of close reading, the author isolates individual strands within the fabric of the text and follows them in the different linguistic, literary, historical and theoretical contexts to which they refer. Plurality of meaning, sounds and echoes, etymology and wordplay all become the means through which the power of language gets visible beyond its functionality. »We may use language as a tool, or we may be used by language. And I think that’s the distinction. But even if one’s using it as a tool, I think every one has had the experience of being used by it.«
Among Muldoon’s lasting influences are the pr ecursors to Modernism T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, and the Metaphysical Poets (especially John Donne). Muldoon took up their stylistic devices with brilliant ease, as he accommodated himself to traditional poetic forms including the sonnet. He has again and again published long poems, among them »Madoc: A Mystery« (1990), considered his masterpiece. It pr esents a plan dreamt up by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey to found a Utopian society in America as an actual historical experiment. In 2006, the collection »Horse Latitudes« has appeared, the most recent of nearly thirty books of poetry. Muldoon has also published essays, children’s books, plays, opera libretti and has worked as an anthology editor and translator (i.e. of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Aristophanes).
Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Fine Arts and Sciences. Among his awards are the T.S. Eliot Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the Shakespeare Prize. He currently teaches at the University of Princeton and lives with his family in New Jersey.

© international literature festival berlin

Knowing My Place
Ulsterman Publications
Belfast, 197

New Weather
Faber
London, 1973

Spirit of Dawn
Ulsterman Publications
Belfast, 1975

Mules
Faber
London, 1977

Names and Addresses
Ulsterman Publications
Belfast, 1978

The Scrake of Dawn
Blackstaff Press
Belfast, 1979

Immram
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1980

Why Brownlee Left
Faber
London, 1980

The O-O’s Party
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1981

Out of Siberia
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1982

Quoof
Faber
London, 1983

The Wishbone
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1984

The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish poetry [Hg.]
Faber
London, 1986

Meeting the British
Faber
London, 1987

The Essential Byron [Hg.]
Ecco Press
New York, 1989

Madoc: A Mystery
Faber
London, 1990

Shining Brow
Faber
London, 1993

The annals of Chile
Faber
London, 1994

Incantata
Graphic Studio
Dublin, 1994

The Prince of the Quotidian
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1994

The Last Thesaurus
Faber
London, 1995

Six Honest Serving Men
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1995

Kerry Slides
Gallery Press
Dublin, 1996

The Faber book of beasts [Hg.]
Faber
London, 1997

Hopewell Haiku
Warwick Press
Easthampton, 1997

The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt
Faber
London, 1997

Auf schmalen Pfaden durch den tiefen Norden
Hanser
München,1998
[Ü: Margitt Lehbert und Hans-Christian Oeser]

The bangle
The Typography Studio
Princeton, 1998

Hay
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York, 1998

Bandanna
Faber
London, 1999

Poems 1968-1998
Faber
London, 2001

Vera of Las Vegas
Gallery Press
Dublin, 2001

To Ireland, I
Oxford University Press
Oxford, 2000

Moy Sand and Gravel
Faber
London, 2002

Unapproved Road
Pied Oxen
Hopewell, 2002

Reverse Flannery
Random House
New York, 2003

Medley for Morin Khur
Enitharmon Press
London, 2005

Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore
Modern Haiku Press
Lincoln, 2005

The End of the Poem
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York, 2006

General admission
Gallery Books
Oldcastle, 2006

Horse Latitudes
Faber
London, 2006

Übersetzer: Margitt Lehbert, Hans-Christian Oeser