Tuesday, March 3, 2009
7 p.m.
Leo A. Guthart Cultural Center Theater Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library, First Floor
South Campus

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. Between 1999 and 2004 he was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. The End Of The Poem, a collection of the Oxford lectures was published in 2006. Paul Muldoon’s main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and Horse Latitude (2006).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other 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, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

It has been written about Paul Muldoon’s poems that they, “remind us of the Elizabethan’s definition of wit, a deadly serious from of play that encompassed far more than mere humor, but included originality and ingenuity, particularly in the forging of concise and startingly appropriate phrased to capture the paradoxes of human experience. These paradoxes are at play in many of Muldoon’s poems, which will often share classical forms out of the most common street slang, or tackle metaphysical questions with the language of advertising slogan and pop records.”