Graduating senior Lance Rutkin sat down for a wide-ranging and candid conversation with poet Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor and Founding Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. One of "the most significant English-language poets born since the second World War” (TLS), Muldoon spoke with Rutkin about his recent sea voyage around the world, his months-long drive across the United States, and his time in Ireland participating in the centenary events of the 1916 Rising, Easter Week.
In this enlightening interview Muldoon tells Rutkin why it can be a challenge to write commissioned poems, why he does not want to be a public figure, and why it is nevertheless a creative thrill to compose a poem for an orchestra and chorus of twelve hundred. Muldoon also reflects on his evolution as a poet. Learn how T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland was a formative early influence, how he’s an “image driven” poet who has come to feel like a visual artist, and how the sonnet form may matter now more than ever.
The full interview appears in The American Poetry Review, America’s premier poetry magazine: