Paul Muldoon

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Paul Muldoon (2013)

Paul Muldoon (born June 20, 1951 in Portadown ) is a Northern Irish poet . He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 , is an honorary member of Hertford College and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003, along with numerous other awards .

Life and work

Muldoon grew up a Catholic in County Armagh, the son of a teacher and a mushroom and vegetable farmer. He attended St. Patrick's College in Armagh, where he studied Gaelic and studied Irish literature. During this time he also wrote some first poems in Gaelic. He then studied at Queen's University of Belfast , including with Seamus Heaney , and was subsequently also a lecturer there . His early poems were mainly influenced by Robert Frost and especially TS Eliot . From 1973 to 1986 with the British Broadcasting Corporation in Belfast .

In 1987 he moved to the United States and taught at Columbia University and Princeton University , where he is now Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing . Since 2007 he has also been the head of the poetry department of the New Yorker . Muldoon is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature , the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He also wrote and writes lyrics for Warren Zevon , The Handsome Family and the rock band Rackett, of which he is also a guitarist .

Since the 1970s he has been publishing books of poetry on a regular basis, for which he has received several awards. Along with Heaney, he is considered one of the most important contemporary Northern Irish poets. He writes short as well as longer narrative poems and uses not only traditional literary forms such as ballads or sonnets but also experimental forms. His lyric poetry can be both playful and serious and encompasses a variety of subjects, from personal to political to historical. She is known for her wealth of puns , allusions, ambiguities and concetti .

Many of his poems point to the symbolic character of reality and the impossibility of permanently establishing linguistic meaning, although Muldoon's pictures, figures or situations always remain committed to an objective world. Characteristic, however, are surprise effects such as unexpected contexts of meaning on the level of sound, form or etymology , which create semantic congruences in apparently incompatible historical, situational or intellectual contexts. Despite the occasional criticism of composing picture puzzles instead of poems and designing poetry as a meaningless language game, Muldoon, regardless of his eye for the absurd and his sometimes cynical view of reality or his postmodern sensitivity for the relationships between word, reality and perception, is not out to see the world and to interpret reality as pure chance.

His lyrical work is characterized both by the richness of language and images of the rural life of his childhood as well as by his extensive cultural and historical knowledge, his profound humor and a kind of playful erudition. The contrast between the rural origins and the later cosmopolitan career of Muldoon is reflected, for example, in his fourth volume of poems Quoof from 1983. The title is a private word that used to refer to a hot water bottle in the Muldoon family and now as a poetic symbol by Muldoon is used for the contradicting experience of identity, security and social demarcation.

Although the unrest and conflict in Northern Ireland flow into many of Muldoon's texts, he is still not a political poet or writer in the strict sense. In his fifth volume of poetry, Meeting the British (1987), which culminates in the long dialogical poem 7, Middagh Street , Muldoon brings in a series of imaginary monologues by famous artistic or literary figures such as WH Auden , Salvador Dali , Gypsy Rose Lee , Carson McCullers and Louis MacNeice expressed his meditation on the relationship between art and reality against the background of war and destruction in a thoroughly provocative form.

Probably influenced by Muldoon's move to the USA, his more recent poems often deal with Irish-American passages, such as the extensive narrative title poem of his sixth volume Madoc (1990), which also contains an ironic commentary on Western philosophy and a speculative thought experiment in to the Muldoon, a utopian social design planned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey in New England in 1794, but never realized, as a historical possibility in the imagination.

In his short and long Immram stories, which appeared in 1980, Muldoon tries to explore the connections between personal and public history, for example in Identities or The Big House . He often takes on the role of a traveler who, in some cases comparable to the classic Picaro, tells of his occasionally comical encounters with the modern world. For his complex, with a wealth of references to literature, art and philosophy overflowing Seal Incantata from The Annals of Chile in the form of a letter in free verse 1994 Muldoon received the TS Eliot Prize of the Poetry Book Society .

Muldoon's interest in the possibilities of expressing various genres is reflected in his efforts to modernize archaic narrative forms such as the Winnebago Indian crooks ( The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants in Poems 1968 - 1998 ) and in his move into the world of opera . He wrote two libretti : Shining Brow (1993) and Bandanna (1999). His book of poetry, Hay , published in 1998, cemented his reputation as one of the most important Irish poets of his generation.

For 2017, Muldoon was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry .

Muldoon is married to the writer Jean Hanff Korelitz and has two children.

Works (selection)

  • 1973: New Weather
  • 1977: Mules
  • 1980: Immram
  • 1982: Out of Siberia
  • 1983: Quoof
  • 1984: The Wishbone
  • 1987: Meeting the British
  • 1990: Madoc: A Mystery
  • 1993: Shining Brow
  • 1994: The Annals of Chile
  • 1998: Hay
  • 2000: To Ireland, I
  • 2002: Moy Sand and Gravel
  • 2004: Selected Poems: 1963–2003 (awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize )
  • 2006: Horse Latitudes
  • 2009: Plan B
  • 2010: Maggot
  • 2015: One Thousand Things Worth Knowing
in German language

literature

  • Tim Kendall, Peter McDonald (Eds.): Paul Muldoon. Critical essays. Liverpool 2004.
  • Jeff Holdridge: The Poetry of Paul Muldoon. Liffey Press, Dublin 2009.

Web links

Commons : Paul Muldoon  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information on the Princeton University website : Paul Muldoon . Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  2. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors. 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 417.
  3. ↑ See the entry on Poetry Archive Paul Muldoon . Retrieved September 30, 2017. See also the information on Princeton University : Paul Muldoon . Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  4. ↑ See the information on the Princeton University website : Paul Muldoon . Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  5. ^ Page on Muldoon at poetryfoundation.org . Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  6. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors. 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 417. See also page on Muldoon at poetryfoundation.org . Retrieved September 30, 2017.
  7. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors. 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 417. See also the review of the title poem Quoof by Ruth Padel : Books: The Sunday Poem - Quoof . In: The Independent , December 13, 1998. Retrieved September 29, 2017.
  8. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors. 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 417. See also the comments on Muldoon's work in the entry on Poetry Foundation Paul Muldoon . Retrieved September 29, 2017. See also the detailed analysis and interpretation by Brian Cliff: Paul Muldoon's Community on the Cusp: Auden and MacNeice in the Manuscripts for "7, Middagh Street". In: Contemporary Literature , Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 613-636.
  9. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors. 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 417.
  10. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber, Hubert Zapf and Annegret Maack: Die Lyrik nach 1945 . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 365-380, here in particular p. 375.
  11. ↑ Cf. Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors. 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 417.
  12. ↑ Paul Muldoon wins Queen's gold medal for poetry 2017 , theguardian.com, December 19, 2017, accessed December 20, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Muldoon, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Northern Irish poet
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Portadown