Paul Muldoon on Poetry #9

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. He has served as both president of the Poetry Society (UK) and as Poetry Editor at The New Yorker magazine. 

He was in Ottawa, Canada for the April 2006 edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We met at my apartment, where we talked about, among other things: poetry as pemmican; initials, dashed expectations, the movie Ice Age, James Joyce’s secular epiphanies, the luck of Shakespeare and Mozart, what constitutes great poetry, judgement, pigs, the depth(s) of Johnny Depp, and hot water bottles.