Paul Muldoon
Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature Series
Wednesday November 28, 2007 7:30 pm
Coffman Union Theater
Parking: See map.
Admission: Free and open to the University of Minnesota community and the general public.
The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing.
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in Northern Ireland and grew up Catholic in a village near Moy, in County Armagh. His mother was an elementary-school teacher, his father a laborer and farmer. When Muldoon was 16, he met Seamus Heaney and passed him some poems; Heaney was so impressed he arranged to have them published.
Muldoon read English at Queen's University in Belfast. When he was 21, his first poetry collection New Weather (1973) was published with Faber & Faber. After college, he worked for more than ten years in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. In 1987, he moved to the United States, where he is Howard G.B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, teaching out of the Creative Writing Program. He is also the head of Princeton’s Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Between 1999 and 2004, he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford; he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College at Oxford.
Muldoon's collections of poetry include: Mules (1977), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Poems 1968-1998, and Hay (1998). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). His tenth collection, Horse Latitudes, appeared in the fall of 2006.
Also in 2006 Muldoon published the punning and inventive Oxford lectures collection The End of the Poem and General Admission, a collection of lyrics including “My Ride’s Here,” co-written with Warren Zevon and recorded by Bruce Springsteen, along with other songs he has been performing since 2004 as a member of the band Rackett. In addition, Muldoon has written numerous translations, four children’s books, and (with Daron Hagen) three operas.
“Horse Latitudes will extend and augment Muldoon's reputation as a master of the quantum leap of linguistic intelligence. But beyond the insistence on playfulness here is an equal counterweight of elegy, anger, love, conflict and doubt. — Ken Babstock, Toronto Globe and Mail
For more information, visit the Esther Freier Endowed Lectures in Literature section of this site or call 612-625-3363.
Hear Paul Muldoon read from his poetry in the current issue of Pike Magazine.