Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon shares favorite poems by other poets and reads from his own work. Reception and book signing to follow.
 
Introduction and conversation moderated by Folger Director Michael Witmore


Renowned Irish poet Paul Muldoon channels disorder and form in his recent work, Maggot, resulting in poetry that is both sophisticated and spry. His Moy Sand and Gravel was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and The Annals of Chile received the T. S. Eliot Award. He is the recipient  of the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, as well as Royal Society of Literature and Guggenheim fellowships. In addition to being poetry editor of The New Yorker, Muldoon teaches at  Princeton University and the University of Oxford.

“The most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets, he writes poems like no one else.” —The New York Review of Books

“Hugely talented and perennially disconcerting.” —London Sunday Times


From A Porcupine

Simply because she’d turn her back on me,
a porcupine on the Homer Noble farm
would unwittingly
give me a shot in the arm,

bustling off in her ball gown
while clutching a quillwork purse.
I’m thinking how our need to do ourselves down
will often be in inverse

proportion to how much we want
to be esteemed. . . .


From Maggot © 2010 by Paul Muldoon, published by Farrar Strauss Giroux. Used with permission.