What advice do you have for young poets?
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Literature
Posted at:
12:27 PM on April 08, 2008
Question: What advice do you have for young poets?
Muldoon: Stop immediately. My advice for them is…my advice for myself and anyone else is trying to do—and it’s hard to remember oneself. It really is, because one of the terrible reasons--I think one of the reasons why poets disimprove with age is that, put very crudely, they think they know what they are doing. They think they know what they are doing. They think they are special. They think they’ve been around the block once or twice. They’re in command. You’d understand why people begin to think like that, particularly if no one you know increasingly there are fewer and people who have the nerve to say “you know what? Your poems stinks. Your poem stinks” which is what they should be saying, where appropriate. They are doing them a favor to say that. So what I say to them is forget about yourself as they say. Get over yourself. And remember that the greatest poems I think come from a place that no one can quite account for. There’s always a mysterious aspect about where they came from. That includes that essay you wrote when you were 15, when you wonder now who wrote that. And so one has to develop ways of, insofar as we can, of being able to get to that place.
Question: What should they read?
Muldoon: A book that I often, from time to time suggest to people to read is a book called Zen in the art of archery by yogun heregal a German philosopher who went to study with a Japanese master, a master Archer and this was a man who was able as many of them are to hit a bulls eye in the middle of the night, all blindfold, so he goes of to find out how that is possible and of course what he discovers is that it is possible only when one allows it to do it and one has no engagement with it at all, only when one gives one so have over to that, I am not science crazy and I don’t have [inaudible] but actually I bravely believe that unless one does something like that nothing really of any significance is going to come out of what you are doing, only when you allow yourself to go to that place of innocence and ignorance what words with [inaudible] nice passiveness which keeps [inaudible] negative capability only then are you going to make art that is any [inaudible] meaning because it comes from that place of unknowing and it touches that place of unknowing in the reader.
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Paul Muldoon is a writer, academic and educator, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for this work, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002).
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”
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