Muldoon believes that a great poem can come out of nowhere.

Question: Which poetry is overrated?

Paul Muldoon: Do you have witness protection program? Can you provide me with a couple of those big guys, they can keep an eye on me after that.

I honestly don’t. I think one has to say honestly that for anyone to go into the poetry business one has to respect the right they are trying to do at all. 

I would just I haven’t been, I wouldn’t be interested in, a part from the fact that it would not be politically smart of someone who has a certainly as a measure to poetry to New York or probably be an appropriate for me to say I hate so and so.

The fact of the matter is that there is no one I hate. I am really open to the really open to the possibility that great poem will come down the pike from anywhere. It's a fact of life that they do. It's is a fact of life that for example writers who often may not have been able to produce scintillating work, actually one day will. That goes from students. One does not write off anyone.

That is, largely, because apart from anything else, on a good day Ideally it is not even they are doing, it is not the doing of the person, when the only when the person I deeply believe only when the person has given herself or himself over to the idea that their part in writing a poem is actually quite small. They have to rely for something beyond them sense to happen and we know that experience, we know that experience from, even if we are reading a letter.

We wrote six months ago, never mind a paper one wrote at college and you look at it and you think who wrote that, did I write that? No couldn’t have, couldn’t have been wrote the that is too smart is to go to have learn to whatever.

And it is that sense actually that one has taken over by some thing, ideally, that one must never loose sight of. 

I am interested in poetry in  many manifestations.

Recorded on: Jan 30, 2008