Folger Poetry Board Reading: Paul Muldoon (2013)

This article is about an individual occurence of this event. For other instances, see Folger Poetry Board Reading (disambiguation).

The O.B. Hardison Poetry Series 2013 Folger Board Reading by Paul Muldoon was held on May 13, 2013 in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre. Muldoon shared his favorite poems by other poets and read from his own work. Folger Director Michael Witmore introduced the poet and moderated the conversation.

Paul Muldoon

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 at the time of this reading, Muldoon was teaching at Princeton University and the University of Oxford.

Reviews and excerpts

“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. . . .