Paul Muldoon shares the Ireland of poets and peacekeepers

Muldoon, the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, will be retiring from teaching in the next few years. But he will lead a Princeton Journeys trip to Dublin and Belfast, June 19-25, 2025, that is certain to be just as out of the ordinary and memorable as his poetry.

What can you tell me about growing up in Northern Ireland?

I was born in the parish of Loughgall, in County Armagh, which is about halfway across Northern Ireland, and grew up in an area called College Lands, so named because it was owned at one point by Trinity College, Dublin. The tenants there were Catholic farmers and many of their descendants still lived there. It was a little Catholic area in a probably predominantly Protestant zone, though we didn’t sit up nights thinking about that. But everywhere in Ireland, the landscape is charged and the place names are charged, and everything is fretted and fraught with meaning.

Such as Loughgall, which means the “Lough of the foreigners.” Now, it’s hard to know which foreigners these would’ve been. There are quite a few foreigners coming through. It most likely refers to the Vikings, who ran Ireland between 900 and 1100, roughly speaking. And they were followed then by the Normans or Norsemen who’d settled in France. It was in Loughgall that the Orange Order was founded, which as Princetonians should know, was named after Prince William, who would eventually become King William of Orange and Nassau.

What was it like being in Belfast at the height of the troubles?

I arrived there as a student in 1969, and from then through the early to mid-’70s was the worst part of it. Of course, ’72 being the worst year of all, notable for what were known as tit-for-tat murders. One night a Protestant was shot. The next night a Catholic was shot, and so on. It was a nasty time.

Will there be an aspect of next year’s journey that addresses that?

There will be an element of it that will have to do with the politics of the place. So we’ll be covering quite a lot of ground, literally and metaphorically. We will be introducing the travelers to some of the context of what was happening in Northern Ireland. And then, of course, there’ll be a literary component. The two are not unrelated because, of course, poets, for as long as there have been poets in Ireland, have been engaged by what’s happening in public life and this most recent period is no exception. By trying to make sense of their own lives, poets helped other people to make sense of theirs, including what’s happening on the political and social front.

Can you tell me about your first encounter with poetry and how you came to love it? Wasn’t your first book of poetry published when you were 21?

There’s an Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, who said, “A man” — a person, he probably meant — “dabbles in verses and they become his life.” So, when you’re writing a poem at the age of 18 or 19, you don’t necessarily think that that’s what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life. I just got into it and I never got out of it, as it were.

Writing poetry is a habit in the sense that doing drugs is a habit, exercise is a habit, and the two things are connected. There is a feel-good aspect to finding connections in the world, which is basically what art-making is about. And when we make those connections, our brains experience a high. Basically, most artists are drug addicts in that respect, and they go back for more. And it’s just the way it is. And that’s the story of my life.

How did you get into songwriting? Was it just a natural extension of your poetry?

The two activities are certainly connected, which may be why I’ve just always been fascinated by song lyrics. And in the Irish tradition, songs and poems are indistinguishable in many cases. Patrick Kavanagh is almost as well known for his song, “Raglan Road,” as he is for anything else. And so, in Ireland, it doesn’t seem odd that someone who’s interested in writing poems might write a song, or someone who’s interested in writing songs might write a poem.

It must have been a bit of a shock when you first came to Princeton and saw everyone wearing so much orange, given how Orange Walks have been used in Northern Ireland.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I have nothing against the wearing of orange back home either. That’s a part of the culture of Northern Ireland. One side of the fence, as it were, in Northern Ireland expressing its political position, which so long as they don’t threaten anyone with it, it’s a perfectly decent thing to be doing. They start threatening people, that’s a different matter.

Has the focus of your teaching at Princeton mainly been creative writing?

Yes, mostly poetry writing, but also translation. And we’ll probably be bringing that into the Princeton Journey also. A certain percentage of what we’ll be looking at, thinking about, will be coming through the Irish language and the history of the Irish language and Irish literature — in Irish as well as English.

How different is teaching poetry than what most people see in movies like “Dead Poets Society?”

I think a lot of the time people go slightly fuzzy when the notion of poetry enters the conversation, but writing poetry is no less intellectually challenging than astrophysics or engineering, and a lot of it engages some of the same areas of the brain. I mean, the word poetry means making. It refers to construction. Indeed, it refers to engineering. And the forces that come into play when you construct a poem should be equal to the forces that are brought to bear on it, as if one were building a tunnel or a bridge. So that’s a component of what we focus on when we’re teaching poetry. Though there are other aspects of writing poetry that are indeed slightly more mysterious.

You are married to the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. Would you recommend marrying a writer to anybody who is considering it?

I wouldn’t not recommend it. While my wife and I engage in slightly different zones of writing, I still find it useful to be married to someone who’s engaged in a similar-ish activity. And I do show her my poems, for example, and quite often — not always, but quite often — she has something useful to add. Most often she’ll say, “That’s a bad idea, don’t do it.”

I bring this up because writing is frequently referred to as a mistress, or that other thing in a relationship that a spouse devotes a lot of time to.

Yeah, I understand that kind of talk, though if you’re going to have a mistress, you should just have a mistress — which I don’t, just to be clear about that. But that’s a way of thinking about it for some people. It goes back to what I said earlier about that Patrick Kavanagh quotation. Writing is an activity that does take over one’s life. In my case, certainly, and in the case of many writers, you write almost every day and probably seven days a week. So that does take up a big part of your psyche and your physical energy.

As someone who’s been teaching for 37 years, what do you love about it?

The students — it’s great to see what they come up with. And Princeton in particular, one of the remarkable things about the students is that they tend to be multi-talented. Most of my poetry students come from a wide range of interests and majors. So, for instance, one might bring an anthropologist’s or engineer’s viewpoint to writing a poem. It’s quite fascinating and can be a lot of fun. I’m going to miss it.