Paul Muldoon announced as new Ireland Professor of Poetry

The honour was announced at a small reception on Friday (November 18) hosted by President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.

Professor Muldoon will be the ninth Ireland Professor of Poetry, taking over from the current holder, Frank Ormsby. The position will run until November 2025.

The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was established in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney. It was felt that this honour should be marked every three years by choosing a poet of distinction to hold the position of Ireland Chair of Poetry. The Chair is jointly held between Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, as well as the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Paul Muldoon said of his appointment: “To be a poet at all is to be a professor of poetry. In this case, it’s especially gratifying to have the opportunity to formalize that professing, that ‘declaring openly’, of how poetry has been the central spiritual practice of my life. In the course of the next three years I hope to focus less on the writing of poetry than the reading of it. At Queen’s University, Belfast, for example, I’ll be leading discussions on ‘How To Read a Poem’. These discussions will centre on poems published in literary journals and newspapers in the same week as our meeting and will be open to one and all.

"That’s a forum I also plan to offer in both UCD and TCD, though I’m very keen to make further connections with the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore at UCD and the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. The lectures I’ll be giving as Ireland Professor of Poetry will reflect all of these interests, plus a few more. After 35 years of teaching in the US, I’m looking forward to connecting more immediately with, and contributing to, the cultural life of Ireland.”

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown in 1951, brought up near The Moy, and studied at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of 14 full-length collections of poetry. He has won major poetry awards, including the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Pulitzer Prize and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters. He served as poetry editor of the New Yorker from 2007 to 2017.

Since 1987, Paul Muldoon has lived in the United States, where he is Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. He has also published collections of criticism, children’s books, opera libretti, song lyrics, and works for radio and television and recently, with the support of Poetry Ireland, he toured Muldoon’s Picnic all over Ireland together with his band Rogue Oliphant.

It has been said of his work that "In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass.”