“The best poems come from the world, go through the poet and go back in to the world.”

A little cultural interlude now with a conversational interview, from Saturday’s Guardian Review, with Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon referencing, among other things, the focus of his recently published collection of Oxford lectures - The End of the Poem - “the ‘invisible threads’ that connect words and works”, the kindness of fellow poet Seamus Heaney, and the worry of becoming “a sort of a poetry machine”.  His website contains a number of recordings of him reading his work at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in 2002, including the superb Meeting the British [mp3 file]

“What matters is that something is captured and is equal to that moment. A bleakness that can meet the bleakness, or a gaiety that can meet the gaiety. But there tends to be less joy than bleakness, alas. It seems that unhappiness is more interesting.”

Pete Baker @ 07:33 PM