Award-winning poet Paul Muldoon to give reading of his poetry at CSB

Award-winning poet Paul Muldoon will be reading his poetry at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, in room 204, Gorecki Center, College of Saint Benedict.  The event is free and open to the public.

Muldoon's awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003 as well as the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1994.  Born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, he has lived in the United States since 1987, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Between 1999 and 2004, he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Muldoon's numerous collections of poetry include "Poems 1998-1998" (2001); "Moy Sand and Gravel" (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; "Horse Latitudes" (2006); "Maggot" (2010), and his most recent collection, "One Thousand Things Worth Knowing: Poems" (FSG, 2015).

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature in 1996. He is the current Poetry Editor of the New Yorker Magazine.

Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War." It has been written about his poems that they "remind us of the Elizabethan's definition of wit, a deadly serious form of play that encompassed far more than mere humor, but included originality and ingenuity, particularly in the forging of concise and startlingly appropriate phrases to capture the paradoxes of human experience. These paradoxes are at play in many of Muldoon's poems, which will often share classical forms out of the most common street slang, or tackle metaphysical questions with the language of advertising slogan and pop records."

The event is being presented by the Literary Arts Institute (LAI). The LAI, founded in 1997, fosters creative writing, publishing and interaction between students and writers.

LAI brings nationally recognized authors to the college for a visiting writers series (Writers Writing), promotes literary events, holds conferences (Inside Books), supports publications (S. Mariella Gable Prize), and encourages the artistry of fine letterpress (Welle Book Arts Studio). With its local and national partners, such as Graywolf Press, LAI is able to bring writers and their work together with readers on campus, in Minnesota and beyond.