i was staying at the marriott with jesus and john wayne

In addition, he said, ''You've got to get an opening to a poem that grabs people by the scruff of their neck.'' ''I'm very interested in what happens when you take outlandish ideas and put them together in far-fetched comparisons. ''Not that I get up in the morning and say, 'Let's yoke together by violence heterogeneous ideas,' but that's the way the world comes to me,'' Mr. In ''The Flea,'' for example, Donne equates the marriage bed with an insect. Johnson's description of metaphysical poetry as heterogeneous ideas yoked together by violence. Still, he added, ''It's hard to imagine how one could read the poetry of the 20th or the 19th or 18th century without looking words up in the dictionary.'' ''I don't think much about it, good, bad or indifferent,'' he said of criticism. Muldoon takes it all in the typically tough, quiet, independent-minded way that has stood him in good stead as he has made his way as a poet from a background in which he could hardly afford to buy books. Some poems, he said, seem like ''artificially enriched, overinformed doggerel.'' ''Postmodernism contents itself with allusion rather than conclusion,'' Mr. But he complained that some of it was so difficult that one needed a dictionary, or perhaps an entire university library, to decipher it. Peter Davison, reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, had high praise: the book ''shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information,'' he wrote. He has also been criticized for being postmodern, a prankster, for engaging in madcap rhyming.Īnd now, with his ninth collection, ''Moy Sand and Gravel,'' published in October, it is happening again. But he has also been criticized for being difficult: take that pesky word ''lake'' in the early poem, for instance, which he used to signify a dark blue-gray color. Over the years he has won a fair share of praise. In 1999 he was also appointed professor of poetry at Oxford University. Muldoon went on to become professor in the humanities at Princeton University, and for many years he was director of its creative writing program.

I was staying at the marriott with jesus and john wayne