Paul Muldoon: The Joseph M. Hassett Collection

Described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War,” Paul Muldoon has authored more than 30 collections of poetry, drama, lyrics, translations, and criticism. Muldoon’s numerous prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1992), the T.S. Eliot Prize (1994), the Irish Times’ Irish Literature Prize (1997), the Pulitzer Prize (2003), and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2017).

Muldoon was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004, poetry editor of The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017, and, since 1987, has held a professorship at Princeton University, where he currently occupies the Howard GB Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities. In November of 2022, Irish President Michael Higgins named Muldoon the Ireland Professor of Poetry.

Born in 1951 to a farmer and a schoolteacher, Muldoon was raised in a Catholic nationalist enclave, near a village called The Moy on the border of counties Armagh and Tyrone. He attended Queen’s University Belfast, where he participated in the Belfast Group, a weekly poetry workshop of Northern Irish poets, many of whom, including his mentor and future Nobel laureate (1995) Seamus Heaney, would go on to achieve prominence.

In 1971, at the onset of the Troubles, the nineteen-year-old Muldoon published Knowing My Place. In the mid-1980s, after publishing five full-length collections with Faber & Faber, Muldoon left his position as a BBC radio producer in Belfast to write full time. At this time he migrated to the United States.

Equal parts conversational and cryptic, Muldoon’s poems, in his own words, “engage in leading people on, gently, into little situations by assuring them that all’s well and then [...] leaving them high and dry, in some corner at a terrible party, where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window.”
 

Dermot Seymour (b. 1956)

1992

Oil on canvas

Fish, Flesh, and Fowl (Belfast & Dublin: Kevin Kavanagh Gallery & Golden Thread Gallery 2012

Lauinger Library

Paul Muldoon, James Simmons

Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1974

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 O9 1974

This short biography of Muldoon from his 1974 collaboration with James Simmons provides a snapshot of his early reception. Out of the Blue was the result of Simmons and Muldoon’s joint tour of eight venues in Northern Ireland between 25 November and 6 December 1974. The tour included an appearance at Muldoon’s home village of the Moy. Simmons, editor of The Honest Ulsterman, published Muldoon’s first poems in the May 1969 issue of the magazine, as well as his student chapbook, Knowing My Place (1971).

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1983

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 Q6 1983b

In this poem a childhood family trip spurs meditations on the Troubles.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1973

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 N4 1994

Muldoon’s first collection was published by Faber in the wake of Bloody Sunday in 1973. Eager to emphasize Muldoon’s connection to his mentor Seamus Heaney, his editors suggested the title New Weather, a nod to Heaney’s Wintering Out, published earlier that year. This rare first edition was mistakenly printed in italics, an error which was later corrected in a 1994 reprint.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 N4 1994

Faber’s 1994 reprint saw a correction to the typographical error of the first edition. Faber also devised a new cover for the reprint, featuring their iconic (ff) pattern. The cover art, a Thomas Bewick wood engraving from A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), references Muldoon’s oft collected poem “Hedgehog.”

In July 1962, the English critic and poet Philip Hobsbaum took a position as a lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast. There he started an informal poetry workshop now referred to as the Belfast Group. The Group’s earliest participants included Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and James Simmons, each of whom rose from obscurity to international prominence by the time of the Group’s dissolution a decade later.

Muldoon attended workshops while he was a student at Queen’s University Belfast, where he studied with Heaney. Simmons, editor of The Honest Ulsterman, published Muldoon’s first poems in the May 1969 issue of the magazine, as well as his student chapbook, Knowing My Place (1971). During these years, the internecine conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles raised questions about the moral responsibility of poets, and the capacity of language to effect change.

Paul Muldoon

Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1971

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 K56 1971 Vault

Muldoon’s first chapbook was published while he was a student at Queen’s University Belfast at the onset of the Troubles. There he was a member of the Belfast Group, a weekly poetry workshop for Northern Irish poets begun by Philip Hobsbaum and continued by future Nobel laureate (1995) Seamus Heaney, along with Michael Allen and Arthur Terry.

Various Authors

Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, May 1969

Lauinger Library

Now considered the most influential literary magazine in Belfast during the late sixties and early seventies, this independent publication, founded by James Simmons in 1968, quickly became a critical forum for Ulster Renaissance poets. This issue contains Muldoon’s first poem’s with the magazine.

Paul Muldoon

Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 S68 1975

Like Knowing My Place (1971), this rare first edition octavo was printed by Ulsterman Publications, an arm of The Honest Ulsterman literary magazine, edited by Belfast Group original James Simmons. All twelve of the poems included would be republished two years later in Muldoon’s second collection of verse with Faber & Faber, Mules (1977). Cover photo by John Middleton.

Paul Muldoon

Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1978

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 N36 1978

Muldoon’s final volume with Ulsterman Publications, the rare first edition octavo includes poems that would be republished two years later in Muldoon’s third collection with Faber & Faber, Why Brownlee Left (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and confirmed Muldoon’s growing reputation.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1977

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 M8 1977

Muldoon’s third collection was originally published with a two-tone brown cover including only text. Faber reprinted Mules in 1989 with their iconic (ff) pattern and cover art of a Thomas Bewick wood engraving from A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), a reference to the collection’s title poem. Faber’s 1994 reprint of New Weather is an echo of this design template.

Thomas Bewick

Newcastle upon Tyne: Printed by and for S. Hodgson, R. Beilby, and T. Bewick, 1790

Gift of John S. and Edith S. Mayfield, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

86A684

This comprehensive, late eighteenth-century illustrated nature guide showcases British engraver Thomas Bewick’s (1753-1828) groundbreaking techniques that allowed text and image to be published on the same page. The volume includes engravings of over four hundred animals, printed alongside scientific descriptions, current to the era. Bewick’s work reflects the zeal of eighteenth British colonists and travelers for observing and cataloguing the natural world.

The conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles spanned three decades, from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s. Beginning with a campaign for civil rights for Catholic nationalists, the Troubles soon devolved into a low-level war between forces committed to some form of secession of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom (nationalists) and forces committed to continued British rule (unionists, and the British government and its security forces). The violence of the Troubles led to over 3,500 deaths.

The first acknowledged casualty of the Troubles was John Scullion, who was shot by the unionist Ulster Volunteer Force at the door of his home at Oranmore Street in the Clonard area of west Belfast on 27 May 1966.

Among the most shocking incidents of the thirty-year period of violence was the Bloody Sunday massacre during a civil rights protest march in Derry/Londonderry on 30 January 1972. British Army paratroopers opened fire on the march, resulting in the deaths of 14 unarmed civilians. The events of Bloody Sunday fueled Catholic nationalist hostility towards the British Army, worsening the conflict.

On 8 November 1987, a Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb exploded near the War Memorial in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh during a Remembrance Sunday ceremony to commemorate British military war dead. 12 people were killed in the bombing. The attack was condemned by nationalists and unionists alike and marked a turning point in the Troubles.

On 6 April 1994 the IRA declared a ceasefire, beginning the process of ending the conflict. On 10 April 1998 the Belfast /Good Friday Agreement was signed, marking a major development in the Northern Irish peace process, establishing a devolved, power-sharing government, and largely bringing to an end three decades of political violence. While the Troubles have ended, the legacies of violence and of almost a century of division remain a part of the political, social, and artistic landscape of Northern Ireland.

Gilles Peress (b. 1946)

1972

Photograph

Gilles Peress & Chris Klatell, Annals of the North / Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Göttingen: Steidl, 2021)

Gelman Library Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University

The incongruities of daily life in Northern Ireland during British occupation. From French photographer Gilles Peress’ sprawling, 2000-page document of Northern Irish life in the 1970s and 80s, Annals of the North / Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. Peress is Professor of Human Rights and Photography at Bard College in New York and Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley.

1971

News clipping

Gilles Peress & Chris Klatell, Annals of the North / Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Göttingen: Steidl, 2021)

Gelman Library Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1977

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 M8 1977

This haunting fragment told from the perspective of a child displaced by the Troubles closes the chilling sonnet sequence “Armageddon, Armageddon,” concluding Muldoon’s 1977 collection Mules.

Paul Muldoon, Rita Duffy (b. 1959, Belfast)

Portadown: Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2007

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

ND497.D85 A4 2007

This book was published on the occasion of Muldoon and Rita Duffy’s collaborative exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown, entitled Cuchulain Comforted. The work is a meditation on the legacy of Northern Irish history.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 2015

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 A6 2015b

This cover art is taken from Rita Duffy’s (b. 1959, Belfast) 2005 oil on linen painting, Watchtower 2, which inspired a poem. Duffy’s work on British landscape surveillance in Ulster has continued to the present. A solo exhibition of her border watchtower paintings was held at the Spectrum Gallery in London in 2007.

“These paintings are an act of surveillance, and as such, they are about the whole nature of looking.” -Rita Duffy

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1995

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 S5 1995

This verse play, commissioned by McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., follows an I.R.A. cell in the Armagh-Monaghan borderlands. It’s cover features a painting by Dermot Seymour (b. 1956, Belfast), whose magical realist work arises from the disturbing collision of the militarized and the pastoral that attended rural life in the North during the Troubles.

Paul Muldoon

New York: Faber & Faber, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 A84 1994

Muldoon’s seventh collection features a magical realist painting by Dermot Seymour on its cover. Dedicated to Seymour, the poem “Cows” relates a harrowing encounter on a rural cow path with a smuggler’s cattle truck in the Irish borderlands.

“Now let us talk of slaughter and the slain,
the helicopter gunship, the mighty Kalashnikov:
let’s rest for a while in a place where a cow has lain.”

Excerpt from “Cows,” The Annals of Chile (1994).

Dermot Seymour

Belfast & Dublin: Kevin Kavanagh Gallery & Golden Thread Gallery 2012

Lauinger Library

Dermot Seymour

Fish, Flesh and Fowl is a fully illustrated publication of Dermot Seymour’s (b. 1956, Belfast) work that accompanied a retrospective exhibition of the same name. Seymour’s work appears on many of the Muldoon publications scattered throughout this exhibition, including Six Honest Serving Men (1995), The Annals of Chile (1994), The Birds (1999), The Drowned Blackbird (2001), and Vera of Las Vegas (2001).

Paul Muldoon

Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1978

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 N36 1978

A poem often referenced as an example of Muldoon’s political ambiguity, this early Ulsterman version opts for a first-person, rather than a third-person perspective.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1980

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 N36 1978

The Faber version of this poem introduces italics and a third-person perspective. The poem is an early example of Muldoon’s work on borders and boundaries, a cornerstone of his poetry.

Ordnance Survey, 1925

UK National Archives

Map of Northern Ireland from the Irish Boundary Commission, which met in 1924-1925 to decide on the precise delineation of the provisional 1922 border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Fearing unrest, the project was abandoned. The report was not made public until 1969.

The West of Ireland has long figured in the Irish cultural imagination as a repository of the most “pure” or “authentic” of Irish culture. In the context of Irish language and cultural revivals of the late nineteenth century, this myth of cultural authenticity was used as a political tool to legitimize a nativist claim to the land, in opposition to British colonial claims.

Peter Fallon

13 July 1995

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 2, Folder 24, Identifier: Subseries 1.1, PMP.

In this letter, Fallon describes Doyle’s photographs to Muldoon for his work on Kerry Slides.

Paul Muldoon; Bill Doyle (1925-2010)

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1996

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 K47 1996

Bill Doyle’s 1970’s photographs of the Dingle peninsula were printed alongside Muldoon’s poetry in Kerry Slides (1996). Known as Ireland’s Cartier-Bresson, the Dublin-born photographer favored Leica and Rolliflex cameras and worked mostly in black and white. Doyle’s work on the Aran Islands, the Blaskets, and in Dublin, earned him international awards in Japan, Germany, the UK, and the U.S.

From 1977 to 1987, Wake Forest University Press served as Muldoon’s main publisher in the U.S. They published editions of Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), and Meeting the British (1987), as well as a collection that included poems from New Weather (1973), titled Mules and Early Poems (1985). After 1987, the year of his migration to the U.S., Muldoon began working with New York publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1977

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M8 1977

Paul Muldoon

Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1980

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W4 1980

Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1985

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M8 1985

Paul Muldoon

Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1983

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 Q6 1983

Paul Muldoon

Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1987

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M77 1987

Paul Muldoon; Bill Doyle

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1996

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 K47 1996

Muldoon worked on Kerry Slides from 1986-1996. The poems are printed alongside Bill Doyle’s stark, black-and-white, 1970’s photographs of the Dingle peninsula, where Muldoon lived for a year in 1986. This collection is an early example of Muldoon’s collaborative work with visual artists, which would define many of his small press publications in the later part of his career.

Introduction

The books in the Joseph M. Hassett collection bear out Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s assertion in The Meaning of Things that cherished objects are not “static entities”, but are “signs, objectified forms of psychic energy.” Many of the books are signs of my delight on the occasions when Paul inscribed them. Quite apart from their personal resonance, there is a sense in which the inscriptions add Paul’s presence to the exhibit. As poet Susan Howe suggests, there is a trace of authors in their handwriting: “There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin.”

The idea that experiencing a Muldoon poem is of a piece with our voyage through life is suggested by Paul’s “Immram” (1980), which is based on the medieval Irish poem “Immram Curaig Mael Duin” (“The Voyage of Muldoon”). Paul linked the journey of his life with the journey of a poem in the first of his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The exhilaration stirred by that lecture is embodied in Paul’s inscriptions on the collection’s copies of both the text of the lecture and the book, entitled The End of the Poem (2006), containing the text of all fifteen lectures that Paul delivered over the five-year term of his Oxford Professorship. Paul’s comment on the imprecision of this title linked life and poem together in terms of their uncertainty:

“If I knew precisely where this lecture was going to end, never mind where I'd be ending up in five years’ time, knew precisely what revelation, if any, might be at hand, it's more likely than not that you’d know it too…I don't know where a lecture is going to end any more than I know, as I embark on writing it, where a poem is going to end.”

The traces of Paul’s presence in his inscriptions are signposts on the path through this wonderful exhibit curated by Chris Kenny (MA English, ’23) and hosted by the Booth Family Center for Special Collections at Lauinger Library.

The sadness of some of life’s uncertainties is evoked by the opening poem in A Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), which Paul inscribed following the book’s launch at Keats House in Hampstead. The night before the launch was a joyous one, featuring the first of Paul’s Clark lectures at Cambridge University and a long talk over dinner afterwards. The launch, however, was tinged with the grief crying out in the book’s opening lament for Seamus Heaney. The poem's haunting refrain “I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead” took me back two years to Paul’s moving eulogy, and the strains of Brahms’ Lullaby, at Heaney's funeral in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, Dublin. Even so, that memory is also a reminder of the power of words to evoke happier days, as when Paul’s eulogy quoted Seamus’s comment after a surgical procedure to regulate his heartbeat, “Blessed are the Pacemakers.”

Paul’s inscription on Medley for Morin Khur (2005) captures memories of slip-sliding along an icy road in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery as Paul, my son Matt and I weathered a powerful storm to pay our respects at the grave of the great Seneca chief Red Jacket, whose speech to proselytizing missionaries is quoted in Muldoon’s Madoc: A Mystery (1990). The experience of careening along the ice was both precursor to and metaphor for the vertiginous plunge along the cascading words of a Muldoon poem that Matt and I would experience that night when Paul read at my alma mater, Canisius College.

The first book that Paul inscribed for me, the stunning Graphic Studio Incantata (1994), is a deeply moving example of how solemn intonation of just the right words can order grief and begin to tame it. Incantata seems to heed Joseph Brodsky’s admonition, as quoted in Heaney’s “Audenesque”:

“Meting grief and reason out

As you said a poem ought.”

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2000

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 B42 2000

Paul and all the Korelitz Muldoon’s

Christmas card with poem by Muldoon. Artwork of a wood engraving by Scottish artist Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980) from a limited edition (1500 copies), illustrated octavo of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard (London: Raven Press, 1938). Parker made the original sketches in the same churchyard at Stoke Poges where Gray brooded over his elegy. Privately published by Peter Fallon, printed on cardstock. 175 copies.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2001

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 H667 2001

Illustrated Christmas card with translation by Muldoon. Privately published for the author by Peter Fallon, printed on cardstock. Inscribed to Joe Hassett by Muldoon. 175 copies.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2001

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 D76 1999

Illustrated Christmas card with poem by Muldoon, translated from the Irish of Seamus Dall MacCuarta (1647-1733). Artwork by Dermot Seymour (b. 1956, Belfast). Privately published for the author by Peter Fallon, printed on cardstock. Inscribed to Joe Hassett by Muldoon. 100 copies.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press,

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 H667 2001

Illustrated Christmas card with translation by Muldoon. Privately published for the author by Peter Fallon, printed on cardstock. Inscribed to Joe Hassett by Muldoon. 175 copies.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1998

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 H3 1998b

Paul fondly for Joe 2002

Including Hassett’s Muldoon ephemera: tickets to Paul Muldoon, The Allen, Monday, 15 March 2004, ACT Theatre, Seattle.

Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice Archives, Georgetown University

In April of 2007, Muldoon participated in a Lannan Symposium on Lyric and Crisis in Northern Irish Poetry 1966-2006, along with several other Belfast Group alumni, including Ciarán Carson, Michael and Edna Longley, and Frank Ormsby. The event boasted a video conversation between Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll, prerecorded for the occasion.

Date unknown

Carolyn Forché

Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché is Professor of English and Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown. Her books of poetry include Gathering The Tribes (1976), The Country Between Us (1981), The Angel of History (1994), and Blue Hour (2003). Her most recent volume, In the Lateness of the World (2020) was Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Paul Elie

6 December 1993

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 2, Folder 13, Identifier: Subseries 1.1, PMP.

Paul Elie is a Senior Fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Before joining Georgetown, he spent fifteen years as a senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York, where he edited Muldoon. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture.

Chris Reid (1918-2006)

Etching

Incantata (Dublin: Graphic Studio, 1994)

Joseph M. Hassett’s Personal Collection

Jennifer Lane (b. 1952)

Woodcut

Incantata (Dublin: Graphic Studio, 1994)

Joseph M. Hassett’s Personal Collection

1998

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

GTM-20220426

Launch of Sing whatever is well made: The Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Collection of Irish Poetry at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Photo taken by American novelist and Muldoon’s wife, Jean Hanff Korelitz.

Date unknown

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

GTM-20220426

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 2015

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 A6 2015b

Paul for Joe with love 2015 London

Inscribed by Muldoon following the collection’s launch at Keats House in Hampstead. Hassett reflects on both the inscription and the book’s elegy for Seamus Heaney “Cuthbert and the Otters” in his essay for this exhibition, “Immram: A Voyage with Paul Muldoon.” Limited edition, no. 46 of 80.

Paul Muldoon

London: Enitharmon Editions, 2005

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M43 2005

Paul Muldoon for Joe fondly Canisius 2006

Inscribed by Muldoon at the 4^th Annual Hassett Reading at Canisius College in 2006, Hassett (’64) references the occasion in his essay for this exhibition, “Immram: A Voyage with Paul Muldoon.” No. 163 of 175.

Paul Muldoon

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

GTM-20220426

Pelt for Joe

Paul Muldoon 2013

Handwritten poem on stationary, inscribed by Muldoon for Hassett at the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series 2013 Folder Board Reading on May 13, 2013, in the Folger’s Elizabethan Theatre in Washington, DC. Folger Director Michael Witmore introduced the poet and moderated the conversation. The exhibit includes Hassett’s ticket from the event.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1980

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 147 1980

Limited-edition octavo with illustrations by Irish artist Robert Ballagh (b. 1943). An early example of Muldoon’s prolific collaborative work with visual artists, “Immram” derives from the medieval Irish poem Immram Curaig Maele Duin (“The Voyage of Muldoon”). It plays on the Irish vision-quest genre, film noir, and Raymond Chandler. Hassett borrows the title for his essay on this exhibition. No. 142 of 174, signed by the author.

Mary Farl Powers (1948-1992)

1960

Etching on paper

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, University Art Collection

2022.6.1

One of several “torso” etchings by Powers, including Torso (1973), Spotted Torso (1976), Blue Spotted Torso (1977), Red Ribbon Torso (1977), Red Torso (1977), Cloud Torso I (1979), and Cloud Torso II (1979). Muldoon references Powers’ Pink Spotted Torso in the opening lines of “Incantata,” as well as in the poem “Mary Farl Powers: Pink Spotted Torso” from Quoof (1983).

Paul Muldoon

Dublin: Graphic Studio Dublin, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett’s Personal Collection

Rare, limited-edition publication of Muldoon’s elegy for his ex-lover, the artist Mary Farl Powers, who died of cancer in 1992. Designed by Irish printmaker James O’Nolan (1952-2018) of the Graphic Studio Dublin, the book includes artwork from eleven Graphic Studio artists. Powers was the driving force behind the studio between the late 1970s and her death. No. 4 of 75, signed by the author and artists.

Featured image is:

La Vista Del Poeta

Alfonso Monreal (b. 1953)

Etching Engraving Mezzotint

Incantata (Dublin: Graphic Studio, 1994)

Born in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1948, Powers was a visual artist who worked in print, cast paper, and paper sculpture. Powers met Muldoon while living in Belfast during her Print Maker residency at the Northern Irish Arts Council’s print workshop in 1980 and they became lovers . She died of breast cancer in Dublin on 4 April 1992. She was 43 years old.

Paul Muldoon

New York: Faber & Faber, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 A84 1994

In these stanzas from his elegy for his ex-lover, the artist Mary Farl Powers, Muldoon wrestles the dissolution of their relationship, Powers’ diagnosis with terminal cancer, her decision to look to alternative medicine and refuse traditional treatment, and ultimately, her death.

Brian Lalor (Author), Colm Toibín (Foreword)

Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2011

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

NE850 .L26 2011

Mary Farl Powers’ etching Emblements (1981). Muldoon references this piece in “Incantata.”

The Belfast Group was a weekly poetry workshop for Northern Irish poets begun by Philip Hobsbaum and continued by future Nobel laureate (1995) Seamus Heaney, along with Michael Allen and Arthur Terry. Muldoon began attending the workshop while he was a student at Queen’s University Belfast. Among the Group’s poets who gained prominence in the 1970s were Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Frank Ormsby, Derek Mahon, and James Simmons who would publish Muldoon’s first student chapbook, Knowing My Place (1971).

Although many of these poets were gripped by similar concerns, the Group was anything but singular. Far from a fixed or consistent entity, the Group had no defined political or aesthetic identity, mission, or manifesto. In the years following its dissolution in 1972, individual accounts of its history, function, impact, and membership have regularly contradicted each other. Nonetheless, the Group looms large in the history of Irish letters.

1998

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

GTM-20220426

Launch of Sing whatever is well made: The Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Collection of Irish Poetry at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Photo taken by American novelist and Muldoon’s wife, Jean Hanff Korelitz.

June 2013

Mihai Cucu, The New Yorker

Muldoon and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney on the roof of Joyce’s Tower in Sandycove, Dublin. Heaney was an original member of the Belfast Group poetry workshop where Muldoon got his start. Heaney mentored Muldoon and the two remained friends until his death. In 2013, Muldoon delivered the eulogy at his funeral at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, Dublin.

Paul Muldoon, James Simmons

Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1974

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 O9 1974

Program for a joint tour of eight venues in Northern Ireland between 25 November and 6 December 1974, including an appearance at Muldoon’s home village of the Moy, Co. Armagh. Simmons was a founding members of the Belfast Group Poetry workshop and editor of The Honest Ulsterman. He published Muldoon’s first poems as well as his student chapbook, Knowing My Place (1971).

Edited by Robin Robertson

London: Enitharmon Press, 2009

Joseph M. Hassett’s Personal Collection

Love Poet, Carpenter is an anthology celebrating the life and works of Michael Longley (b. 1939, Belfast). Longley is a central figure in contemporary Irish poetry. He was a member of the Belfast Group poetry workshop where Muldoon got his start. The contributors of this anthology include many poets associated with the Group, including Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Michael Allen, Frank Ormsby, and Muldoon.

Patrick Hickey (1927-1998)

Etching

Incantata (Dublin: Graphic Studio, 1994)

Joseph M. Hassett’s Personal Collection

An eminent independent press founded in 1970 by poet and editor Peter Fallon, The Gallery Press is based in Loughcrew, Co. Meath. The press focuses on publishing contemporary Irish literature. Muldoon has published with The Gallery Press from 1980 through the present.

Circa 1999

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 110, Folder 24, Identifier: 7, PMP.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2006

Joseph Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 G46 2006

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1984

Joseph Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 W5 1984

First edition octavo, no. 35 of 750, signed by author.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press/The Deerfield Press, 1982

Joseph Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 O87 1982

First edition octavo, limited to 300 copies, signed by the author. Hand-colored woodcut by American artist, Timothy Engelland (1950-2012). Printed by Harold McGrath at the Hampshire Typothetae in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and bound by hand at Antiquarian Bookcrafts, Ltd., in Dublin. This publication is an early example of Muldoon’s prolific collaborative work with visual artists.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1999

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PA 3875 .A8 1999

Translation of Aristophanes’ comedy of 414 BC, this volume features artwork by Northern Irish artist and longtime Muldoon collaborator, Dermot Seymour (b. 1956), on its cover.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2017

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 A6 2017

Collection of translations and work written for performance.

Paul Muldoon; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2007

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PB1399.N473 F54 2007

Muldoon’s second collection of translations of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish-language poetry, printed alongside their originals.

Paul Muldoon; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1993

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PB1399.N473 A88 1993

Translations of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish-language poetry, printed alongside their originals. Muldoon's addition of the word “acrostical” in this excerpt from “The Lay of Loughadoon” to describe Ní Dhomhnaill’s capercaillie is a nod to his acrostic poem “Capercaillies,” from Madoc: A Mystery (1990). “Capercaillies” produces an acrostic which reads: “Is this a New Yorker poem or what?” The New Yorker rejected Muldoon’s submission.

Paul Muldoon; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1990

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PB1399.N473 F54 2007

Collection of Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish-language poems with translations into English by thirteen poets, including Seamus Heaney, Peter Fallon, Michael Longley, and Muldoon. Muldoon’s translations include “Ceist na Teangan,” literally, “The Language Question,” which echoes a hackneyed phrase of Irish-language realpolitik. Muldoon renders the title as “The Language Issue,” playing on the changed word’s double meaning of “problematic” and “progeny.”

Date unknown

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 45, Folder 7, Identifier: 7, PMP

In 1987, Muldoon migrated to the U.S. Much of Muldoon’s poetry around this time focuses on migrations, whether fictional, historical, or some combination of the two. Most significantly, Madoc, A Mystery (1990) imagines a migration by Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to start a utopian society in North America (based on a colonization scheme that the two hatched but did not carry out). This work also reconsiders the Welsh myth of Prince Madoc’s apocryphal journey to North America in 1170.

Keith Wilson (b. 1965)

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2009

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W39 2009

Illustration by British artist Keith Wilson taken from Muldoon’s Wayside Shrines (2009).

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 P7 1994

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 P7 1994

In these excerpts from Muldoon’s poem-a-day experiment after settling in Princeton, N.J., he reflects on his migration to the U.S. Images of a New Jersey carwash blur with images on the Dingle Peninsula and Muldoon responds to Seamus Deane’s politically-charged criticism of his migration.

Paul Muldoon

New York: Faber & Faber, 1994

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 A84 1994

In this stanza from Muldoon’s 1994 elegy for his mother the child speaker projects Hollywood images of the American West onto the Northern Irish landscape.

Paul Muldoon

Unpublished Typescript

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 14, Folder 28, PMP.

An early draft of the poem, “The Key,” which opens Muldoon’s 1990 mock epic of American colonization, Madoc: A Mystery. The poem references both Marina McCall and The Golden Book of California.

Irwin Shapiro

New York: Golden Press, 1961

Lauinger Library

In 1962, Muldoon’s American cousin, Marina McCall, brought him a copy of The Golden Book of California, feeding his interest in the U.S. As he states in a recent interview with the Irish American Heritage Museum, “I knew more about California in 1962 and its history than I did about Ireland.”

Charles Boyle

10 December 1993

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 2, Folder 10, Identifier: Subseries 1.1, PMP

In this letter, then Faber editor writes to Muldoon regarding his shuttling between American and British spelling and grammar, particularly noticeable in “Yarrow,” Muldoon’s elegy for his mother from his 1994 collection, The Annals of Chile. Boyle’s comments reflect the collision of linguistic worlds in “Yarrow” as well as the changing perception of Muldoon from Irish to American poet.

Beginning with the “The Indians on Alcatraz” from Knowing My Place, his first student chapbook in 1971, and continuing through his loose adaptation of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle in Quoof’s “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” (1983), Muldoon has been writing about American Indians for over fifty years. This decades-long interest in the lives and histories of American Indians continues to the present day, as we can see in one of his most recent publications, “By the Time You Read This” (2023).

George Catlin

(American, 1796 – 1872)

1826

Oil on canvas

George Catlin: American Indian Portraits

London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013

Lauinger Library

ND237.C35 A4 2013

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1990

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M3 1990

Central among the many nineteenth-century figures whom Muldoon satirizes in Madoc is George Catlin, whose portrait of a Mandan chief serves as the cover for the British edition of the collection. In this fragment, Catlin paints Seneca orator and chief Red Jacket. In his essay for this exhibition, “Immram: A Voyage with Muldoon,” Hassett recalls braving a snowstorm with Muldoon to visit Red Jacket’s grave in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery in 2006.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1987

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M44 1987

Published the year Muldoon migrated to the U.S., this collection features a Kwakiutl mask on its cover.

Activist Poster

30 September 1970

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 3, Identifier: Subseries 1.1

In 1970,  Seamus Heaney wrote Muldoon a letter from San Francisco praising Muldoon’s “The Indians on Alcatraz,” which would be published a year later in Muldoon’s student chapbook Knowing My Place (1971). Heaney also mailed Muldoon this poster from the protest.

Christopher Reid

14 November 1986

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 2, Folder 7, Identifier: Subseries 1.1, PMP

In this letter, Reid writes to Muldoon regarding the cover of Meeting the British.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1980

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W85 1980

Paul Muldoon May 81

Written seven years before Muldoon’s migration to the U.S., “Why Brownlee Left” portrays the unexplained disappearance of an Irish farmer.

Paul Muldoon

The Times Literary Supplement

6 January 2023

Lauinger Library

This poem, published last year, demonstrates Muldoon’s sustained interest in American Indian subjects for over five decades. The poem reads as something of an Americanized sequel to Muldoon’s well-known “Why Brownlee Left,” the title poem from his 1980 collection.

Paul Muldoon; Bill Doyle

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1996

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 K47 1996

This poem from Kerry Slides (1996) is printed alongside a photograph by Bill Doyle and references nineteenth-century American ethnographer, Jeremiah Curtin, who wrote about both Seneca and Irish folklore. Solomon O’Beal, the son of Dutch-Seneca chief, Cornplanter, provided source material for Curtin’s work. In this poem, Muldoon is pulling from a passage in Curtin’s 1922 book, Seneca Indian Myths, entitled “The Wren.”

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1990

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M3 1990

In 1794, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned to escape political repression in Britain by emigrating to the U.S. and founding a utopian society on the banks of the Susquehanna. Muldoon imagines what would have happened if their plans had come to fruition with disastrous and darkly comic results. The cover of this edition is a decolorized reproduction of George Catlin’s Mah-táhp-ta-a, Rushes through the Middle, a Brave (1832).

From The American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590

Paul Hope Hulton and David B. Quinn

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964

Booth Family Center for Special Collections

93B16

This map first appeared in Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia (1588), a first-person account by a scientist and was later enriched with engravings by Theodor de Bry, 1590 after a John White watercolor, 1585. Muldoon’s U.S. migration prompted inquiries into earlier transatlantic migration narratives, including the “Lost Colony” at Roanoke.

Joan Dane; illustration by A.S. Boyd

Boston: Everett Publishing Co., 1901

Lauinger Library

Illustration of the apocryphal Prince Madoc, who is said to have left Wales in 1170 amidst a succession dispute and sailed west to discover North America. Many early American explorers, including George Catlin and Lewis & Clark, were convinced of his progeny among the Mandan peoples of the Great Plains, referring in their writings to “Welch Indians.”

Paul Muldoon

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M34 1991

Like the British first edition, the American first edition of Madoc: A Mystery features a reproduction of an oil painting by George Catlin on its cover, Bull Dance, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony (1832).

Paul Muldoon

Typed MS draft with holograph notes

Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Box 15, Folder 62, PMP.

This draft of the “[Derrida]” fragment from Madoc: A Mystery (1990) is typical of Muldoon’s chaotic handwritten notes from this collection. The words “croat(o)an” and “[crotona]” are variants of “Croatoan,” the word famously found carved into a tree on Roanoke Island at the site of the Lost Colony in 1590.

Paul Muldoon

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR5904.A45 M85 2000

Paul Muldoon Oxford 2002

This lecture, delivered at the University of Oxford on 2 November 1999, extends Muldoon’s interrogation of boundaries to those between the physical and spirit worlds. Whereas Bandanna takes the Mexican Day of the Dead as a metaphor for border transgressions, this lecture focuses on Yeats and All Soul’s Night.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 2006

On Loan Courtesy of Andrew L. Bouwhuis, S.J. Library, Canisius University, Buffalo, N.Y., Collection of Joseph M. Hassett, '64

PN1271 .M85 2006

In these lectures from his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1999-2004), Muldoon meditates on “ends” and “endings.” Muldoon’s lectures exemplify the way that his penchant for border crossing emerges in his increasingly interdisciplinary work.

Paul Muldoon

Spring 2004

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

In this letter, Muldoon invites Hassett to dinner to celebrate the end of his term as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

Paul Muldoon

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR8714 .M85 2000

Muldoon’s alphabetical history of Irish literature further evinces that for Muldoon, Irish poetry draws from the power of transgression—not only across physical boundaries, but also boundaries among disciplines, genres, and mediums.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 2002

Joseph Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M69 2002b

Muldoon’s ninth collection of poems won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. This award affirmed Muldoon’s place as an American poet.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2016

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 A6 2016

This volume collects Muldoon’s commissioned work for the Irish Writers’ Centre, New York University, Poetry Ireland, RTÉ, and more. In this excerpt from the Authors Note to “One Hundred Years a Nation,” a choral piece commissioned by RTÉ to commemorate the centenary of 1916, Muldoon reflects on Irish national consciousness.

At least as early as “The Boundary Commission” in 1978, Muldoon has been writing about borders and boundaries and investigating the ways that humans and animals cross and recross geographic, linguistic, historical, and artistic borders. Often, these concerns are grounded in hard political realities, such as is the case in his work on the U.S./Mexico border in Bandanna (1999). For the shapeshifting Muldoon, his work on borders also extends to both spiritual and formal questions.

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1999

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

ML50.H1445 B36 1999

Paul for Joe with love the Folger 2003

This opera libretto for composer Daron Aric Hagen centers on migrants in the U.S./Mexico borderlands and reflects Muldoon’s widening interest in borders in a global context. The collection’s cover is a retablo of Mexican migrants, a type of religious folk art commemorating the dangers of crossing the border.

Jorge Durand; Douglas S. Massey

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995

Lauinger Library

ND1432.M46 D87 1995

Paul Muldoon

London: Faber & Faber, 1993

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

ML50.H1445 B36 1999

Muldoon’s first opera libretto for composer Daron Aric Hagen focuses on American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It was first performed by the Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin on 21 April 1993. Muldoon would go on to write two more librettos for Hagen, Bandanna (1999) and Vera of Las Vegas (2001).

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2001

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 V47 2001

Muldoon’s third libretto for Hagen follows IRA volunteers illegally in the U.S. It was originally conceived as Act II of a three-act opera to be titled, Grand Concourse, which would begin with Six Honest Serving Men (1995).

Paul Muldoon; Jean Hanff Korelitz

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2018

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PB1399.N473 F54 2007

Ciaran Byrnes, Robert Mack, Rufus Collins, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Paul Muldoon, Meg Hennessy, Melissa Gilbert, Kimberly Doreen Byrnes

An immersive, dramatic adaptation of James Joyce’s 1914 masterpiece by Muldoon and his wife and novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, this signed copy was presented to Hassett on January 5, 2019, after that night’s production at the American Irish Historical Society in New York.

As evidenced by his focus on Irish oral and bardic poets in his history of Irish literature, To Ireland, I (2000), Muldoon sees the song tradition as deeply tied to his work as a lyric poet.

From rock bands to opera productions to books and podcasts on music, Muldoon crosses from poetry into songwriting and back again, collaborating with musicians and composers like Daron Aric Hagen, Warren Zevon, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul McCartney. He has been a member of such rock bands and musical collectives as Rackett, Rogue Oliphant, and Wayside Shrines.

In his 2022 documentary Paul Muldoon: Laoithe is Lirici (A Life in Lyrics), acclaimed Irish filmmaker Alan Gilsenan composes a biography of Muldoon’s life through musical performances of his poems and lyrics, featuring artists such as Paul Simon, PJ Harvey, and Bono.

Muldoon is currently developing a new rock musical commissioned by the Public Theater in New York with Tony-winning composer Stew (Passing Strange) based on the Frogs of Aristophanes but set in present-day America.

Paul Muldoon

Rochdale: Andrew J. Moorhouse, 2017

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 N68 2017

Letterpress broadside print of Muldoon’s lyrics with illustration by Paul Wright. Designed and printed by John Grice at Evergreen Press, Stonehouse, UK. Signed by Muldoon and Wright. No. 19 of 45 copies.

Paul McCartney

New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

ML54.6.M13 L97 2021

Based on Muldoon’s interviews with McCartney, The Lyrics provides fascinating insight into 154 of McCartney’s songs.

Paul Muldoon

London: Enitharmon Press, 2012

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 S66 2012

Paul for Joe fondly 2013

This collection brings together Muldoon’s sonnets and lyrics, including songs written for his six-member garage band, Rackett, formed in 2004. Muldoon’s work as a lyricist is rooted in his interest in the song traditions of Irish Bardic poetry.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2006

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 G46 2006

This volume includes “My Ride’s Here,” cowritten with Warren Zevon and recorded by Bruce Springsteen, as well as lyrics for songs by Rackett.

Paul Muldoon

London: Eyewear Publishing, 2017

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR 6063.U367 S33 2017

This volume features nineteen song lyrics by Muldoon for songs by his band, Rogue Oliphant.

Paul Muldoon

New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W67 2013

Paul for Joe 2013 Washington

Another example of Muldoon’s work as a songwriter. Many of these lyrics have been performed by the Princeton music collective, Wayside Shrines. In these lyrics, Muldoon continues to transgress across the lines of form and genre.

Muldoon’s frequent collaborations with visual artists have led to the creation of some of the most mesmerizing and mysterious artifacts of his career. Many of these collaborations have found expression through The Gallery Press, including Immram (1980), Out of Siberia (1982), Kerry Slides (1996), and Wayside Shrines (2009).

One of the most lasting artistic contributors to Muldoon’s books has Dermot Seymour (b. 1956, Belfast). Seymour’s work appears on many of the Muldoon publications included in this exhibition, including Six Honest Serving Men (1995), The Annals of Chile (1994), The Birds (1999), The Drowned Blackbird (2001), and Vera of Las Vegas (2001).

The centrality of visual art to Muldoon’s work has found expression in such poems as “Incantata,” an elegy for his ex-lover and artist Mary Farl Powers. The 1994 Graphic Studio publication of this work features artwork from eleven Graphic Studio artists.

Muldoon poetry has been presented alongside the work of painters, printmakers, woodcut artists, engravers, and photographers such as Norman McBeath, Keith Wilson, Lafranco Quadrio, Neil Bousfield, Rita Duffy, and Philip Pearlstein.

Paul Muldoon

London: Enitharmon Editions, 2022

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 C37 2022

Poetry by Muldoon with illustrations by American painter Philip Pearlstein. Signed by Muldoon and Pearlstein. No. 9 of 50 copies.

Philip Pearlstein

2022

Lithograph printed on 300 gsm Somerset White Velvet at Paupers Press in London

Numbered and signed, 36.5 x 28 cm.

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 C37 2022

Philip Pearlstein

2022

Lithograph printed on 300 gsm Somerset White Velvet at Paupers Press in London

Numbered and signed, 36.5 x 28 cm.

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 C37 2022

Lanfranco Quadrio

Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2008

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W49 2008

Paul Muldoon

London: Enitharmon Editions, 2005

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 M43 2005

This rare volume contains the first printing of Muldoon’s “Horse Latitudes.” The title poem refers to the morin khur, a two-stringed viol and Mongolia’s national instrument, and plays on the obsolete definition of medley, i.e., hand-to-hand combat. The poem meditates on acts of war as diverse as Genghis Khan’s conquests, Nazi Germany, Stalinist repression, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and the invasion of Iraq. No. 58 of 175.

Paul Muldoon

London: Enitharmon Press, 2017

Joseph Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 S87 2017

The title poem of this volume is an extended elegy for Leonard Cohen. Letterpress-printed and hand-bound by Stan Lane of Gloucester Typesetting Services / The Stonehouse Fine Press. Signed by Muldoon. No. 58 of 100 copies.

Paul Muldoon

Oxford: Four Candles Press, 2011

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 F44 2011

Poetry by Muldoon, color illustration on title page by British engraver Neil Bousfield. Designed, handset, and printed by John Grice at Evergreen Press, Stonehouse, UK. Signed by Muldoon. No. 20 of 112 copies.

Paul Muldoon

New York: Warwick Press, 1997

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 H66 1997

First edition, limited, striped and stenciled paper over boards. Illustrated with four hand-colored vignettes by American artist/printer, Carol J. Blinn, representing the four seasons. The collection includes a ninety haiku poem sequence by Muldoon, named for Hopewell, New Jersey. Signed by the author and illustrator. No. 72 of 150 copies.

Paul Muldoon

Lincoln: Modern Haiku Press, 2005

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 S59 2005

This first edition of Muldoon’s third major haiku sequence ostensibly records a holiday in Bermuda with references to the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852), who was appointed Registrar to the Admiralty Prize Court in Bermuda in 1803. Sewn letterpress edition handset and bound by Swamp Press. Signed by Muldoon. No. 149 of 600 copies.

Paul Muldoon

Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2008

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W49 2008

Paul for Joe Happy Christmas 2008

Poetry and translations by Muldoon, drawings by Sicilian artist Lanfranco Quadrio. Published in association with the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris. Sewn paperback with dustjacket.

AFTER THE WAR

If Britain’s motives for blanket bombing the Ruhr

seem no less pure after the war

than they did in the spring of 1943,

we know much must remain obscure after the war.

It’s become more and more difficult to track 

big game by their spoor after the war,

the Centurion, the Rhino, the Lancaster taking flak

having lost their allure after the war.

Even in Belfast, a cry from the heart 

has become un cri de coeur after the “war”

drew so many foreign correspondents. 

The plank on which we run taxi tours after the war

that has thrown up 21 miles of “peace” wall

is far less solid, less secure after the war

than the mahogany plank in the 1959 Gibson Les Paul

featured on Gary Moore’s After the War.

That tone derives from two out of phase magnets.

One thing that does seem sure, after the war,

is that the chances of proving British collusion

with local paramilitaries are poor. After the war

is fought in the streets, it’s fought in the courts.

Not the least of what we must endure, after the war,

after the high sounds, after holding the fort,

is the sense life is lived in miniature after the war.

After the War: © 2024 Paul Muldoon. Printed with the kind permission of the author who wrote the poem for this exhibition.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2001

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 H667 2001

Illustrated Christmas card with translation by Muldoon. Privately published for the author by Peter Fallon, printed on cardstock. Inscribed to Joe Hassett by Muldoon. 175 copies.

Norman McBeath (b. 1952)

London: Enitharmon Press, 2009

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 P53 2009

From Muldoon’s Plan B. Photograph by Scottish photographer Norman McBeath.

Paul Muldoon

London: Enitharmon Press, 2009

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 P53 2009

Poetry by Muldoon, photographs by Scottish photographer Norman McBeath. Deluxe edition consisting of 150 slipcased copies, bound by The Fine Book Bindery in Dubletta. No. 72 of 150 copies, signed by Muldoon and McBeath.

Paul Muldoon

Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2009

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 W39 2009

Poetry by Muldoon, illustrations by British artist Keith Wilson. Printed on Rives Artist and hardbound in linen with blind embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound. Signed by Muldoon. No. 149 of 400 copies.

Norman McBeath (b. 1952)

London: Enitharmon Press, 2009

Joseph M. Hassett Collection, Booth Family Center for Special Collections

PR6063.U367 P53 2009

From Muldoon’s Plan B. Photograph by Scottish photographer Norman McBeath. It was this photograph, Muldoon writes in his introduction to the book, “that I felt I might be most likely to respond directly…The photograph has a kinetic, kinky aspect, and I imagined writing a kinetic, kinky poem in return.”