Creative writing professor Muldoon wins Pulitzer

The reconstruction of Princeton's Visual Arts and Creative Writing Department, also known as 185, has yet to be entirely completed. The walls are bare for the most part, but as soon as you turn a corner, you are likely to bump into renowned faculty members such as Emmet Gowin, Joyce Carol Oates, Andrew Moore and many other artists and writers on staff.

Paul Muldoon, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner for his collection of works, "Moy Sand and Gravel", sits in his office with the door happily propped open for visitors. The visual arts and creative writing department, despite first glance, is extremely well decorated.

On your way to the women's restroom on the first floor, you inevitably walk past Muldoon's office; like a jolly man sitting on his front porch, Muldoon typically waves and greets even casual onlookers from his desk in the back of the room. As a student in one of his creative writing classes, I am always introduced into the room by an immediate, "Hello. How are you today?" and left with the same warmth "Take care of yourself now."

On the day of the unexpected, and very unusual April snowstorm last week, Muldoon, like any other family man, took it upon himself to shovel the snow out of his driveway. First he picked up his children from school and then returned to the task at hand. You could almost say Muldoon was the last person to know about his award.

"I thought my wife was pulling my leg. She came outside from the house while I was shoveling snow and simply said 'Paul, you won the Pulitzer.'"

Despite the phones ringing off the hook from television, radio, family and friends wishing to congratulate Muldoon, he spent a quiet evening at home with his family. The next day though, Muldoon could not fend off the desire of the media such as the Associated Press to contact him for a picture and an –interview. Muldoon hardly in response to his new honor.

"I'm absolutely delighted, but one doesn't want to get caught up in the reward or the prize. There are lots of poets in history and in the present who have never won an award but are still great poets."

Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast.

From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Since 1987 he has lived in the United States and now teaches as a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. During the summers, he teaches as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

Main collections of Muldoon's poetry include New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001).

Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Muldoon's latest body of work, "finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navies, where he now lives," publishing company Farrar, Straus and Giroux remarked on the strong sense of place within he collection of poems.

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"Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything and anybody," Farrar, Straus and Giroux further commented.

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 for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

After winning the Pulitzer Prize, I expected Professor Muldoon to take off a couple of weeks and maybe even the rest of the semester; in my mind, it seemed as though his recent achievement should allow him to retire. This was a bold and uninformed thought, however—our class was still scheduled to be held the very next day.

As soon as I strutted into the room with paper cups (part of our surprise party), a news camera from the left side of the room quickly changed its glance to my entrance. Muldoon remained calm as a local journalist spun the camera around the classroom while we read our poetry for the week. Muldoon's passive manner and patience in class simply reflect other manifestations of his wide-ranging humility; his response to winning the Pulitzer bronzes his image as a poet.

"My poems would still exist had I not won. And I would have continued writing," he said.

Ironically, the only time Professor Muldoon has been absent, he pulled a muscle in his back while shoveling snow during one of our many snowstorms of the winter. This time he escaped injury-free, and perhaps with an unexpected healing.