Muldoon to be editor at New Yorker

Poet and creative writing professor Paul Muldoon will soon add yet another title to his already well-adorned resume.

Muldoon will succeed Alice Quinn as poetry editor of the New Yorker sometime before the end of the year. He will continue to teach creative writing at Princeton, where he also chairs the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.

"It is very much a part-time job," Muldoon said of the New Yorker post. "I feel that I will be able to devote enough time to it to be able to do it properly without jeopardizing what I'm trying to do at Princeton."

Though Muldoon is unsure how much time he will need to devote to the New Yorker, he said it would be "certainly no more than one day a week," much of which he could do without having to go into the magazine's Times Square offices.

New Yorker editor David Remnick '81 first contacted Muldoon about the job at the end of last week. Remnick was unavailable for comment.

When he was first asked to join the magazine, Muldoon said, he "didn't say yes immediately because I have a lot of responsibilities ... I feel it is very important for me to see through at least some of the plans that we have to develop the arts at Princeton."

But, he added, he said yes because of the magazine's reputation as the "only major publication in which poetry is taken seriously."

"For me always to have a poem accepted by the New Yorker had a magical aspect," he said. "To see a poem published there had a magical aspect. To open up the magazine each week and see what the poem selection might be has a magical aspect, and I want to be part of that magic."

Though Muldoon said he has no plans to alter the direction of the magazine's poetry department, he does hope to "reflect even more of the variousness and vigor ... of contemporary American poetry, and, indeed, poetry from around the world."

John Raimo '08, who has taken two classes with Muldoon, said his professor's ascension to the New Yorker post "signals a major change in American poetry."

"I can see him bringing in poetry looking outside American life and bringing in new focuses on a wide range of political, economic and historical concerns," Raimo said.

Professor Edmund White, Muldoon's colleague in the creative writing program, said he thinks Muldoon will be a "very far-reaching editor at the New Yorker," citing the diversity of the poets Muldoon brings to speak at the University. "He's able to tap all types of poets," White said.

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Muldoon said he has no policy for picking poems to publish except a desire that "the reader ideally, coming out of a poem, will have undergone some kind of change."

"One should expect at least as much from a poem as a piece by Seymour Hersh," Muldoon said, referring to one of the New Yorker's most distinguished investigative reporters.

Muldoon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2003, said his writing is inspired by "everything and anything."

"The key element for me in attempting to write poems is that one does not know what one is doing — that one has no preconceptions," Muldoon said. "The same is true of reading poems: One shouldn't approach a poem with a sense of what it should be doing but open oneself to what it is, in fact, doing."

Originally from Northern Ireland, Muldoon started teaching in the University's creative writing department 20 years ago. "He is probably the most famous poet working today in the [United Kingdom]," White said. "It's just a matter of two or three years before he is that well known here."

Muldoon is known around campus as much for his good nature as for his poetic skill. "He is incredibly kind and generous," Raimo said. "I count myself as one of many students who [see] him as a personal friend."

"I don't think I have ever learned as much at Princeton as I have in having coffee with him," said Maryam Khan '08, whom Muldoon is advising on her creative thesis.

Ian Segal '08, another of Muldoon's students, called him "one of the nicest people I have had the fortune of meeting here or elsewhere."

Muldoon stressed that he plans to keep his focus on teaching and advising. "I read my students' work, taking it every bit as seriously as one would take a poem that's been submitted to the New Yorker," he said.