Howdie-Skelp: Poems
Paul Muldoon, Creative Writing, Fund for Irish Studies
March 1, 2022 · 6:00 pm—7:00 pm · Labyrinth Books and Livestream
Labyrinth Books; Lewis Center for the Arts; Humanities Council
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon delivers a sharp wake-up call with his fourteenth collection. Fellow poet Michael Dickmann will introduce. Please join us.
This is a hybrid event. If the public health picture in early March is still very unstable, we will postpone once more until we can welcome a vaccinated, masked, distanced, in-person audience. Please check back. To register for the livestream, click here.
A howdie-skelp is the slap a midwife gives a newborn. Its a wake-up call. A call to action.
The poems in Howdie-Skelp include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an affront to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold our attention.
Paul Muldoon has taught creative writing at Princeton University for thirty years. He is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and Selected Poems 1968-2014.
This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and the Humanities Council.
