Picnics and poetry with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor at Princeton university Paul Muldoon also performs with a rock band and is about to tour Ireland with a live sketch show, writes Sara Keating

Paul Muldoon: ‘Music functions for many in a way that poetry might not. It is a great connector. It’s not that song doesn’t have an intellectual component, but it is an emotional medium, and that helps to draw us in’ Pic: Getty

‘I am a man of great influence, and educated to a high degree . . . I’ll sit you down and I will fill your can. And along the street all the friends I meet, Say “There goes Muldoon, he’s a solid man.” It is the rousing chorus from this popular music hall number of the 19th century that first caught the poet Paul Muldoon’s ear.

It led him down a path which ...