AUBADE

At 1 a.m. the dairy sink
in your yard was a deer-glyphed megalith
caught in my headlights.
I found not only sermons
in stones but Tamerlane of Samarkand
in the Timberland mukluks
tossed on your bedroom floor.
Now I'd rather shop for staples
(bread, milk, Clorox),
at the twenty-four-hour Supermart-

Paul Muldoon's official website

Paul Muldoon at Poetry Foundation

Paul Muldoon at Academy of American Poets

Paul Muldoon interviewed by Alice Whitwham

The oblique way of thinking about things is almost inevitably more interesting, and that I suppose is what we talk about when we talk about being in touch with one's own unconscious. One may cultivate that to some extent. One may keep an eye out for the odd expression, the odd image, the striking image, so in that sense one may educate oneself.

It is about being in the habit of ignorance. I love the descriptions – by some of the great poets – of this condition. Wordsworth calls it 'wise passiveness'; you’re sort of lying there in a heap, but not a total heap, you know?

Great poems come from that area: ignorance. When I teach at Princeton, for example, I tell my students, 'What we want to really work on now, is what you don't know: the condition of not knowing.' There are many people who write poems who've not got their heads around this idea, and who actually think that they know what they're doing. I really believe that the minute one thinks one knows what one's doing – actually, in any department of life – one's probably making a terrible mistake. That's the most difficult thing to teach and the most difficult thing to learn. It’s very tempting for us to think we know what we're doing.