Event Details
Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 6:30 pm

Dia:Chelsea
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City 

Readings in Contemporary Poetry curator, Vincent Katz provided an introduction for the evening's reading.

Free for Dia members; $10 general admission; $6 admission for students and seniors 

Advance ticket purchases recommended. Tickets are also available for purchase at the door, subject to availability. 

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University Belfast. Muldoon’s recent collections of poetry include Poems 1968–2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and Maggot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary fellow of Hertford College. From 2007 to 2017 he served as the New Yorker’s poetry editor. Muldoon is currently Howard G. B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Director of the Princeton Atelier, and Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey.

AT TUAM

Among the hundreds of children who stare up at us from their       

                                                            septic tank

is James Muldoon, who died in 1927
at the age of four months. At least he would never be forced to             

                                                              thank
the Lord for mercies large or small. That cry to high heaven
must come from Brendan Muldoon, who died in 1943
at a mere five weeks. A teenage nun bows before an unleavened
host held up by a priest like a moon held up by an ash tree.
In 1947 the eleven month old Bridget Muldoon, a namesake of 
                                                            the mother

who would shortly give birth to me,
has already distinguished herself as being a bit of a bother 

while Dermott Muldoon, three months old in 1950, is about to
                                                            join the ranks
of my foster-sisters and foster-brothers

in that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another
                                                              wasp’s face
and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering
                                                               place.

Susan Wheeler is the author of a novel, Record Palace (Graywolf Press, 2005), and six books of poetry. In 2012 her volume of poetry Meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her awards include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in ten editions of Best American Poetry as well as in New American Writing, New Yorker, Paris Review, Talisman, and many other journals. She teaches at Princeton University in New Jersey.