Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon’s line sounds like small talk, but it’s engineered as a quiet rebuke to the cultural reflex that treats certain places as punchlines. New Jersey, in the American imagination, is less a state than a shorthand: industrial stink, turnpike drear, mob-movie residue, the “between” zone you pass through on the way to New York or Philadelphia. By opening with “I live in New Jersey now,” he triggers that whole preloaded archive of jokes and condescension, then pivots: “which always gets a bad rap here and there.” The phrase “here and there” is doing sly work, suggesting the insult is lazy, ambient, almost automatic.

Then comes the underplayed counterspell: “but I must say, I enjoy living here too.” “Must” implies an obligation to testify, as if the social script demands he apologize for his address. “Too” is the key word: it concedes there are other places one is expected to enjoy more, but refuses the hierarchy. This is a poet’s version of refusing the easy metaphor. Muldoon, an Irish-born writer long attuned to how geography becomes identity and how identity gets caricatured, is staking out allegiance to the unglamorous, the misread, the routinely dismissed.

The intent isn’t boosterism; it’s a critique of taste as a form of power. He’s not arguing New Jersey is secretly paradise. He’s exposing how “bad rap” thinking flattens lived experience into brand management, and he does it with a conversational shrug that makes the prejudice look sillier than any direct scolding could.