Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Muldoon

Muldoon is selling a kind of radical ignorance as craft: the decision to begin a poem without a map, and to treat each piece as its own weather system. That little parenthetical - "and one writes them, of course, poem by poem" - does a lot of cultural work. It sounds offhand, even obvious, but it quietly rebukes the fantasy of the poet as someone executing a grand design. No master-plan cycle, no neatly architected "project"; just the stubborn, serial labor of attention.

The intent here is partly defensive, partly liberating. By insisting on not knowing "where it's going to end up", Muldoon frames composition as discovery rather than delivery. That posture protects the poem from premature meaning - the kind that arrives when a writer starts with a message and then forces language to serve it. The subtext is a warning against the managerial impulse in contemporary art: the pressure to pitch, brand, and summarize before the work exists. Muldoon’s method refuses the elevator pitch on principle.

Context matters because Muldoon’s own poems are famously agile: riddled with swerves, puns, historical jump-cuts, and tonal feints. The quote isn’t romantic mysticism about inspiration; it’s a technical stance that makes room for surprise, for language to outsmart the poet. He’s describing a practice that trusts process over premise - not because he lacks control, but because he knows control can be the enemy of aliveness. In an era obsessed with outcomes, he’s arguing that the poem’s most honest destination is the one the poet can’t predict.