February 8, 2010

Renowned poet Paul Muldoon to give Turnbull Memorial Lecture

Renowned poet Paul Muldoon will give the Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lecture at Johns Hopkins at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 2, on the Homewood campus; the location will be announced soon. The event, originally slated for Feb. 9 in Mudd Hall Auditorium, was rescheduled because of weather.

Muldoon, a native of Ireland, was described by the United Kingdom’s Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” He is the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor and chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, as well as the poetry editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004, he was a professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary fellow of Hertford College. His collections of poetry include New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968–1998 (2001) and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. His 10th collection, Horse Latitudes, appeared in fall 2006 and was widely praised. His Oxford Lectures were also published in 2006, under the title The End of the Poem. His most recent book is Plan B (2009).

Muldoon’s recent awards include the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry.

The Turnbull Lecture, given through the generosity of a gift made in 1889 in memory of Percy Graeme Turnbull (1878–87), has brought to Homewood some of the most distinguished voices in American poetry and criticism, including Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Charles Eliot Norton, R.P. Blackmur, Northrop Frye, W.S. Merwin and Harold Bloom. The first lecture took place in March 1891.