Design Observer recently reprinted one of Paul Muldoon’s poems in their poetry section. It caught my eye because the poem celebrates the @ sign, which I use in my personal branding. I also love the way the words “Like a whorl of an out-of-this-world ear” trip off my tongue. Here is the poem, originally published in The New Republic.
Paul Muldoon
@Like the whorl of an out-of-this-world ear that had been lent
to an oak-gall wasp by a tenth century Irish monk
who would hold out oak-gall ink against the predicament
in which he found himself…Like the ever-unfolding trunk
of the elephant in the room that gives such a bad vibe
it vies with your old hippie girlfriend who once lent such weight
to any argument to which you feared she might subscribe,
including her insistence we abbreviate
our most promising rlshps…Like the scrolled-down tail
of a Capuchin monkey drawing on its inner strengths
as it hammers short-sighted snail against short-sighted snail
that has nonetheless gone to extraordinary lengths…Like the tapeworm swallowed by a hippie who was once fat
but is now kind of bummed out you’ve lost track of where she’s at.
Muldoon is a poet, a professor, and an editor. He has been called “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War” by The Times Literary Supplement, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003. Muldoon is a professor at Princeton University and previously taught at Oxford University. He is also the Poetry Editor for The New Yorker. You can learn more about Muldoon’s accomplishments on his website.
