Like any event that becomes legend, it is hard to disentangle fact from fiction in accounts of Paul Muldoon's first meeting with Seamus Heaney. Even Muldoon mistrusts his memory. As he recalls it, he was 16 when a teacher introduced him to Heaney at a poetry reading. He posted Heaney some poems, asking, 'What can I learn from you?' Heaney's response: 'Nothing.' By 21, Muldoon had published his first book, New Weather, after Heaney showed his work to Faber and Faber's poetry editor. Now, after 10 volumes of poetry, no Irish poet rivals Muldoon for the Nobel laureate's mantle. Muldoon shares little in common with his former mentor. Muldoon's playful verse - where recondite allusions rub up against colloquial diction, and emotion is undercut by irony - contrasts with Heaney's high seriousness and polish. Muldoon is equally puckish in person. Boyish despite his 56 years, he has a rotund figure and bouncy walk. He's so soft-spoken and mild-mannered that it's hard to see where the poetic fireworks come from. His lilting Ulster vowels remain despite two decades in the US, where he teaches at Princeton University. With his tweed sports coat and shaggy hair, he is a cross between professor and ageing rock star. He is perplexed by his reputation for cryptic verse, insisting he is not trying 'to present riddles or conundrums but to engage readers'. Even Helen Vendler, perhaps the preeminent US poetry critic, has suggested he publish with explanatory notes. 'Certainly, I can imagine a circumstance when a few notes would be useful, absolutely - but we'll leave that for someone else to do,' he says. He doesn't see why poetry is inherently more difficult than film or music. 'We've spent so much of our lives watching movies that we're not conscious of how sophisticated we are at it,' he says. 'In the silent movies, that famous caption, 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch', had to be shot up because there was no understanding that what was happening in one frame was synchronicitous with the next frame, rather than in advanced time. And we've learned a very sophisticated grammar of popular music. Poetry is not something people read, and they say, 'I don't understand this.'' Muldoon's poetry has a sonorous quality that makes it inviting even when resisting comprehensibility. His fondness for unlikely rhymes has led some to joke that he could rhyme 'knife' with 'fork'. Although rhyming verse has fallen out of fashion, Muldoon doesn't see it disappearing. 'These little chimes are delightful to us,' he says. 'They make things memorable. In popular culture rhyme is a very potent force, in everything from rap music through to advertising.' For such a worldly poet, Muldoon's origins are surprisingly provincial. The oldest of three siblings, he was born into a Catholic family in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His parents were opposed to political violence - a legacy inherited by Muldoon, whose poetry maintains an even-handed view of the sectarian conflict. Muldoon describes his father, Patrick, as a life-battered but jubilant man. Though virtually illiterate, Muldoon Snr once heard his son's poem broadcast on the BBC and said: 'God, you made me very wee.' His mother, Brigid, was a tough-minded schoolmistress, whom Muldoon admits to having 'probably demonised more than appropriate'. His mother educated her children through general knowledge magazines. Today, Muldoon remains 'less interested in literature with a capital L than just books about interesting aspects of life - history, geography, biology, almost anything'. He started writing poetry aged 15 at St Patrick's College, where he discovered Donne, the 17th-century English poet known for his mastery of the 'metaphysical conceit' - extended metaphors that yoke together two unlikely ideas. 'A lot of my poems operate in similar ways - the idea of the quite fanciful, far-fetched metaphor,' he says. 'I love John Donne - the range, the control, the craziness. He's so witty, so airy, so grounded. He's a model poet.' Muldoon regrets that his rich poetry education was rare. 'It's usually taught at the pretty banal level of, 'Oh, so here we have our poem for today. You'll notice in the first stanza some alliteration. And notice what a hard sound that word 'hard' has.'' Not all poetic techniques are so obvious. Muldoon submitted Capercaillies to the New Yorker magazine in the 80s, a poem in which the first letter of each line spelled out a message reading, 'Is this a New Yorker poem or what?' Despite Muldoon mimicking what he saw as the magazine's preference for revelatory pastoral lyrics, the answer to the acrostic was clearly negative - the New Yorker rejected it. But the barb didn't stop the New Yorker hiring him as poetry editor last year - a post he holds on top of his demanding Princeton schedule. Muldoon has only ever written about a dozen poems a year. 'I try not to get involved in writing a poem unless I'm fairly sure that it's going to be demi-semi interesting,' he says, 'when I have an image or phrase or two that I think, in my innocence, are going to be explosive.' He's rarely conscious of form when he writes. 'I would never know that something was going to be a sonnet, unless it was part of a sonnet sequence - that's just something that develops. But I'm apt to write a sonnet because the structure is predisposed to us. The basic idea of the sonnet, which in many cases is, 'Here we have this, then we have that,' corresponds to a very basic way of thinking.' Poetry doesn't become easier with experience. 'Poetry is made out of the stuff of one's own self, out of one's innards,' he says. 'And for that reason it becomes more and more difficult, in the spider sense of weaving from its own innards, to spin out as one gets older. Poets disimprove as they go on. It's just a fact of life. It's not one I want to think about. But it's a fact.' However, there are signs Muldoon is improving. In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel. And his most recent volume, Horse Latitudes (2006), was published to high acclaim. Although critics never question Muldoon's verbal dexterity, some, like Vendler, have criticised his work for appealing more to the head than the heart. But reviewing Horse Latitudes in The New Republic, Vendler wrote that 'age has deepened Muldoon's poetry' and applauded his ability 'to bear aloft both grief and playfulness'. Muldoon downplays claims his work has become more emotionally charged. 'I can see how there might be more evident emotion, but there was always emotion.' Flights of fancy pervade Muldoon's essays as well. In 2005, he published The End of the Poem, which consists of 15 lectures he delivered over his five-year tenure as professor of poetry at Oxford University. Although applauded for their inventiveness, his readings of 15 poems were too idiosyncratic for some. Oxford literary scholar Valentine Cunningham described them as 'Bedlam - an associative madness'. The End of the Poem is not the funeral lament for the form its title may suggest; it refers instead to Muldoon's belief that, after taking in the shape of a poem, the reader might reasonably start at its end. He says the early 21st century is a particularly vital moment for poetry. 'What I like now is that there are no figures that have a monopoly on the poetic situation. There are many voices from all around the world. One can appreciate a poem by Les Murray, say, without getting involved in some kind of notion of the Herculean figures. In my day, the ones represented as such were [Ted] Hughes, [Philip] Larkin and [Thom] Gunn.' And now there are Heaney, Murray and Muldoon? He smiles bashfully. 'Well, see, I wouldn't know that,' he says. Writer's notes Name: Paul Muldoon Age: 56 Lives: New Jersey, US Family: married with two children Genres: poetry, essays Latest book: Horse Latitudes: Poems (Faber and Faber) Current project: a translation of the Hebrew Book of Psalms Other books: New Weather (1973); Mules (1977); Why Brownless Left (1980); Quoof (1983); Meeting the British (1987); Madoc (1991); Shining Brow (1993); The Prince of the Quotidian (1994); The Annals of Chile (1994); Hay (1998); Bandanna (1999); To Ireland, I (2000); Poems: 1968-1998 (2001); Moy Sand and Gravel (2002); The End of the Poem (2006) Other jobs: arts producer for BBC radio; lecturer at Princeton University What the papers say: 'What is not in dispute is his voice, his great gift, the glissade over the surface of the English language that creates markings both strange and yet strangely familiar.' The Age, Melbourne 'Muldoon's manner is both playful and troubled. Though he subverts connection, meaning and the reverence of art and life, he subverts subversion as well.' The New York Times