A Celebrated Princeton Poet Organizes a Festival of His Peers

POETRY is not everyone’s daily bread, but even those who would be hard pressed to name three great living poets understand its power, says Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

“We tend to know, in our bones, that poetry can help us make sense of things, even if we don’t turn to it as often as we might,” said Mr. Muldoon, who is also poetry editor of The New Yorker. He believes that poetry has the force to stir many more people than commonly thought.
Mr. Muldoon, 57, who was born in Northern Ireland, has been thinking about holding a poetry festival at Princeton for years, and now he has pulled it off: Some of the world’s most celebrated poets will read their work at the inaugural Princeton Poetry Festival on April 27 and 28.
“If all goes well” the festival will happen every other year, said Mr. Muldoon, chairman of the university’s Lewis Center for the Arts. The event’s organizers timed it to complement the biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which had been held in even years since 1986. But in January, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in Morristown announced that it had canceled the 2010 festival for economic reasons, and might not bring it back.