South Street Seaport Museum to Present HOW TO READ A POEM
Poems for discussion will be provided at the session. No preparation or prior poetry knowledge required-just bring an open mind! Advance registration required.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Dec. 18, 2025
Do you find poetry intimidating? Do you race past the poems in The New Yorker on your way to the fiction or the cartoons? Have you persuaded yourself that you'll "just never get it?" Join the South Street Seaport Museum and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former Poetry Editor of The New Yorker Paul Muldoon for a special gathering where participants discuss poems published only that week in literary journals and magazines-not just to uncover their meanings, but to reflect on where poetry has been as an art form and where it's going. Tickets are $45 and are available here.
Since 2023, the extraordinary "How to Read a Poem" discussion has been held at literary festivals and universities around the world, and this Winter, you can take part while nestled in the beautiful first-floor gallery of the A.A. Thomson & Co. building.
Poems for discussion will be provided at the session. No preparation or prior poetry knowledge required-just bring an open mind! Advance registration required.
About the Speaker
Paul Muldoon has been Howard G. B. Clark Professor at Princeton, teaching creative writing, Irish literature, songwriting and translation for nearly forty years. He served as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2022 to 2025. He has taught at Cambridge University, University of St. Andrew, University of East Anglia, and Lancaster University. His fifteen major collections of poetry, published in America by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the Pulitzer Prize winning Moy Sand and Gravel and Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, a New York Times Notable Book of 2024. He is the editor of many anthologies of poetry, including, most recently, Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets.
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