In Martin Amis’s short story “Career Move”, the customary positions of the poet and the screenplay writer are transposed. Screenwriters, toiling in mouldering garrets, submit scripts to obscure publishers in the hope of some pitiable compensation. Poets are flown first-class between London and Los Angeles to discuss million-dollar development deals for single sonnets.

When Paul Muldoon meets me at Princeton station, I wonder whether the story was prophetic. Appearing suddenly, he waves me in the direction of a car. There is nothing especially remarkable about getting a ride from a poet, but this car was a Corvette. A long, gleaming, bright blue Corvette. Perhaps he has signed a mega-contract for some blockbuster new ode?

“I borrowed it from a colleague,” Muldoon says as we subside into our bucket seats. “I lent my car to some friends over the weekend and they crashed it. I’ve spent all morning at the garage.” As if to reaffirm the implausibility of a poet driving a sports car, he has severe difficulty getting it started. Despite furious twists on the ignition and relentless palpating of buttons, switches and blinking lights, the beast fails to stir. “It’s not been a good morning on the car front,” Muldoon says with a sigh. We gaze disconsolately out of the windscreen. As I confront the dismal prospect of conducting an interview in a stationary vehicle, he gives a final, despairing tweak and the machine roars capriciously into life.

A lack of proficiency with a Corvette is not necessarily a sign of the impractical artist. Hailed as the most important poet of his generation, Paul Muldoon is also a solid professional. In his native Northern Ireland he spent many years as a producer for the BBC, and in 1999 was appointed professor of poetry at Oxford. Today he is head of Princeton University’s Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Entering Mediterra, the airy, elegant restaurant to which Muldoon drives me, he exudes the mildly bohemian prosperity of the professorial class (as does everyone else in the room). Though barely half full, the restaurant reverberates with the boom and clatter of lunchtime conversation. “Do you think you’ll be recording this conversation?” Muldoon asks, clearly familiar with the logistical demands of the press interview. He seeks out the quietest table. His tie loosened, he peers cautiously from beneath an unkempt shrub of hair, which, though dusted with grey, makes him appear younger than his 56 years. Even after sitting down, he has a slightly preoccupied air.

“There’s a bit more administration in the current job than I expected,” he says as we study our menus. ”But the truth is, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t spend very much time writing poems. Very, very little. I’d say I wrote a dozen poems a year. Each one of them is probably written in one or two days.” He doesn’t spend long over the menu either. He orders a charcuterie platter, and I ask for steak-frites. The waiter’s half-hearted suggestion of an appetiser is dismissed by Muldoon with a quick shake of the head.

Over the past 20 years, Muldoon has laid down a body of work that has brought him near-universal acclaim. In 2003 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel, while his latest volume, Horse Latitudes, was published last year to great reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It was accompanied by The End of the Poem, a collection of lectures he gave during his five-year stint at Oxford.

Although he is one of a stellar group of Ulster-born poets - including Seamus Heaney, to whom Muldoon, as a teenager, submitted his first poems - Muldoon has no strong sense of writing in an Irish poetic tradition or of being part of an Irish diaspora. His work shows little inclination to hymn the great Irish-American cities of New York, Boston or Chicago. He is happy to nestle with his family in the suburban ease of New Jersey. “I never really had an ambition to come to America. I came because someone asked me if I’d teach here. I lived in New York for a few months and wrote a couple of poems that reflected something of the day-to-day life. But now I go in as a tourist, as someone determined to have a good time.”

There is indeed something democratic about Muldoon’s poetry, in the way that he prostrates himself before the banalities of contemporary life. (One of his collections is called The Prince of the Quotidian.) There is a good deal of punning, trade names, rock trivia, album titles, celebrity sightings, glimpses of family life, snatches of trite conversation. Cliches are relished. High culture and the irretrievably low are meshed with abandon. The language veers between recondite and brashly demotic.

However, even Muldoon’s most ardent admirers would have a hard time denying that his poetry is often formidably difficult. It can feel like being led on a tortuous, confusing journey through a fractured, apparently arbitrary sequence of images and allusions. Although I admire his linguistic dexterity and range, I feel an urge to slap one of his books on the table and come straight out with it: ”What’s this one about? What’s going on in that one?” My actual approach is more diffident. Girding myself, I press him gently on how he responds to accusations of obscurity.

“I don’t know what I’m doing when I embark on a poem,” he says, disarmingly. “I don’t have any intentions. What I try to do is figure out what the poem’s intentions are, try to figure out from word to word what the impact of the piece of writing is. That’s the same with all writing. It’s the same with this piece you’re going to write about our lunch.” The last remark is accompanied by a smile, as if he is laying down a challenge.

Muldoon is a regarded as a master of technique, equally at home in the sonnet, the haiku, the ode and the villanelle, not to mention the pantoum, the ghazal and the double sestina. He is celebrated for the ingenuity of his rhyming. Horse Latitudes opens with a sequence of 19 sonnets, each written in the same, highly unusual rhyme scheme. And each one is named after an historic battle beginning with the letter “B”.

There would, I venture, appear to be some evidence here of conscious pre-arrangement, of the designing hand. But again he is at pains to qualify the extent of his responsibility. “Believe it or not, very rarely would I embark on what turns out to be a sonnet knowing that it’s going to be a sonnet. The sonnet happens to be a form that has had legs, because it conforms to a very basic way in which we think.”

Just as this avenue of inquiry is being blocked, the food arrives. Muldoon regards his charcuterie platter sceptically, removing its sweaty duvet of cheese. He seems surprised by the high proportion of meat. I, by contrast, devour my steak with what in retrospect seems like unseemly gusto. I ask whether we might order wine, but Muldoon declines emphatically. “Just mineral water for me. I’ve got a faculty meeting at two. Then I plan to go to the gym.”

Gym? Mineral water? What’s wrong with poets today, I wonder aloud. Where are the heroically tortured voluptuaries - the Byrons, the Rimbauds - of our age? Muldoon is dismissive: ”Writing under the influence of alcohol - I cannot imagine how it’s done at all. Probably how people do it is by getting up early in the morning, while they’re still demi-semi-compos mentis.”

In fact, alcohol at this point would be unlikely to derail him as he returns enthusiastically to the question of poetic obscurity. “What we tend to overlook is that people have to learn how to read poems. Most people are very sophisticated when it comes to looking at a movie, how it’s made, the special effects. When we cut to another scene, that’s something we had to learn as viewers. In the same way, much popular music is very complex, in a way that would have seemed problematic but which we now take as the norm. Just as we take as a norm the idea that not everything makes sense in the world. The poem reflects the fractured nature of the world.”

Muldoon comes back repeatedly to the theme of music. He has written opera libretti and was a friend of – and collaborator with – the rock musician Warren Zevon, to whom he devotes a long, whirling elegy at the end of Horse Latitudes. Music, he says, may hold a key to the future of poetry, about which he seems both dejected and guardedly optimistic. ”Poetry isn’t normal in the way it should be. I believe every major newspaper should carry a poem a day. Actually, if one were to ban it, that would be the sure-fire way to generate interest,” he says, brightening momentarily. “But poetry may take in a great deal more than we traditionally associate with it. It occurs in many ways in the world, such as the song tradition.” That, he adds, includes rap. “It’s a comparatively literary form, based on the couplet.”

Our waiter returns to take down our request for desserts but leaves with an order for nothing more than two coffees. The conversation begins to ebb. I ask to what extent the future of poetry will contain Paul Muldoon, and he strikes a wistful tone. “I was having a conversation with another poet the other day about whether we should pack it all in. And we were somewhat serious. A lot of people go on for far too long and no one takes them to one side and says, `it’s time you handed in your licence’.”

The tide of chatter from the surrounding tables rises almost to engulf us. I shout a final question. How, I wonder, are things going with Rackett, a garage band he has formed with a few middle-aged colleagues – Muldoon writes the lyrics. “It’s very hard to find time to practise. We’ve had some personnel changes. And a couple of exploding drummers. But, yes, the band potters along.” Then he reflects for a few moments and grins, as though in apprehension of some intriguing new prospect. “But maybe the Corvette is the way to go.”

Mediterra, 29 Hulfish Street, Princeton, New Jersey
1 x green salad
1 x Caesar salad
1 x charcuterie platter
1 x steak-frites
1 x tap water
1 x mineral water
2 x coffee
Total: $69.55