A recent Georgetown graduate curated a new exhibition in Lauinger Library on renowned Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

Chris Kenny’s (GRD ’23) “Paul Muldoon: The Joseph M. Hassett Collection,” which lies outside the Booth Family Center for Special Collections, is open for viewing from March 1 to May 31, giving students, staff and faculty the opportunity to examine Muldoon’s poetry and contemporary Irish history. The Paul Muldoon exhibition began as a project to catalog a donation from Joseph M. Hassett – an author currently based in Washington, D.C. – which compiles Muldoon’s rare, limited-edition works.

Kenny said that it was a challenge to create the poetry exhibition since it was his first time doing this type of project. 

“I don’t think I’ve been to a book exhibit before doing this, so it was definitely a challenge,” Kenny told The Hoya. “After I was assigned to do it, I went to a bunch of book exhibits to see what they were like, but it just introduced me to that whole world.” 

Muldoon, whom the Times Literary Supplement recognized as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War” and a 2003 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, is prominent in modern Irish literature and poetry and provides profound insights into postcolonial history, according to Kenny.

Cóilín Parsons, an associate professor in the English department, said he introduced Kenny to this book curating project upon discovering his notable attentiveness to literature. 

“Chris was taking a class I taught on Joyce’s Ulysses, and I was struck by his deep love of literature and his facility for reading with care and pleasure,” Parsons wrote to The Hoya. “I asked him whether he would be interested in the cataloging job and it took off from there.”

Jay Sylvestre, a curator at the Booth Family Center for Special Collections who collaborated closely with Kenny on the exhibition, said he and Kenny focused on making Muldoon’s written work appear visually appealing.

“The big challenge for Chris and for myself was to take a lot of written material and try to make it interesting in a visual manner,” Sylvestre told The Hoya. “We were really fortunate that Muldoon often partners with artists and musicians, and with Chris knowing a lot of Muldoon’s work and a lot of his partnerships and collaboration, we were able to find some really interesting and visually appealing images to put in the case to complement the poetry.”

Kenny said the creative process behind the curation of Paul Muldoon’s poetry collection included various hands-on experiments to bring the art to life. 

“First thing was just to sit in the beautiful reading room at Special Collections and read everything and try to find a few sticking points that jumped out as kind of crucial moments in the life and work of this poet,” Kenny said. 

Sylvestre emphasized the high level of detail and attention in curating the Muldoon Hassett collection as they experimented with different book stands and layouts.

“We would sit down in our classroom with books he was thinking about putting in the exhibit, and we would get book supports and lay things out on the table and adjust levels and put things on risers to see how they might look in the exhibition case and that was a much more hands-on process,” Sylvestre said. 

Kenny said he found the process of creating the exhibition eye-opening as a different approach to Muldoon’s work other than his thesis.

“When you’re writing a thesis a lot of times it can be hard, you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and you just get lost in all of these threads of different arguments,” Kenny said. “But one way I learned through doing this — that helps you find your way out of that sort of labyrinth — is by going out into the world and seeing book exhibits.”

Parsons said the exhibition effectively displays Muldoon’s writing process as the reader can track the lifespan of Muldoon’s works.

“I think one of the great things about a collection like this is that we get to see not only the lifespan (so far, since Muldoon is still writing) of the poet’s work, but also the life span of individual poems,” Parsons wrote. “Built into the collection are reprints and emendations, showing how a poem moves from pen to page.”

Parsons encouraged students to enjoy the beauty of Muldoon’s works, especially since the collection in the library holds some of Muldoon’s most notable works.

“I would love students to enjoy the beauty of these books,” Parsons wrote. “Joe [Hassett] has taken such good care of them, and has collected them so deliberately, that this is one of the most important collections of Muldoon published items in the US.” 

“Ever attuned to nuance and multiple meanings, his poems offer us a masterclass in how to experience, with pleasure and confusion, and reflect on the many-faceted world around us,” Parsons added.

Kenny recommended students engage with the Muldoon poetry exhibition by looking beyond the words on the page and delving into its context. 

“Pick a poem that you see that jumps out at you or an image and look at it and read about the context immediately surrounding that,” Kenny said.