"Well," he says. "It's quiet enough."

This month brings Mr. Muldoon's 11th book of poems, Maggot. The 59-year-old Irish native writes poetry to read with the Oxford English Dictionary in hand. His stanzas are seas of subtle puns. He has been a major poet since his first collection, New Weather (published when he was just 21 years old), because of the quiet perfection of lines like, "What was he watching and waiting for/ walking Scollop every day?/ For one intending to leave at the end of the year/ who would break the laws of time and stay," from "February." He is either referring to his own memory or anyone's or creating a new myth entirely. It could be all three.

It is Mr. Muldoon's ability to walk the line between comedy and tragedy, autobiographical and universal themes, colloquial and stylized language, all with equal grace, that has made him influential. It has also branded him with labels like "postmodernist" and "difficult." Indeed, he is a jester, but only in the sense of Lear's Fool: Though he's not as grave as John Ashbery or theatrical as Anne Carson, his jokes and tricks are among poetry's most serious and illuminating examples of beauty.

In 2007, David Remnick appointed Mr. Muldoon poetry editor of The New Yorker. The choice caught some off guard--he is not American, and Alice Quinn's exit from the position was unexpected. But Mr. Muldoon has brought a freshness to the magazine's poetry section that only he could. Yes, he publishes Mr. Ashbery and C.K. Williams, but he also leaves space for emerging poets like Michael Robbins, who broke in with a controversial poem titled "Alien Vs. Predator," or for Dave Musgrave's single-line poem, "On the Inevitable Decline Into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age" ("O Sting, where is thy death?").

"One of the great things about this moment, and one of the reasons I was even interested in doing the job, is that there are many styles," Mr. Muldoon told me. "I don't have to go desperately looking for a range of poems."

Maggot is Mr. Muldoon's first collection since 2006's Horse Latitudes. He considered retiring after that book, but the impulse to write did not fade. Still, Mr. Muldoon is reluctant even to call himself a poet. "Generally," he told me, "the people who come out of the woodwork and say, 'Hey, I'm a poet. Here's a poem for you.' You say, 'Oh my God. When's the next bus?'"

Back in the moth-covered screens surrounding the porch of Homer Noble Farm, the deer flies buzzing around us, I sat and sipped coffee with Mr. Muldoon and his wife, the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. Every summer Mr. Muldoon comes here to Ripton, Vt., to teach poetry to high-school teachers at Bread Loaf (named for Bread Loaf Mountain, on which the campus rests). The corners of Mr. Muldoon's mouth are perpetually turned up in a half-smile. His eyes look red and tired, but always attentive, nearly hidden behind a pair of thin glasses and a thick mop of unruly hair.

"The phones that connect the cabin were used for Frost and the secretary to get in touch with one another," he explained.

"He was shtupping the wife," said Ms. Korelitz. "There's a phone line that connects from the house to the cabin so the wife could call up there and say, 'My husband is away.'" She raised her eyebrows.

"You say that," Mr. Muldoon said, "with such authenticity."

Mr. Muldoon was raised Catholic in Northern Ireland. His father was an illiterate farmer, his mother a schoolteacher. The house where he grew up was largely barren of books, save for an encyclopedia for children. In grammar school, he encountered a slim volume, Book of Verse for Young People, which collected the most famous stanzas of Burns, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Yeats and others. Donne's "The Flea" remains Mr. Muldoon's favorite poem ("It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,/ And in this flea our two bloods mingled be."). His interpretation typifies the seriousness with which his own poetry employs humor and sex--attributes of Donne as well: "It's the greatest pickup line in the language," he said.

He left Ireland at age 35 to teach part-time at Princeton. After a stint at Oxford, he returned to Princeton, where he is director of the Lewis Arts Center. His on-campus office, where he does much of his writing, is stacked floor to ceiling with the collected works of Auden, Bishop, Keats and every other major poet since Homer. The complete volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary sit close to his desk. Mr. Muldoon told me that when he writes, he enters something like a literary fugue state and prefers "to have absolutely no sense of what I'm doing"--echoing T.S. Eliot's belief that poetry is a giving over to the unconscious. He writes every day, as he has for nearly a half a century.

"That's the sort of phrase you read and think, 'My God! Didn't he have something better to do?'" he said. "Unfortunately, the fact that one has attempted to do it for 50 years is completely immaterial. One of the questions I have for myself is, 'Is it time to quit?' There's no point in doing it unless it's sort of half-interesting. If you're a chef, the more often you make sushi, the better you might get at it. Maybe even that's not the case, but it sure as hell isn't the case in poetry. One tends to get worse at it, if anything. And here's the thing: Even one's best friends probably wouldn't even tell you that it's not interesting."

This worry was particularly palpable with Maggot, a collection that Mr. Muldoon has his doubts about, even after it flowed out of him following a rare period of not writing poems. To be fair, Mr. Muldoon had other things to think about: raising two children, being a husband, his job as an administrator and teacher at Princeton, curating the poetry in The New Yorker. People have debated poetry's importance since Plato, but the question remains: Is poetry worth the effort when there is a life to be lived?

"Is washing one's socks worth doing?" Mr. Muldoon says. "I think poets are often their own worst enemies, engaging in these debates about 'Does poetry matter?' Really why not just get on with it? It does matter. It does matter."

Jonathan Galassi, Mr. Muldoon's publisher at FSG, told me about how Mr. Muldoon wanted to quit writing after Horse Latitudes.

"He was tired out, and yet here we are with a new book," Mr. Galassi said. "His mind is just zapping all the time with linguistic games and connections. Maggot is like a kind of résumé--a reprise of many things he's done as a writer. What it's telling you is that he can't stop writing."

"What do you think about Paul saying he's getting worse with time?" I asked.

Mr. Galassi let out a loud laugh.

MR. MULDOON BEGAN his career with these lines: "The early electric people had domesticated the wild ass/ They knew all about falling off." 

At once archaic and forward-looking, optimistic and hopeless, the words already predict and characterize Mr. Muldoon's style: He electrifies language. He uses each word not only aware of its entire history, but also activating it. With Maggot, one of his most consistent, enthralling collections, he creates a quietly connected series in which every syllable is packed with meaning. In it, he rhymes "dork" with "Scythian torc"; composes a lengthy ethereal sequence about traveling in Japan and struggling to write the poem that the reader is reading; and, in "Balls," creates poetry's greatest sex joke since Donne's "Loves Progress." The very title, Maggot, suggests myriad understandings: As a noun, the word signifies those off-putting creatures that arise hopefully out of a corpse, the single sign of life among death--but also in the word's verb form, "to fret," a word that can also mean "to gnaw," in the manner of a maggot. 

The entire book is a kind of maggoting, in every sense imaginable, predominantly derived from the paradoxes of life continuing on both in spite--and because--of death. Consider, as Mr. Muldoon would want his readers to, the etymology of the word "metaphor"--itself the operative function of any poet's work, but also the dominant linguistic technique of the recurring signifier "maggot," a sustained metaphor throughout the collection. "Metaphor" comes from the Greek metaphero, meaning "to carry over," suggesting, at once, the literal connotations of the noun maggot (organic life "carrying over" as a result of death), but also the symbolic nature of such reciprocity as a poetical trope.

Such a delightfully antithetical (and antithetically delightful) notion repeats itself in the strange contradictions of Maggot's best images: "maggots, for their part,/ are content to be in a crowd scene from which they'll nonetheless depart/ about as gracefully as Swift would retire/ from a debate on the slave trade," or a girl with a tattoo that reads, "I REGRET THIS." For all his claims of ignorance, Mr. Muldoon has crafted a highly nuanced, interconnected text, one that demands to be appreciated at all levels of interpretation.

THE DAY I left Vermont, Mr. Muldoon was on his way to a Jon Bon Jovi concert in Saratoga Springs. We were driving in his Prius.

"Are you a Bon Jovi fan?" he asked.

"No."

"Me neither. But I feel like I should go to this. It's a sociological experiment."

He drummed on the steering wheel of his car, singing Bon Jovi lyrics, hiding his Irish accent beneath an approximation of Mr. Bon Jovi's Jersey croon.

"You give love a bad na-ame!"

There is a potential poem here.

He said he "takes a stab or two at playing guitar."

It was strange to hear him say this. He talks of his poetry with a similar air of informality: a hobby he takes a "stab" at. I recalled a conversation we had in his office the previous month. We sat surrounded by the collections of influential poets, his own books buried away on the shelves.

"I don't think of myself as a professional poet at all." His voice was serious, but his face was still half-smiling.

"Do you think there are any professional poets?" I asked.

"Um." He paused for a long time.

"Because that begs the question: If you are not a professional poet--"

"Who would be, is that it? There's something about being a poet that's different from being a physician. If I were a physician and I were to say to you, 'Yeah, I sort of try to be a physician,' you would think, 'Well I better find somebody else to do this.' If one could pass oneself off as not just a poet, but a good poet, maybe it would be easier to say, 'I'm a poet.' But because I wouldn't want to be a poet at all unless I were a good one, and I think this is true of many people, one would tend not to say it. Maybe it's just time to embrace it and say this is what I do. For better or worse. This is what I do."

mmiller@observer.com

The birthday party is a fund-raiser for Andrew Cuomo's 2010 campaign--a campaign that has yet to settle on the exact office Mr. Cuomo might be seeking--and it comes just a few weeks before the next campaign finance filing deadline, on January 15. A strong filing from Mr. Cuomo, the thinking goes, could hasten calls for Governor David Paterson to cede the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to the ascendant attorney general.

Tickets for the Bon Jovi bash range from $1,000 dollars to $50,000 dollars, depending on how close you'd like to be to Mr. Bon Jovi and Mr. Cuomo.

He'll headline an event on December 17 at the Sheraton Towers in Manhattan, which is also a fund-raiser for Andrew Cuomo 2010. Tickets cost $1,000 per person, and bundlers are encouraged to buy tables (and a pass to the VIP reception before the dinner) for $10,000. Donors can also become "gold" and "silver" chairs for $25,000 and $50,000, respectively.

Fund-raising is critical, with a January 15 deadline looming. Cuomo is gearing up for a bid against David Paterson, and has been raising money steadily.

Paterson's own efforts have been somewhat halting.

In the spring, Matchbox 20 appeared at a Cuomo event and L.L. Cool J appeared for Paterson. The governor's own birthday party didn't yield him the bump that was expected.

Paterson is hosting a holiday celebration a week earlier, also charging $1,000 per person.

The film is a sweet road story in which a mother bounces around from state to state with her two sons in search of a husband. Ms. Zellweger is no stranger to road trips. As she put it, she’s gone “across the bottom, around the top. New York to Florida. I’m from Texas, so it’s my favorite thing.”

It was obvious that in the film, the road simply represents searching. Surveying the theater, the Transom wondered what these people were looking for in their lives.

During a party afterward at the East Hampton Mexican restaurant the Blue Parrot, the Transom approached Bob Colacello and asked him.

“I’m searching for a way to finish my next Vanity Fair story and still go to a lot of parties at the beach,” he said.

Across the room, The View’s Joy Behar negotiated table space for two friends. “I’m searching for good guests for my new show—it’s called The Joy Behar Show,” she said. “I want great people to come on the show and give me radical opinions.”

Outside, designer Marc Jacobs was sitting alone, his entourage having just walked inside. He thought about the question for a moment, then looked up, smiling, and said, “Love.”

Party photographer Patrick McMullan was standing next to the porch, having a cigarette. What was he searching for? “I’m looking for a month off. Like, a full month off,” he said. “To be able to have a week is like a vacation, but to be able to have a month, you can really get into things, and, you know, laziness is not always bad.”

He paused for a moment and then added one stipulation. “A month off with no repercussions. With no fires that have to be put out.”

Jon Bon Jovi, a co-owner of the Blue Parrot, approached the front door all smiles. When the Transom asked what he was searching for, he seemed taken aback. But just for a moment. Then he leaned into his swagger and simply said, “A margarita.”

As Mr. Hamilton was leaving the party, the same question was posed to him.

“At this point, it’s time to maintain grace in your life. As you get older, life has a way of debasing you,” he said. “There’s an old expression, ‘When you finally get your head together, your ass is falling apart.’ I want to have a style of life and grace in my life as I get older.”

As he spoke, Radioman, a bearded homeless man so-called for a radio he keeps around his neck, famous for crashing movie parties and film sets, butted in and introduced himself.

“You look great, George,” he said to Mr. Hamilton, who looked uncomfortable, but smiled politely and thanked him.

“That’s what I’m looking for,” the star said. “Dignity.”

On Friday, July 3, business was booming at Savanna’s restaurant in Southampton—a favorite of effusive Real Housewife Ramona Singer. “The people that are running it are from T-Bar in the city, which I love,” she said. “The food, just so everybody knows, is great food now, and great service. Because that was always the killer. People would want to go there, but—bad food, bad service. And now the food is great and so is the service. I’m serious!” O.K.!

Meanwhile, on Main Street in East Hampton, Walter Struble, the manager at Della Femina’s, said that Friday was the busiest he thinks the restaurant has ever been. “It was quite surprising because of the state of this economy, but because of the wonderful weather, everyone was very positive and energetic.” Weather anchor Sam Champion made an appearance, along with a Scarlett Johansson look-alike. By the end of the night, employees decided the comely customer was not, in fact, the actress. “She looked identical to her, though!” Mr. Struble stressed.

Guests dining at the Blue Parrot in East Hampton the next night, meanwhile, were surprised with a concert by Jon Bon Jovi. The singer came to the restaurant with his wife, Dorothea Hurley, and performed “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” “Free Bird” and “Dead or Alive.” Actress Renée Zellweger was there with author Kristen Gore. Democratic Leadership Council chair Harold Ford came to the restaurant for the second time that weekend, after dining with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons the night before. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani came for dinner at the restaurant on Sunday night.

Just a couple miles away, at Georgica on Wainscott Road, executive chef Robert Hesse from the show Hell’s Kitchen said that the restaurant served 600 to 700 covers on Friday and Saturday night, compared to 400 to 500 every other weekend. Actors AnnaLynne McCord and Kellan Lutz showed up for dinner, along with Rolling Stone daughter Alexandra Richards and more Real Housewives. “It was packed. The scene was nuts!” Chef Hesse said.

The next morning, Ms. Richards drove up to the Surf Lodge in Montauk in her new Audi, got her makeup done by Maybelline and put on her Tracy Feith bikini. While Ms. Richards DJ’d a selection of reggae music, a huge crowd stood on the deck, including some of her best friends from high school in Weston, Conn.

Designer Calvin Klein’s former wife Kelly stopped by the Lodge on the Fourth, and 300 star Gerard Butler partied all weekend long at the bar. Ad man Jerry Della Femina also made an appearance.

At Day and Night Beach Club in Southampton, co-owner Derek Koch reported that one customer spent $45,000 in a single visit. “When I looked at his bill, I was like, ‘Oh my God!’” he said. Another guy bought every single bottle of Champagne. Day and Night is known for parties that start at noon and end around 8:30 p.m.; Mr. Koch said that on Saturday he was in bed by 10:30. “I mean, I did have to wake up the next morning and do it all over again! It was an amazing turnout. We had around 700 people. It was our biggest weekend, ever.”

Spending was big, too, at Dune Nightclub’s Axe Lounge in Southampton, where one customer dropped around $30,000 dollars on the Fourth, said Mike Heller, president of Talent Resources, which deals with all of the celebrities that go through the nightclub. “Towards the end of the night we ran out of Cristal!” he said.

DJ Vice flew out from the West Coast, “did a whole tribute about Michael Jackson, and, you know, talked about how it’s America’s birthday, blah, blah, blah,” Mr. Heller said, adding, in some wonderment: “There were bottles flowing, sparklers all night and bottles of Champagne! Where’s all the money coming from?”

Dune also enjoyed a huge stampede after the nearby Pink Elephant, already wounded by bankruptcy woes, was closed down to a carbon monoxide scare.

Security was tight, meanwhile, at the Social Life Estate in Watermill, which held only 150 people. Publicist Kristian Laliberte described the atmosphere as being “very young Hollywood meets Manhattan art scene with an East End twist.”

Socialite Lydia Hearst, the cover girl of Social Life Magazine this month, was supposed to host the event along with Mr. Lutz, but was stuck at home with gallstones, Mr. Laliberte said.

The theme of the party was “Great Gatsby,” and while many guests donned borrowed couture, socialite Minnie Mortimer wore a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt dress of her own design.

Fashion designer Ashleigh Verrier was also wearing her own creation: a silvery-white camisole-skirt combo. “It was a really nice crowd,” she said of the event later. “It was intimate. Enough people, but at the same time a level of it being not too crowded.”

Perhaps lulled by the sense of intimacy, actor Nick Stahl fell asleep in the pantry at some point during the evening, said a source.

Ms. McCord was also drowsy. At the end of the party, Mr. Lutz drove her to the Axe Lounge, where another source said she hung out in the car, taking a nap, while Mr. Lutz went back and forth inside the club and back to the car. “They looked very coupley, I guess,” said the source. “Towards the middle of the night, she left the car and came out with him. She was just chilling in the car.”

For the rest of the night, Ms. McCord drank from water bottles and sat at the table, “unlike Lindsey Lohan! When she was here, she was also drinking from a water bottle,” said a different source at the Axe. “But she was dancing all night.”

Not everyone was in the Hamptons, of course, though it felt that way at times. Designer Marc Jacobs and fiancé Lorenzo Martone were rumored to be relaxing in the Berkshires over the holiday weekend, and socialite Lauren Santo Domingo flew to Brittany, France, for a wedding. “Not very patriotic, I know!” she said.

That’s saying a lot coming from a man who's written for Seal, Willie Nelson and Mick Jagger, among others. Mr. Thomas’s ceremonial duties included presenting Jason Mraz with the Hal David Starlight Award. “I hate Jason Mraz because he is a great songwriter, a great singer,” Mr. Thomas said, extending his hands as if to strangle an imaginary Mr. Mraz standing before him. “Everything about him is too good and I think he’s blowing the curve for a lot of us.” (The modest/envious Mr. Thomas did not disclose the fact that he has already won the very award he was presenting.)

This year’s newly minted Hall of Famers included: Eddie Brigati and Felix Cavaliere of the Young Rascals; David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash (yes, it took them this long);  Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway; and Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. Mr. Bon Jovi’s arrival seemed to quadruple the number of fans clogging 45th Street—most standing on tiptoe for a glance of the red carpet. He showed just before the start of the ceremony after a full day of recording. (Don’t ask: his new album is “not done yet—but almost,” he said.) Mr. Bon Jovi, who has sold 120 million records worldwide was all gratitude: “The Hall of Fame, it doesn’t get any better than that, right? You write a catalog of music, people gravitate toward it and that’s the closest thing to immortality that I’m ever going to see.”

American Idol finalist (and self-proclaimed Bon Jovi fan) Chris Daughtry was on hand to sing “I’ll Be There for You.” Other stars performing at the ceremony included Clint Black, singing Cook and Greenaway’s “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”; James Taylor covering C, S & N's “Love the One You’re With,” “Long Time Gone” and “Teach Your Children”; and Ryan Tedder singing the Young Rascal’s “How Can I Be Sure” and “People Got to Be Free.” Singer Kara DioGuardi presented the Howie Richmond Hitmaker Award to the hitmaker of hitmakers, Sir Tom Jones. James Rado reveled in the revived popularity of the musical Hair, which he penned with Galt MacDermot and (the late) Gerome Ragni (all three were also inductees). Comparing the original experience with what he had seen in the new Broadway production, Mr. Rado noticed that the current actors are, well, better groomed than the original cast. “Nobody shaved in those days," he said. "It was kind of disgusting.” Martin Bandier accepted the Towering Song Award for “Moon River” along with Ginny Mancini (daughter of Henry) and Amanda Mercer (daughter of Johnny).

And the Hall of Fame’s highest honor, the Johnny Mercer Award, went to Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland Jr., who wrote just about every smash hit for the Supremes—13 No. 1 singles in a row—including “Baby Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You).” BeBe Winans performed their song “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” and Berry Gordy presented the award. “It’s named after Johnny Mercer,” Mr. Holland, Jr. said with a smile spreading fast across his face. “In my opinion, he’s the greatest songwriter of all time. He’s the master of masters. Just to receive an award named after him—it’s humbling.”

Gioia, speaking with me after Ray Kelly’s testimony, said if the city can’t pay for it, the cost could be borne by private funding.

“New York has a history of celebrating great human achievement,” said Gioia, “and clearly this is a historic moment and a celebration for the entire country.”

The night Obama won the election, Representative Charlie Rangel put up a big screen outside the federal building on 125th Street and hosted a series of guest speakers. (The Saturday before the election, Rangel hosted elected officials and musical acts at the same location).

Speaking of the Central Park location, Gioia said laughingly, “If it’s good enough for Bon Jovi, it should be good enough for the inauguration.”

According to a press release posted by Brooklyn Vegan, beginning tomorrow, July 2, tickets will be distributed at baseball parks and events throughout New York City. The bulk of tickets distributed at the ballparks will be found at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, with others made available at Shea Stadium in Queens, KeySpan Park in Brooklyn, and at the home of the Staten Island Yankees at 9 a.m. In addition, tickets also will be available in Manhattan at DHL All-Star FanFest at the Jacob K. Javits Center on Friday, July 11. MLB.com also will be conducting a random drawing for tickets.

Bank of America will also promote the concert and offer ticket giveaways through radio promotions in the tri-state area.

About nine minutes into the video, Bon Jovi is recalling other concerts in the park, and he notes that earlier, Bloomberg had mispronounced Art Garfunkel's name (he apparently said Garfinkel).

“Did I say that?” Bloomberg asks. “He’s my neighbor too. He lives next door.”