Want to publish an ode in The New Yorker? Don’t send it to the longtime poetry editor Alice Quinn anymore. As of November, the Irish-born poet and Princeton professor Paul Muldoon will be taking over one of the most powerful positions in American poetry. Mr. Muldoon, chairman of Princeton’s Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, counts 10 books of verse and a Pulitzer Prize (for his 2002 collection Moy Sand and Gravel) among his laurels.

The selection of Mr. Muldoon does not represent “some sort of radical aesthetic or theoretical shift,” The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, told The New York Times. “It’s not as if we went from a structuralist to a poststructuralist or a Beat to a conservative.”

The poet’s East Coast location as well as his creative record appear to have helped his candidacy. “It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,” Mr. Remnick said. “It’s also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who’s not in Alaska.” —Jennifer Howard