« Back to SCR

Interview with Timothy Murphy

Paul Stevens puts the questions

Paul Stevens:   In his essay, A Fine Line, Alan Sullivan writes of you that as a young writer you were “unaware that anyone else wanted to challenge the hegemony of free verse.” How far do you see that as true now? Is there still such a hegemony, and how far is it being challenged?

Tim Murphy:   I was ignorant. I was 44 when I met Richard Wilbur, who introduced me to Tim Steele, who introduced me to The New Formalists. Many of my near contemporaries whom I consider to be excellent poets were turning to form at the same time as I. Steele, Gioia, Gwynn, Hadas, Doyle, etc. They published and so learned of one another two decades before I learned of them.

PS:  Isn’t Formalist poetry old-fashioned, out of date, unsuitable as a vehicle for contemporary subject-matter?

TM:  Certainly not. The great themes, love, death and faith, are unchanged since King David. To my mind the major poets of the last century were masters of form: Hardy, Yeats, Housman, Robinson, Auden, Stevens, Hope, Wilbur, Hecht. That is true of the thirty-one preceding centuries as well.

PS:  You mention the Australian A.D. Hope in this list of major poets. Bearing in mind that many of the readers of The Shit Creek Review will be Australians, I want to ask you if you’re interested in the work of other Australian poets, such as Gwen Harwood. Who else do you find significant?

TM:  I think Hope is a very major figure, and I’d never heard of him until Dave Mason and Dana Gioia set me to reading him. I have enjoyed Gwen Harwood, especially the trimeter poem for her father in which she wantonly slaughters an owl (“Father and Child: Barn Owl”). I have enjoyed individual poems by Murray and Wright. And I pay very close attention to the many talented Australians who frequent the Eratosphere workshop. As a Plainsman I feel a close kinship with your outsized, under-populated country that has stood shoulder to shoulder with my own for so long.

Western Oz, A State Of Mind

A drover in Mundiwindi
grins from his dusty rig:
“Mate, ’ere’s fantastic country,
loik Texas, except it’s big.”

PS:  Writing of your development in the 1970s and 80s, Alan Sullivan says, “Murphy decided he had a lot more work to do before he could measure up to [Richard Wilbur’s] exacting standards. He did not seek publication again for many years.” During this period, how did you improve your poetry?

TM:  I developed a life outside of literature. I had embarked on a lifelong gay relationship, become a farmer and hunter of the High Plains, a sailor and trekker, and I began writing of these things rather than about worlds of which I had only read. We’ll address the formal choices later.

PS:  How conscious or deliberate was this movement towards a life outside of literature? If it was to some extent a strategic move, was it (ironically) to achieve material for literary purposes? Tim, I ask this because I did a similar thing when I left university for several years and worked as a trench-digger, brickies’ labourer, factory worker, fettler, and sandal maker: partly it was a reaction against the massive overdose of academia that had rendered me intellectually comatose, partly I thought it would give me some “real life” to write about. Unfortunately in my case it couldn’t remedy the fact that I had no talent to start with!

TM:  Oh it was just to make some money! Alan and I were eating pork and beans, and on a good night we’d melt some cheddar over our fare. But I was drawn to the people of the High Plains. My ear delighted in their colorful speech. Alfred Nicol memorably described Very Far North as “Open mic time for North Dakota.” I also had a primitive, romantic notion: that the true wealth of the earth came from the mines, the forests, the farms, and the sea. I wanted to be part of that. The irony is that I have lost my ass farming and made a small fortune in computers.

PS:  You’ve remarked that you agree with Robert Penn Warren’s advice to you never to waste time reading critical theory. Do you see any use for criticism at all both in general, and specifically to poets?

TM:  I recant. I’ve no use for critical theory, but I now enjoy reading the criticism of many authors, all of whom are good or better poets. But Warren wanted me to immerse myself in verse, not prose about verse. I still think that’s good advice to a youngster. Now I not only read criticism, I write it. Although the profiles of my friends in Requited might better be called “appreciations.”

PS:  Your working life has been associated for many years with farming. What effect has that had on your poetry?

TM:  I last drove the tractor when I was seventeen. But I have blown three modest fortunes farming, and I have become intimately acquainted with flood, hail, drought, disease. My losing battles with nature animate much of my best work.

PS:  Do you envisage a perfect reader of your poetry? What qualities would that perfect reader have?

TM:  Wilbur, Hecht, Gwynn, Espaillat, Sullivan, all are perfect readers for my poetry. All are superb poets. That said, I value the farmers who read my farm poems, the hunters who read my hunting poems. They can’t read as poets would, but they have a depth of shared experience the poets lack.

PS:  In Requited you wrote, “So began my passionate admiration for the great birds of prey, peerless hunters, fishermen and sailors of the three earthly dimensions.” How do you respond to the suggestion that your poetic perspective is somewhat modeled on birds of prey?

TM:  I’m ungainly and blind as a bat, so any comparison to the birds of prey is unfair to them. I look up at the sky and they, down at the earth. Nonetheless I hunt, fish and sail, and the osprey cannot rhyme.

PS:  How important is a sense of place, of terroir, to you as a poet?

TM:  No more important than Ireland to Yeats, Wessex to Hardy, or New England to Frost. (This is the best answer I ever gave an interviewer.)

PS:  Alan Sullivan calls you an “intensely private man” (A Fine Line). You said of yourself, “I believe that the poet speaks for his tribe” (in the Cortland Review interview with Cynthia Haven). Is there a conflict between the roles of private man and speaker for the tribe? Do poets have a public role? Do you, as a poet, see yourself as having a public role?

TM:  I become a less private man with each confessional poem I publish. I don’t think any contemporary poet speaks for the tribe as Homer did. I address each audience to which I belong: hunters, farmers, poets, Christians, gays - audiences which are sometimes inimical to one another. Whether I read for the Library of Congress or Oxford, I have no public role. Wilbur’s readership is miniscule, and mine, infinitesimal.

PS:  You’ve said, “I am a self-destructive poet –– but I dust myself off and carry on.” (Cortland Review). In what ways are you self-destructive as a poet? How does this affect your poetry?

TM:  It is my alcoholism, my dysthymic depression, which are self-destructive. My focused poetic ambition has centered and sustained me. Like the farmer’s adversity, my self-destructive bent lends tension to my work.

PS:  Referring to your desire to write a poem “as cold and passionate as the dawn,” you’ve said that you haven’t achieved that yet (Cortland Review). Is that still the case? Has any poem of yours come close?

TM:  The quote is Yeats, and it is romantic posturing, a vice to which I still sometimes sink. When Cynthia Havens interviewed me, I was about to organize Very Far North, and I had written a handful of poems as perfect as any I am likely to write. I had so little facility as a youth, and it took years even to manage pentameter. But I couldn’t get away from it, I stuck with it for decades, and my improbable ambition has been sometimes satisfied. Here is the first poem in Very Far North.

The Last Sodbusters
Wibaux, Montana, 1907

“Rain follows the plough!”
the pamphleteers proclaim.

Does grass follow the cow
or wind, the weathervane?

Care furrows the brow
and bows the straightest frame.

Thistles follow the plough,
and hail threshes the grain.

PS:  You often write of hunting, of shooting animals. Many readers might feel uncomfortable with that theme. What would you say to that?

TM:  Sam Gwynn is the only one of the aforementioned perfect readers who hunts. The others find it baffling or even offensive, though they eat the birds with relish! But they all love my hunting poems. Just as I love Catherine Tufariello’s poems about her infertility and her difficult quest to become a mother. Or Wilbur’s and Espaillat’s poems for their grandchildren. You can’t imagine how desolate those loving poems can make an aging gay man feel. But for heaven’s sake, it is poetry’s task to take us outside our narrow fields of reference.

PS:  What effect have your linguistic studies in Old English and Ancient Greek had on your poetry?

TM:  Homer taught me to hear a magnificent music I could never compose, as did Baudelaire. You don’t need to know a language well to memorize its verse and understand its music. Anglo Saxon is another matter. I employ the forty percent Anglo-Saxon minority of our vocabulary more than any modern poet I know, including the young Auden. In the above poem only “pamphleteers proclaim” are words from the Romance side. Every other word is Anglo-Saxon. I once examined a significant chunk of the Beowulf Alan and I did for the Longman Anthologies of English and World literature, and over ninety percent of our vocabulary is Anglo-Saxon. Of course, that was a consciously chosen principle of translation, a ground rule we set at the inception of that project. The High Plains is populated by heirs of the Germanic family: English, German, and the Scandinavian tongues. So it is the speech to which my heart beats. Knowing this of his eighteen-year old pupil, Mr. Warren had me learn Old English. As a counterweight he had me learn Homeric Greek. I never learned the grammar, but I can still bellow out the Iliad. And that music rings in my ears when I read A.D. Hope’s magnificent "Western Elegies". Had he given us an Iliad, Odyssey, or Aeneid, THAT would be something to have! Mark Allinson understands the dactylic hexameter as Hope did. He has started the Odyssey, and I say to him what Dick Davis said to me when I was 100 lines into the Beowulf: “But you must finish the job.”

PS:  Why do you use short lines so frequently? What particular challenges and advantages do they present?

TM:  One of the first poets Warren had me study was Skelton. I love short poems in short lines. I liked “West Running Brook”, but I adore “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” and “A Dust Of Snow”. Turning to short line gave me my voice, of which X.J. Kennedy wrote “He is one of the few contemporaries whose work I don’t want to run through a trash compacter.” It is harder to rhyme on each fourth or sixth syllable, than on every tenth. It is harder to substitute metrically, to enjamb, to lay the sentence across the lines and within the stanza. That said, I confined myself to pentameter for the years 1976 to 1980, just to learn how to lay the sentence across those capacious lines and stanzas.

PS:  Which other poets have you particularly admired?

TM:  This is entirely too large a question. In recent years though, I have been amazed to read Borges in the samizdat Mezey Barnes metrical translation and St. John of the Cross in Espaillat’s miraculous translation. I have delighted in reading Greg Williamson and Alicia Stallings and Mike Stocks and many other poets who are much younger than I. In reading my contemporaries, some of whom I listed above. In studying for the first time King David.

PS:  What advice would you give a novice poet?

TM:  A novice poet asked that question of Anthony Hecht when he was my guest at the Eratosphere, an internet workshop to which many of Shit Creek Review’s readers belong. Here is Tony’s advice. “Memorize. There is no contemporary poet I admire who has not a great deal, and I mean a VERY great deal, of verse by heart.” Same advice Warren gave me. I carried it to excess, committing so much Yeats alone, that his influence overwhelmed me and much delayed my coming into my own. But with those tens of thousands of lines ringing in my head, I am highly unlikely to make mistakes.

PS:  Do you see the internet as an important influence on poetry in general, and on the way you write poetry in particular?

TM:  Sitting on a panel at an early West Chester Conference on Form, I was asked about the net and the web. Didn’t know anything to say, except quote Wyatt’s “Sins in a net I seek to catch the winde.” And Sir Walter Scott’s “Oh what a tangled web we weave.” That was a decade ago. I shall always compose in my head. My memory is sufficiently trained for me to write a first and even a third draft of a sonnet before typing it. But the net is a fantastic boon for poets. Had I had the Eratosphere workshops available to me in my twenties, it would have propelled my development by many years. I think the internet will also supplant print periodicals as the main venue for disseminating our art, and I have only come to that view and started sending my work to “zines” very recently.

PS:  Tell us more about the process of composition for you. How do ideas come? Do you think, “I’ll write a sonnet” or does the idea suggest the form? Do you write with pen on paper or straight onto computer? Do you find yourself tending to favour a particular form? How many drafts do you take a poem through? What sort of a discard rate do you have?

TM:  No, I have never set out to write a sonnet. However, twenty-five of my poems decided to be sonnets. I begin with an image, or more likely the fragment of a tune. Then the developing argument finds its form. I heard “you can’t fertilize a field/ by farting through the fence” in a bar in rural North Dakota twenty years before I succeeded in ending a poem with that couplet. Some poems come gratifyingly swiftly and a few can take a decade. Most poems involve many drafts, and there is always hell to pay when Alan does the final editing on a book. We call it “dictionary throwing.”

PS:  How has your return to Christianity affected you, and what direction do you envisage your poetry taking next?

TM: My return to the Church prevented me from the sin of self murder. It has had a profound effect on my dark art. In twice daily prayer I ask, “Lord, make me more like Richard Wilbur, able to celebrate not just the beauty of creation but the majesty of its Creator.” You have published “To the Dean”, in which I say “You make it look so easy, Dr. Donne.” For me it has not been easy, and I daresay it was not easy, even for so incandescent a genius as Donne, who wrote love poems that employed spiritual language and godly poems like “Batter my Heart” that used carnal language. In all three poems that you have published here, Paul, I am consecrating my modest gifts to the service of God. Like the historian, John Boswell, I am too gay for the Catholics, too Catholic for the gays. Thy will be done.

PS:  Thank you, Tim Murphy.