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More Takes on Tim

More impressions and appreciations

Janet Kenny: My Tribute to Tim Murphy

New Zealand, the land of my birth, bred tough people who lived off the land and didn’t complain. A masculine culture where, despite their early access to the vote, women had to fight to be heard.

Tim Murphy is the child and poet of an equally unforgiving country,  North Dakota. He wrote in Set the Drawbar Deep:

It’s hard to imagine a horizon as flat as a ruled line unless you’ve sailed far out to sea or driven Interstate 29 along the Red River of the North. Planed by an Ice Age lake, our Valley extends hundreds of miles along the border of Minnesota and the Dakotas, widening from thirty to ninety miles as it drops imperceptibly northward toward Winnipeg.

Tim steeped himself in the classics and Anglo-Saxon poetry but knew that the real link with the past is a living response to the earth.

He returned to his roots to deal, painfully and bravely with a loved but restricting environment.

To be honestly gay in a world made up of family relationships must have taken courage of heroic proportions. I would honour Tim for that alone but it is his uncompromising attitude to poetry that really seals my undying respect.

His small poems are like weathered stones. The words are spare and perfect and leave huge images in the mind of the reader.

A Farmer’s Prayer

Spirit of the wheat
brush every beard
turning green flaxen
with a wave of your wand.
The wind is your oven,
the hills your loaves.
Dry husks rustle,
flag leaves furl,
heads curl earthward
as kernels harden.
Your garden is golden,
your larder laden.
Feed a hungry world.

(Set the Drawbar Deep)

This poem is at once strong and limpid. A lesser poet would have placed “garden”at the end of a line but Tim knew to leave a subtler echo.

Tim is basically a lover. A lover of the world. He is thin-skinned and only too easily hurt. The positive side of this is that he is open to beauty and humour and large feelings. His generosity towards others illuminates his work.

He has suffered many financial and emotional disasters any one of which would have destroyed a lesser poet.

He dedicated this poem to Charlee Wilbur:

Eidyllion

I am selling my farms
to build a butterfly barn
where multicolored swarms
will storm the glassy dome
to greet the midnight sun,
and that will be my home.

(Set the Drawbar Deep)

Tim is struggling to make peace with the Catholic Church. For a gay man this means constant agony and frustration. I wish him success. The church has need of honest and sensitive men who need spiritual acceptance.

I found these two poems in Very Far North:

Il Poverello

Leaving Giotto’s frescoed nave,
I climbed from the foothill town
to see the saint’s unpainted cave
where Satan was cast down.

The cleft on Mount Subasio
was perilous and wooded,
and the young monk from Gubbio
beautiful but hooded.

He smiled like an angel kissed,
kissed by Giotto’s tincture.
Beads were twisted round his wrist;
his waist bound in a cincture.

He whispered “Vade retro”
when the Devil came to parley
and prayed, prayed from l’Eremo
for the songbirds and the barley.

(Very Far North)

Apologia Pro Eccelsia Sua

Holy Father, you slip a folded prayer
between two stone blocks at the Wailing Wall.
What do you pray for? An end to the despair
that holds the land of Palestine in thrall?

Your sermon is an overdue endeavor
to make your peace with women, Muslims, Jews.
But not with homosexuals. No, never.
Ours is the priestly sin you won’t excuse.

Crippled by your incurable disease,
you shuffle slowly through the Holy Land
as throngs of sinners praying on their knees
bow to the scepter in your palsied hand.

You preach that God is three and God is one?
If  He exists, you are his dying son.

(Very Far North)

And this witty cinquain:

Post Mortem

A certain erratic
erotic erratum
was found at the bottom
of Timothy’s attic,
or was it his closet?

(Very Far North)

And lastly, I wish to thank Tim for his patience and openness when communicating with lesser poets.

Tim and I will never agree about politics but we will always agree about the importance of poetry and truth to materials which is the fundamental virtue of all serious art.

Alan Sullivan

I once knew a farmer named Murphy.
His acres were birdy and turfy.
The hair on his head
was shockingly red,
and his clothing poetically scurfy.

Wendy Videlock

I’ve learned a good deal from Timothy Tim, but primarily he’s been meaningful to my understanding of instinctual music.  I lifted the following quote from an older poem of his called The Wanderer,  a poem which appeals to me for a number of reasons, including the obvious: my own name, of course, means “wanderer”.

Of Promiscuity

There is no end
to the wanderer’s sorrow. 
—  Tim Murphy

I have lain with Jesus.
I have touched the Buddha.
I have bathed with Isis
in the great river.
I have slept with the gods.
With the goddess.
With men.
Alas.
 
I have never belonged
to any of them.