Interviewed by Tana Jean Welch
Erin Murphy is the author of three collections of poetry: Dislocation and Other Theories (Word Press, 2008); Too Much of This World (Mammoth Books, forthcoming), winner of the Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize; and Science of Desire (Word Press, 2004), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize for the best poetry book of 2004. Her awards include a $5,000 2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the 2006 Foley Poetry Award, the 2004 National Writers' Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, and fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have appeared in dozens of journals and in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005). She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.
Read Erin Murphy's essay, "Coveting Thy Neighbor's Poem," here.
Erin Murphy's latest book of poems, Dislocation and Other Theories, was recently released by Word Press. In the following interview, which took place in January 2008, Erin talks about her book and the process of crafting language.
Q: Many poems in Dislocation and Other Theories demonstrate the duplicity of words and the way this duplicity informs our thoughts and actions. Other poems play with the way we hear different words rising up out of other words, like in "Check-Up" when the speaker's neighbor shows her scar: "Remission, she'd said, / and I didn't hear wish. I heard listen." While the poems themselves are somber in mood, I get the feeling the poet is in constant awe of words and their ability to shape and shift the world we live in. When did you first realize the immense power of language? Is this what attracted you to poetry?
A: I owe it all to Evil Knievel, RIP. When I was nine, I saw Viva Knievel! at the drive-in. I spent the whole movie waiting for Viva to appear, assuming that the movie was about Evil's wife or love interest. It wasn't until later that I learned that "Viva" was not a person but an imperative—and much later still that I learned what an imperative was. I would—and still do—dwell on such misprisions. Last year at AWP, I listened to a poet read a poem about a "mayor," only to realize several stanzas in that she was talking about a female horse. I am at once fascinated and frustrated by language, by its potential and its limitations. I can get completely lost in language games (my most recent preoccupation being FreeRice.com, a website on which you earn rice for impoverished nations by choosing the correct definitions of words). I guess in writing I try simultaneously to celebrate language and nail it down.
Q: What is the very first book of poetry you fell in love with? Is there a book you couldn't get enough of? A book you read so much the pages started to fall apart?
A: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind. I read it my junior year of high school. It was the first book that showed me that not all poems were written by dead white guys. Some were written by live white guys. It wasn't until much later that I learned that non-men and non-whites write poetry, too.
Q: When did you first start writing poems?
A: My mother cleaned out her attic recently and found a book of poems I'd written in elementary school. The cover was faux denim with a big jeans pocket on the front—very 70s. As is the case with so much juvenilia, the poems are mainly about racecar drivers and the Indianapolis 500. Thereafter, I took a break from the genre—I mean, how many poems about A.J. Foyt and Al Unser does the world really need?—and thought of myself mainly as a fiction writer until late high school. That was probably because I was exposed regularly to contemporary fiction writers whose work spoke to me, but I hadn't really read any contemporary poetry.
Q: There is a poem in Dislocation in which you inform a haphazard dentist of the care you take with your own vocation: "I spend days chipping away at stubborn / consonants, suctioning extra syllables / with my own tool." This precision is evident in your work. In Dislocation, you have a few prose poems, but for the most part the poems seem to be written in strict, precise stanzas—couplets, quatrains, sonnets, even a ghazal and haiku. Is form an organic process for you, or have many of the poems gone through various formats before arriving at the perfect medium?
A: The forms of these poems came very organically. I was interested in the compressed lines and stanzas playing off of the internal slant rhymes (rather than the more expected end rhymes)—another sort of dislocation. Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, in their book A Poet's Companion, talk about beginning poets believing that "if what they write looks like a poem, it will mysteriously become one." It's a nice feeling when you get to the point in your writing when your lines, stanzas, and forms seem to choose themselves, which is what happened for me in this book.
Q: The poet of the poem quoted in the previous question has taken a clear stance on what her role in this world is—she is a crafter and technician of words. Many poems in the book allude to the act of writing poetry or teaching the writing of poetry. I've participated in several poetry workshops in which a complaint against referring to "poetry" in poems is made. Fearful that poetry is only read by those who write it, some worry that poems about poetry serve to further alienate the reader who is not a member of the "poetry community." Clearly you are not opposed to poems about poetry. What response would you have to those who are?
A: There's nothing like being told you can't do something to make you want to do it all day long, is there? When Billy Collins says poets should never write about cicadas, doesn't that just make you want to write a seventeen-part poem about them (one section for each year of the molting process)? Regarding poems about poems, I like to think that the poems are about more than the writing process and also that the writing process is really the living process, the way we orient ourselves toward the world. I like the way poet Fleda Brown put it. Writing to me after reading Dislocation and Other Theories, she said, "I think poems [that refer back to themselves] work not at all just for poets—they are about the nature of looking inward, of thinking how to order our lives, and what our lives mean."
Q: When guiding beginning writers, some instructors of poetry stress form, some stress experimentation, some say image is everything. Is there a particular maxim that you find yourself repeating again and again to your students of poetry, something they will remember years later, something along the lines of "Erin Murphy always told me to . . . "?
A: "Show—don't tell." I almost hesitate to say this because it has become a cliché in itself in workshops. But it's the most efficient mantra I've found for getting students to focus on the concrete image rather than on the abstract idea.
Q: One command given by my first poetry professor, Fresno poet Glover Davis, was to write three hours a day every day. Six years later I'm still not able to do this. Do you have a strict "writing schedule" that you try to adhere to, or do you find yourself writing at random intervals whenever the mood strikes?
A: I once met a guy—a fiction writer, natch—who said to me, "Oh, you're a poet? What do you do with the other 23½ hours of the day?" There's some truth to the fact that we poets are not slaves to our keyboards the same way fiction writers are. But on good days, we're working even when we don't look like we are, crafting images in the car, on the treadmill, while we're on hold with the gas company. That said, William Stafford wrote a poem a day. I'm more of a poem-a-week kind of gal. Coda: Years after I met the aforementioned fiction writer, I saw an ad for a tow truck service that operated from midnight to 11:30 p.m.—23½ hours a day. I decided the driver must be a poet.
Q: Dislocation and Other Theories is divided into four sections. The first three sections are roughly the same size, while the fourth section consists of the single sixteen-line poem "Dislocation Theory." How early in the process was the decision made to separate this poem from the rest? What caused you to focus your attention on the concept of dislocation? Was it an obvious decision from the start, or did you have other book titles and organizing principles in mind?
A: This book was untitled until it was about half done. When I wrote the poem "Dislocation Theory," I knew immediately that it would somehow tie into the title. I had limited knowledge of dislocation theory, a theory in materials science that involves irregularities in crystal structures. I did some research and learned that the theory was developed in 1905 by Vito Volterra, a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Rome who lost his post and his status in the scientific community when he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Mussolini. I was intrigued by the fact that the story behind the theory involved dislocation, too, one that was more human and more personal that the scientific application. Likewise, the dislocations in the book are more metaphorical than literal. I'm sure I considered starting the book with "Dislocation Theory" as a way of grounding the poems to follow, but the poem very quickly found its place at the end of the book, another dislocation in itself.
Q: The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence . . . Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A: I so admire the way Natasha Trethewey interweaves the personal and historical in Native Guard.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: I was morbid and self-conscious and semi-successful at pretending I was neither.
Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: I'll answer this question with a poem from my book Too Much of This World:
What I Hate About . . .
Rejection slips:
the rejection part.
Relationships:
the rejection part.
Q: What book did you suffer for the most, and why?
A: My first book, Science of Desire, as it was written in the interstices of major life changes: finishing graduate school, getting married, finding a job I didn't hate, having babies, and living abroad.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: I surprised myself with a recent 28-line narrative poem in which every word rhymes with the first word of the poem: flush.
Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: Must . . . stop . . . using . . . the . . . word . . . sluice.
Q: Lastly . . . (one random fact to top it off) What did you have for lunch today?
A: Homemade hummus and pita bread at the Knickerbocker Tavern in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
