Thread: Memorizing
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Unread 04-23-2001, 07:01 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
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Po, As we say in therapy, "Thanks for sharing." Do you sing it in march or waltz time? I do it both ways, but mine is devoid of gesture. I resolutely grip the podium which prevents my shaking hands from straying into pockets, so my voice has to do all the work. At the risk of horn-tooting, I want to share with everyone on this thread the most delightful thing ever written about me, a "review" of one of my recitations at UC Santa Barbara last fall. The student, John Bolin, is a Central Valley farm kid who studies with the poet John Ridland.

Murphy and the Ghost of the Scop

I was fortunate enough to get a front-row seat for Timothy Murphy's
recitation last Thursday. I had read a few poems in Set the Ploughshare
Deep and The Deed of Gift, yet was unsure what to expect. Having been in
another class when he recited his verse the day before, I knew only what
others had told me, yet what I did know was impressive: that he is a man
who, as he would state at the close of his recitation, sees poetry "from the
same vantage point as the Beowulf Poet." "To see the Beowulf Poet recite
Beowulf, I thought, can it get any better? This man must be a giant!"
Somewhere in my mind a dim figure, his heavy bones hung with mail and
scarred leather, lifted a flagon of mead behind a podium.
His appearance, as he stepped into the room, somewhat dissapointed me. He
was a wiry, pale-skinned man with a handful of thinning red hair. A pair of
thick glasses which seemed too large hung over his face, obscuring his vague
blue eyes. It was these eyes, however, that first caught my attention while
the calm voice of an academic began softly. "I am going to follow
Anonymous, starting in the twentieth century, and tracing the path backwards
in time." He lifted his chin and recited a rhyme in a Brooklyn accent.
Speaking poetry, there was determination in the voice as it rose and a spark
in the eyes that startled me. A girl behind me coughed nervously. I sat up
straight.
In the hour that was to follow, Timothy Murphy wound his way back through
several centuries, lighting on distinctive poems that protruded from the sea
of his thought. From the seventeenth century he pulled Sir Patrick Spens.
Murphy mentioned that as a young folk-singer, the Scottish Border Ballads
were instrumental in drawing him into serious poetry. Afterward, I asked
him why these ballads specifically, and he answered that their stories and
their music intruiged him, much as the music of Beowulf would later
"intoxicate him." Indeed, Murphy's own voice as he recited the famous
seventh stanza
Late late yestre'en I saw the new moon
Wi' the auld moon in her arm,
And I fear, I fear, my dear master,
That we will come to harm.
filled it with new significance. It was a strong voice, strength being one
of the qualities I was increasingly struck with during Murphy's performance.
He was a master at conveying meaning through inflection, pitch, volume,
and sheer will. Fusing his experiences in drama and song, Murphy was the
closest thing I think we will ever see to The Scop (without the aid of lots
of mead). His scottish accent was good.
From the sixteenth century, Murphy recited work by Thomas the Rhymer. This
was the first poetry that drew on words and pronunciations that were
unfamiliar to me in their antiquity. At Murphy's suggestion, I let the
words run past me, some of them sticking in my mind and evoking specific
meaning, others delighting me with the purely abstract quality of their
feel, their weight, their tint. It was Murphy's recitation of Alison,
however, a fourteenth century love poem, which really lost me. In spite of
my ignorance of the words, Alison was, next to Beowulf's funeral dirge, the
poem which I enjoyed the most. Interestingly, Murphy said that Alison is a
poem that evidences the collision between the two halves of English; the
Germanic parent language, and words from the French and Latin. Murphy also
linked the opening stanza of Alison to Chaucer's General Prologue, which he
stated was drawn from this older, and in his words, "better" poem.
The litel fowl hath hire wil
On hire leod to singe
Smoking outside, he confided to me and several other students that "leod" is
often mistranslated as "language." "Leod is clearly 'lute'" he said in a
single smoky exhalation.
Finally, Murphy came to Beowulf, which he recited first in the original,
then from his translation. His voice thundered and rose, striking the
stresses accurately, resolutely, until the words, all of which were lost on
my ear, became a single fabric of ringing sound, linked together by ceasura
and alliteration like the metal hooks in a shirt of mail. Murphy's
recitation of Beowulf, in both languages, was nothing short of astounding.
I can only describe it as the primevil synthesis of a rock concert, sermon,
drama and an old testament prophet's doomsaying. At times, looking directly
into my eyes and leaning precariously over the small podium, his voice
pealing out the hard syllables of the dirge, Murphy was genuinely
frightening. Not only was Murphy's deliverance of the poem excellent, but
his translation was superb in the modern English. Murphy stated that he
made all efforts to follow a few ground rules in his translation: retain the
four-beat line of the original, mark a clear ceasura halving each line,
triple alliterate every line possible (when this was not possible, to link
the alliteration of the line to the line before or after it), straighten out
the germanic syntax, and "abjure" words from French and the latinate
languages.
I give Murphy's performance two thumbs up. After reciting Beowulf, Murphy
invited questions and spoke a little about Robert Penn Warren. Apparently,
"Red" so honed Murphy's memory that he is able to write a Shakespearian
sonnet entirely in his head. He doesn't write on paper or a computer.
Everything is set down on the vast scroll of his memory. Murphy's wit came
out in his closing comments. Quoting Robert Penn Warren, Murphy said,
"Rhyme and meter are powerful mnemonic devices". Reflecting for a moment,
he added, "I will be in the smoking section if any of you have any
questions. Tobacco is a powerful mnemonic device as well." Outside, after
I had congratulated him on his performance, we talked a little about
farming, the land, and the rhythm of our language. As he flicked his last
cigarette into a flowerbed and turned to leave, smiling sagely, I realized
that Murphy had again become a simple man, a man intimate with the land and
words. I was glad of that.
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