[Tim Murphy]

Q: Mike, One of the things I’d like to focus on in your tenure as guest lariat is publication, which is probably a distasteful and daunting affair for many of our members. You’ve often expressed to me in recent years your despair at being short-listed and losing so many first book contests. Please describe your progress from nowheresville to the recent string of triumphs.

A: I'm not big on poets' biographies because we babble too much about ourselves, and the biggest babblers have the dullest lives. For me, my poetry is not a validation of my own life, but an attempt to communicate to others. There's far more fiction that fact in my first-person voice, and I
prefer not to distinguish which is which. Last year I pulled a sonnet called "Cancer Prayer" from an anthology because the editors insisted that I supplement the poem with a short essay on the "true" situation. My first poem won a competition in the third grade, and should still be
in a time capsule. I live in fear that it will be unearthed someday because I think I rhymed "in the dark" with "in the park." Although initially I learned and loved traditional verse, in junior high I fell hard for the "happening" free verse--Plath, Creeley and dollops of Whitman and Eliot.
There's a quotation from Whitman beneath my high school yearbook picture. I wrote much free verse imitative of Plath and Creeley. I took poetry writing seminars in college with Robert Shaw and F.D.Reeve. Reeve sat me
down at the end of the semester, explained that I had no talent, and suggested that I find "some other hobby." I agreed, and did not write another poem for more than a decade. While working in the DC area in 1991, I read a review in The Washington Post of Philip Larkin's Collected. Years later I discovered it had been written by my friend and advocate Dana Gioia, but at the time I was clueless
as to who he was. I went out and bought the book, and adored some of the the mature Larkin poems,particularly "Aubade." I started wondering whether I
could write the kind of poem I now enjoyed reading, so I decided to try.

I read and wrote in isolation for several years, and began timidly sending work to journals in 1994. The Lyric and the now-defunct Hellas were kind to me in those days, and The Formalist took some of my first translations. I had started translating as an exercise, but soon realized that most formal translations were pretty wretched, and concluded that the bar was low enough for an earnest novice to hurdle.
Embarassing as this admission is, in early 1995 I wrote what I can only characterize as a fan letter to Dana Gioia after I read Can Poetry Matter? I received a polite reply, along with an invitation to the first West Chester conference in 1995. The norning I drove to Pennsylvania I stopped at the Post Office and was stunned to learn that Mona Van Duyn had selected "Moscow Zoo" as a finalist for the second Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. I had honestly thought it was a renewal notice, and this heady surprise helped he deal with a bad case of "impostor's complex" once I got to West Chester.

West Chester was a blast, and I met future mentors such as Dana, Tim Steele and Sam Gwynn. I met Alan Sullivan and Tim Murphy over breakfast, and we began exchanging poems after I congratulated Tim on winning the third Nemerov in 1996. So many of my other West Chester friends--Catherine Tufariello, Len Krisak, Jim Henley, Kate Light, Wil Mills, Lisa Barnett and others have been a huge help to me over the past seven years.
Since 1995, I have worked harder on my poetry, and slowly made progress. The Formalist, Edge City Review and Light began taking my work on a regular basis, and in 1998 I began a long string of near misses in book competitions. That same year, I was drawn into Rhina Espaillat's remarkable Powow River Poets group in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Talented friends such as Deborah Warren, David Berman, Midge Goldberg, Bill Coyle, Alfred Nicol, Robert Crawford and Len Krisak have been tremendous sources of support. Also, in that year F.D. Reeve awarded me the New England Poetry Club's Firman Houghton Award for lyric poetry in a blinded competition (chortle...).

In 2000, I won the Nemerov a second time, thereby becoming a two-hit wonder (one short of The Righteous Brothers). The following year I published a small book of Petrarch translations called Longing For Laura (Birch Brook Press). Recently I have been sneaking into journals that I thought would never take my work, and I have new work coming out in The Paris Review, South Carolina Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. Last month I received the great news that Rachel Hadas had selected my manuscript, The Secret Language Of Women, as the winner of the 2002 Richard Wilbur Award from the University of Evansville. Plan to run breathlessly to your local bookstore in mid-2003.
Right now I'm tightening up the Secret Language Of Women, and trying to pull my light verse and translations into a separate volume (having followed Alicia Stallings' advice to cut the light verse out in order to actually win instead of being a chronic runner-up). I've also created my version of Wendy Cope's Strugnell character, and have been having great fun with it even though no one else will think that it is funny. I'll be the featured poet shortly in Light and an on-line site called The Hypertexts.
Ok, enough babbling.

Q: You've generously served the Sphere longer than any of my old friends. You've recruited Alan and Len and Rhina, and Deborah and me and lord knows whom else. How do you assess the health and accomplishment of this enterprise?


A: Eratosphere has been a stunning success, and it is a great credit to Alex's vision that he set up this thoughtful architecture before the rest of us figured out how much we needed it. When I first blundered in here in
early 2000 (I was just learning how to surf the Net), it was only Alex, Carol Taylor and six or so other people. When Alex expanded into the chat rooms (which, sadly, we still do not use often), I wandered in and goofed around like a combination Woody Allen/Christopher Columbus (not as strange as it seems when you think Columbus thought he was in India). Alex's "punishment" was to make me the first moderator.

As fair as this punishment was, I wasn't sure how to handle it, so with my new surfing skills I checked out other online workshops, and rapidly concluded I wanted to break the mold a bit. I did not want to praise every poem; the truth is that there are very few superior poems around. I did not want to do "oh Gawd, haven't I been there!". Accordingly, I tried to critique the poem, not the person. I tried to use the critique as a way of educating not just the poet, but bystanders as well, about meter, rhythm
and other elements of great poetry. I tried to stress that the first word or phrase to come to mind is not first because it is perfect, but first because it is easy, and easy language is rarely powerful. I tried to point to
traditional and contemporary classics (particularly the contemporary because I don't like to encourage archaic language) to get people reading: you if they used trimeter, Andrew Hudgins if they needed to try blank verse,
Wendy Cope, Sam Gwynn or Joe Kennedy if they wanted to be funny. Although, predictably, particularly in the beginning, I ticked a lot of people off, somehow this approach started to take off and we started to attract people BECAUSE they wanted candor and discipline in critiques.

I think that is my big contribution to Eratosphere because I think all the superb poets I lured here probably would have found us sooner or later anyway. Unless unstable funding disrupts Erato, I think the metrical part of the
empire is vibrant and will continue to be the single most influential forum for formalists in the world (well, we can debate West Chester). I think the ventures into Art and Fiction have been less successful, and I wonder whether we should have just stayed focused on what makes us unique. I think the free verse space shows intermittent signs of life, but because it is not unique or preeminent, you don't generally see the same vitality and successful products that you see on the metrical side.

[Solan]

Thank you for sharing this piece of 'Sphere history with us who came here later. I remember when I was told about this place; it was almost like a precious secret my informant was unwilling to share with too many people. I was told only because I seemed sincere about wanting to learn the craft. I wonder how many people treat it the same, as a kind of secret temple.

----

Svein Olav

.. another life

[This message has been edited by Solan (edited March 27, 2002).]

[Tim Murphy]

Michael, Although I've not entered any book contests, our experiences are remarkably similar. Here's something I said to Jennifer Reeser and Kate Benedict on Gen'l Talk about a year ago: From 1978 to 1994 I quit publishing my poems. I wasn’t happy with them, and in my isolation in North Dakota I didn’t think there could be any market for them anyway. Then I met Mssrs. Wilbur, Mason, and Gioia in quick succession. Wilbur and Mason were extremely encouraging, but Dana gave me specific advice. He told me that the only outlet for my book was the contests we’ve discussed on another thread. That I needed to publish 60 of the poems in publications with some credibility. And that I needed to network, to schmooze with poets.

Well, folks, I’ve spent all my life in sales, first in life insurance, then as a venture capitalist. I told Dana I had rather busk on a street corner with penny whistle and tin cup than “sell” my poetry. After some 60 appearances in the last four years I still feel like a male stripper when I read publically, but Dana was dead right. My first submissions to Hudson Review, Hellas, Dark Horse, Formalist, produced acceptances, thus the “editorial concensus” Dana said was necessary for book publication. Invitations for chapbooks from R.L. Barth and Mike Peich quickly followed. And a year later, McDowell took The Deed of Gift for Story Line. I attended the West Chester conference, met everybody, and liked most everybody I met. The single best piece of advice I can give any of our aspiring ‘formalistas’ is “Go to West Chester.” Enroll in the workshops, present critical papers. It will be the shot in the arm of the year for you as well as me.

[Deborah Warren]

Tim, you say you weren't happy with your poems -- and for 14 years you more or less wrote them off.

A question for both you and Mike: Do you feel that you have a reasonable -- and/or increasing -- perspective about how good your poems are?

[Tim Murphy]

Dear Deborah, What poet ever justly estimated his or her own work? In the eighties I vastly underestimated mine, and now the reverse is probably true. Virgil left instructions for the Aeneid to be destroyed at his death, instructions contravened by Augustus Caesar, to whom we owe more than Virgil. Likewise did George Herbert, who feared his poems were unworthy of his predecessors. Not that Mike and Tim are to be compared to those two, but I suspect I'm a better judge of Alicia and Deborah than is either very gifted poet.

[Michael Juster]

Deborah: I think the answer is partly "Yes". I think you have to let yourself write some bad poems to free up the energy and focus to write the next, and hopefully better, ones. Just because you've written a bad poem, however, doesn't mean you have to publish it, and I have gotten much better at making myself hold poems for 6 months before sending them out. I am a still a horrible judge of my own stuff in the immediate afterglow of creation, but generally I'm doing a better job of screening out the embarassing ones. I still feel very shaky, though, about determining which ones have real worth. In the Evansville manuscript there were only 6 or so poems where I didn't feel obliged to wrestle with the question of whether they were good enough for the book, and I am still trying to fix the manuscript on the margins.

[David Mason]

Heartiest congrats to Mike Juster on the news of his book award. That's really great, and I'll look forward to the book.
Dave Mason

[A. E. Stallings]

If I may clarify a point--my advice, such as it was, to remove light verse had nothing to do with my esteem for light verse in general or Mike's in particular--am a big fan of both! It was advice I had myself received and implemented, reluctantly, but which probably made the difference between terminal "finalism" and a book. This I would blame on the book contest culture--An Award Winner ought to be serious, it seems. (Yet Wendy Cope in the UK enjoys both popular AND critical acclaim.)

For Mike--do you have any thoughts on the whole book contest circuit/process? Has your outlook changed at all now that you have a book in the works?

[Tim Murphy]

Alicia, Mike--I was given the same advice by Wilbur on the manuscript of Very Far North, and my response was if we take out the funny poems in Cope and Gwynn, we haven't much left. When Alan and I made the final triage, we did throw out some light verses but left some others in. My own feeling is that my stuff is so black it NEEDS a little light verse to leaven the loaf. Of course I can't peer into Rachel Hadas' mind and know whether the inclusion of light verse would have made any difference in her decision. Both of you write brilliantly in a light vein, and Lord knows, we probably need a publisher devoted to Light. One to whom the three of us could each send a book length manuscript. Meantime, thank Heavens for John Mella and his indispensable Light Quarterly. Mike, I'm just delighted that you'll be what? the fifth Spherian to be Featured Poet.

[Michael Juster]

David: Thanks so much! Alicia: I should have made it clear--as you did at WC--that your advice was practical/calculating (and sound), not esthetic. In response to your question, I was a loser for so long with the book contests I'm not sure anyone should listen to me, but the one point that comes to mind is that I decided--arrogantly--to skip the chapbook competitions, and I think that was a mistake. I think they're less competitive, they're better for most younger poets because few can sustain quality over a full length manuscript, and I think the benefit of having a chapbook to raise one's profile is greater than I believed. Tim: I didn't capitulate completely--"Visions Of The Serengeti" (which I first workshopped here) and "Letter To Auden" are in the manuscript.