Recent Activity
 

Recent Activity

The Psalms: Alabama Literary Review will publish Julie Stoner’s excellent essay containing Psalms 2-6. Maryann Corbett has written an incandescent essay on 22, including her rueful yet grateful recollections of arriving at The Deep End and encountering the Editor from Hell. Cathy Chandler's scholarly look at 11 is coming out in Dappled Things. The Flea is publishing Psalms 30 and 32. New Walk just published 103. Commonweal just published 68. My publisher, Lewis and Clark’s Dakota Institute Press, has committed to the book. The file, along with Msgr. Laliberte’s nihil obstat essay, has been forwarded to the United States Catholic Council of Bishop’s Committee on Sacred Scripture for imprimatur.

My stuff: Dappled Things, a new journal aimed at young Catholics, took three of my poems, Triduum, Cathedral on the Prairie, and Refusing the Call. Commonweal took Septuagint, dedicated to OUR Seree Zohar. Gray’s took Lessons in Humility, a five part hunting sequence. 14X14 took Thaw. New Walk took Climbing Days and Cast a Cold Eye. The Flea took To Julien, Tessie Buckley Murphy, and Partial Indulgence. John Mella took a couplet for Light. First Things just published Father Tom and Mato Paha. I just read proof for the five sonnets of Alan’s Ashes for Hudson Review. Chronicles recently published two poems and took 12 epigrams.

Performances: I am the new pro bono rock star English teacher at Bishop Shanley High in Fargo, where I taught six days this semester: Scots on Burns Day, Yeats et alia on St. Patrick’s Day, Basics of Iambic Pentameter for all the Shakespeare students, Alan’s Psalms (two days) for all the freshman religion students, and classical meters for the fourth year Latin students. The kids are great, and I am having a blast! I also made two lengthy presentations to Fargo’s GK Chesterton Society, Alan’s Psalms, and Devotional Poetry from Beowulf to Wilbur.

Book update: The double volume, Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder is slightly delayed (does this sound familiar?), but should be out in June. Hunter’s Log is on schedule for September. The Dakota Institute and I have agreed on another double volume for 2013.

Sorry if any of this is redundant with earlier postings. Hard to keep track of all this.

Hard for us to keep track of it, too (she said, smiling.)

I'm pleased to know that a publisher has committed to the psalms; I wasn't sure that had happened yet. Good news.

Wow Tim, that's a lot of stuff! You've got more poems coming out than I have lines on the paper for the past six months. But maybe that's an easy bar to clear. Still, an impressive list. Congrats.

David R.

My favourite part of this impressive list is the teaching! Great for you, and lucky kids! I'm so glad you're doing that, Tim!

Cally

Lucky Tim, Cally. Though when I do get up and recite without text for forty minutes, the kids quit whining about having to memorize one sonnet. Truth is, with Alan gone, I've got a big hole in my heart to fill. I've never taught before, except here or as a visiting lecturer, and it's just great to have 394 kids at my command. Thanks, Maryann and David. I've written and placed about 150 poems in the last 18 months, and I well remember the years when ten poems was a bumper harvest.

Wow! I'd admire your energy just for submitting 150 poems in that time span, let alone writing them and getting them accepted in all those fancy places. Well done and bravo, Tim.

Yes that output is as impressive as the acceptances - and the teaching!
Congratulations, Tim!

...and I well remember the years when ten poems was a bumper harvest.

Heh! I'm still in those years. You give me hope. Congratulations!

To give you an idea of what the kids are like, after I taught Yeats, explaining that I'd memorized 10,000 lines of him as a kid and explaining his paralyzing effect on so many of his successors, this was the exchange with my 15 year olds.

Boy 1: Mr. Murphy, how did you overcome the influence of Yeats in your twenties.

Teacher: I wrote some very funny parodies of him when I was about 25 and got over him.

Boy 2: Mr. Murphy, I've googled you and I want to know what kind of shotgun do you shoot.

Teacher: A Winchester Model 23 that has both .20 and .28 guage barrels.

Boy 2: Wow! Would you bring it to class and show us?

Teacher: Sorry, I'd go to jail.

Girl 1: Mr. Murphy, why don't you adore Yeats now as much as you did when you were our age?

Pretty grown up interchange for a bunch of high school freshman.

Great news, Tim! Dappled Things has, of course, also published my essay on Alan's Psalm 11. I'm expecting my copy of the issue any day now!

Ouch, Cathy. Of course your essay on Psalm 11. That was on a different yellow pad. Like I said, hard to keep track of all this stuff. Les Murray might have accepted 55 and 57 for Quadrant too. Can't find the post card from New South Wales, but your yellow pad says Accept. I suppose I really should start keeping track of all this stuff on a computer. Just had a case, only my second ever, of dual submission and dual acceptance. Well, things could be worse.

Not to worry, Tim. You're amazing!

Hey! At least I get my blurbs out on time. Ask Wendy. Seriously, the four inaugural books from Able Muse Press are terrific. Kudos to Alex for having the cojones to rush in where angels fear to tread.

"Sorry if any of this is redundant with earlier postings. Hard to keep track of all this."

Tim, that's a great problem to have - congratulations!

Frank

Thanks, everyone. Friday was art day. Charlie Beck, young at 88, brought me the three woodcuts we're using for the outside and inside covers of Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder. They are stunning, recent work. This brings the number of Becks used in my work to eleven, and all will be exhibited at the three book launches in ND and Minn. Here's a site with a lot of material on Charlie: http://www.mnartists.org/tourItemDet...pageInd ex=20 Here is the Cathedral Forest, the outer cover: http://www.mnartists.org/tourItemDet...te mId=171864 And inside the book, here's the cover of Mortal Stakes: http://www.mnartists.org/tourItemDet...te mId=171866



That morning I received the ten drawings commissioned for Hunter's Log from the great Eldridge Hardie. Here is Pheasant Hunters, the cover painting for the book:http://www.eldridgehardie.com/eldrid...allery=hunting Nope, the link just takes you to a huge page of upland thumbnails. Well, it's in there!

When I was seventeen, and determined to become a poet, I could never have dreamed that I would someday collaborate with artists of this stature. Though these are not my first rodeos, lucky Tim still gets excited when I start reading proof and seeing the art integrated into the books.

Here's a great story El sent me Friday night: "I have to tell you a story. In my junior year in high school we studied American poetry for a semester. We were to make a booklet of some of these illustrated with pictures clipped from magazines. Instead, I made drawings. When our teacher handed back the assignment, she singled mine out, saying how moved she was by it. She wanted to keep it, and I consented. It was the most affirming thing that had ever happened to me in school and , I'm sure, had a lot to do with shaping my future. I guess I've come full circle.

Thanks for the opportunity, El"

Just noticed this here...
Of course we've all been touch by private email but I'd like to publicly thank everyone involved for the massively appreciated efforts on behalf of the Psalms translation - essayists, print and online publishers, and clergy, and of course the indefatigable Tim who's been a dynamo these past months. Oh how thankful and grateful I am for internet, and skype, so taken for granted now. How'd we all ever have met and shared our skills and knowledge without them! And folks, there's nothing quite like chatting with Tim when he's just back from teaching! Sounds like a gold panner who's struck it lucky! Thanks Timmo, and for the pome too.

Seree, the gold panner struck it lucky. After a week-long dearth of acceptances, I put seven short poems together in a sequence called The School Teacher. Now obviously I am no expert in this subject. Not like hunting, farming, climbing, and sailing. But they're all pretty light hearted, and Alex Pepple just adjusted the order of the sequence for their appearance in Able Muse. Woohoo!

What wonderful success you're having, Tim, and very well deserved!

I hope the Alabama Lit Review is shortly going to publish 2 poems of mine that they've had for ages, including my bakeoff sonnet and one I wrote for you during your illness a while back.

Thanks, Gail. Bill Thompson assures me it should be out pretty shortly. He's got three or four of mine in there too, as well as Julie's essays on the early psalms. And thanks again for the poem for me, a great lift to my spirits when I was pretty blue.

just stopping by momentarily and needed to add my congrats to the list. That it wonderful, Tim. Glad you enjoyed the teaching as well. Well, off again, no time for much for me right now, but I will be back eventually

Thanks Cyn. I enjoyed your Hanging Glacier. It keenly reminded me of a campsite Alan and I were dropped at in Glacier Bay. How it rained! Our terminal moraine was 200 yards from the fjord, though, and our glacier was much bigger, with a nunatuk dividing it about 1000 feet above us.

Paul Lake reminded me last night that at Easter First Things accepted The Gift, a prolife poem that they will bring out very shortly.

Hard to keep up with your pubs Tim, and I see it is also hard for you! What a well-earned position to be in.

I am happy Hanging Glacier could conjure some good memories for you. Take care