[Tim Murphy]

Mike Moran was one of Yvor Winters’ students when I was reading Winnie the Pooh.
I have very mixed feelings about Winters. He wrote a few flawless poems, and about how many 20th Century poets can one say that? I think his opinions on Yeats, on Frost, are poppycock, and that despite his towering reputation he was a poor judge of poetry. But teaching at his rich, young college in Palo Alto, Stanford, he had an outsize influence. Our successors may look back some day and fully appreciate it. First, he took JV Cunningham, America's great epigrammatist under his wing. He nurtured the talents of Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity, and Mike Moran. Wallace Trimpi, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi and Thom Gunn were all within his circle, as was my Master of Memory, Robert Mezey, whose feelings about him are as mixed as mine. Janet Lewis, his spouse, was arguably a better poet than he.

But through Stanford and the California scene the influence continued to my generation. I count Tim Steele, Suzanne Doyle, the great Indian writer Vikram Seth, and Dana Gioia as all among the Stanford School. Throw in England’s expatriate, Dick Davis, and there you have the contemporaries who persuaded me to publish. Rest assured, there will be no North Dakota School. If you look up all these biographies, you won’t find an MFA teaching creative writing among them. But you know something, when I read Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats, I am gay, and HIV is just starting to kill my friends in Minneapolis. When I read Bowers I find pentameters that are among the most skillful ever written. As Dana quoted to me one day:

Eternal Venice, sinking by degrees
Into the very water that she lights.

Mike Moran went into advertising, married, raised a family. For many years now he’s been confined to a motorized scooter, nearly paralyzed by a rare nerve disease. In the face of one of the world’s most hedonistic, secular societies, SoCal, he keeps the faith. I’ll conclude these scattershot ruminations with a poem in the acephalic tetrameters of Auden’s elegy for Yeats:

Ordinary Time in the Pews

Ordinary days again.
Advent, Pentecost are past;
who now will accept our sins,
raise the dust in which we’re cast?

Cold the God flesh on the tree,
banned the crèche to attic murk,
sheer the silence after prayer,
Nothing seems at all to work.


Yet we try and try again
serving Him we hardly know;
honk if you love Jesus, friend,
beeping blessings as we go.

Here we meet who, somehow, must
rescue meaning from the dust,
where betrayal’s kiss presents
our best hope of relevance.