[Tim Murphy]

TM: Does any living poet employ vernacular speech as
cunningly as you do?

RSG: Naw.

TM: Has anyone done so since Shakespeare or Chaucer?

RSG: Burns and Swinburne.

TM: How would you describe your personal relationship
with all four of those poets?

RSG: Very close. I channel them nightly on A&E.

TM: Given your blinding speed and heroic physique, you
could have made a fortune playing ball. What on earth
prompted you to pursue so unremunerative a career as
poet?

RSG: I was reared in the bayou, croaking Cajun to my
only friends, the frogs. I thought mastering the
English language was a loftier goal than fame or fortune. I was dead
wrong.

TM: With the possible exception of Tim Steele, you are
the strictest formalist of my generation, yet in your
famous cento you rhyme:
“bare, ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,”
and “an aged man is but a paltry thing.”
Do those lines really rhyme in southeast Texas?

RSG: Whup you upside they head, ma cher.

[R. S. Gwynn]

At the outset, I should mention that Mr. Murphy composed both the questions and the answers to this "interview." I merely edited his responses for accuracy. And I was born and raised in Nawth Calina, which is nowhere near bayou country.

[Michael Juster]

Gosh, in Boston we consider them "near".

[Tim Murphy]

The Boston ladies live in furnished souls where the Lodges speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God. And David Berman is my lawyer, and Mike Juster, my friend. And the Merrimack is a river beyond which dragons wend.