[Tim Murphy]

TM After college you did a lot of things before graduate school. You worked in the Alaskan fishery, travelled to Greece, etc. What have those detours from the traditional academic path meant to your life and poetry?

DM My years of manual labor, before, during and after college, were not particularly profound, but I'm glad I had them. Most of my jobs were seasonal: harvesting crops, processing seafood or unloading fishing boats, gardening, etc. I became aware of the interconnectedness, if that's not too New Age a word, of my mental and physical lives. I spent six months hitchhiking the perimeter of the British Isles, and learned something about solitude. I was an outsider, listening in on other peoples' conversations,
learning a thing or two about human speech, developing an ear for it. The first year or so in Greece, during my first marriage, was my most intense period of language learning. I met a lot of writers and experienced the freedom of being a full-time scribbler for a while.

I suppose the decade of my twenties was when I learned how to concentrate, how to be alone for long stretches of time and get work done. I was a workin' fool, all right, and some helpful seeds were planted in that decade, though they've taken another twenty years to sprout. I would also say that my obsession with making a living as a writer (which I can say I succeeded in doing rather briefly, due to the largess of a film company) was also one of the core reasons for the failure of my first marriage, so I learned a great deal about suffering and failure in that decade. It was also then that my older brother died in a mountain climbing accident. More suffering. I advise my students not to emulate my life. They'll have their own suffering, sure enough, and they don't need anything like mine.

When I finally went to graduate school at the University of Rochester I was thirty years old and my marriage was falling apart. I wanted a teaching job, in part hoping that it would help me save the marriage. I had put off adult responsibility too long. Not that those failures were entirely my own; it takes two to wreck a marriage. But I think I came to academic study with a lot of life experience that helped me put it all in perspective. Once you've butchered a few hundred thousand king crab, the opportunity to read Paradise Lost and linger over every word seems like a fabulous luxury, and the effort to write cogent papers for fine old professors like Joseph Summers, George Ford and Tony Hecht was not out of my reach, since I had been reviewing books for years by that time for newspapers and little magazines.

Though I've made my living as a teacher since the age of thirty-five, I don't feel that I've thought about academic life in the same way that some of my colleagues do. Academic power means absolutely nothing to me, and most theoretical quarrels in the academy seem utterly irrelevant to the life I lead. What I want is my intellectual and artistic freedom,and so far I've been blessed to work in institutions like Moorhead State University and The Colorado College that have accepted me as a writer and have not tried to force me into some god-awful mold.

TM At Rochester your PhD advisor was Tony Hecht, who guest lariated for us a month ago. Tell us about your studies with him and about your thesis.

DMI first met Tony when I was about twenty-four years old, working as the estate caretaker for the Van Voorhis family on the shores of Lake Ontario. Mrs. Van Voorhis was a poet--I suppose poetaster is the accurate word--and used to invite me in after work for sherry and literary talk. One day her chauffeur was sick, so I drove her into the city for a reading at the Chatterbox Club by Anthony Hecht, who had just published The Venetian Vespers. After the reading, which had left me spellbound, I shook the poet's hand, and felt like a pilgrim meeting the Pope. I called my father that night to tell him I'd met a famous poet.

A couple of years later I wrote a poem in praise of Tony and published it in a good British magazine, the PN Review. It was a terrible poem, in fact, and I can't understand why it was accepted, but it was. I was out on the west coast then, working for the film company. When the company went bust, my wife and I went back to Rochester with our tails between our legs and went to work again--she at the local art museum, I doing odd jobs for her father, which was rather humiliating. At some point in there--say 1982 or so--I called Tony and said I'd like to meet him. He consented, and I went to an interview at his house. I had met some other famous writers by then--Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Stephen Spender--and the yet-to-be-famous Dana Gioia, and I suppose I was always trying to screw up my courage and meet these men I admired in hopes that some of their magic would rub off on me.

Tony was very gracious, meeting a young manual laborer who happened to be a fan of his poetry. When in 1984 I started graduate school, the only place I applied was at the U of Rochester, specifically so I could study with Tony, who still rather terrified me. Unfortunately, my first year there was his last--he was moving to Georgetown. I took a course in modern poetry from him, which was very helpful to me, and at some point in the year I shyly showed him a few poems (none of the other faculty knew I wrote poetry), and he praised a few of their elements and marked lines that he thought were weaker than the others, and I felt momentarily verified. When it came time to write a dissertation, I thought at first of writing on Seferis and Eliot, but no one on the faculty could help me with that subject. Then I thought of Auden--actually, a good friend named Jon Griffin gave me the idea, knowing I had always loved Auden's poetry. Again, no one on the faculty seemed just right. I hit on the idea of asking Tony if he would collaborate with a new hire in the department, the terrific scholar Daniel Albright, and the two became my dissertation directors. They were rigorous and speedy--Tony has never been one to dally over his critiques, but fired them out at speed and length, full of detailed advice. I researched and wrote the dissertation in about six or seven months, working at it full time while I lived in Pittsburgh with my new wife, Annie. A few bits of my dissertation made it into Tony's terrific book on Auden, <u>The Hidden Law</u>, and I'm very proud of that. Since then, though I'm still rather in awe of him, I feel as though we've become friendlier, and he has graced one of my books with a beautiful blurb, and has offered advice and support on numerous occasions. I'm terribly shy about asking for help from my betters, but Tony has never refused, and I'm deeply grateful for that. To me he's the model of the scholar poet, someone who has had wide experience of life and is rigorous in his reading. A marvelous man and a major poet.

TM Your friends in poetry range from your undergraduates to Wilbur and Hecht, three generations of practitioners. How do you assess the current health of the art?

DM Well, since good poems are being written and even published, the art must be in good shape. But I have worries. For one thing, poetry publishers seem to be biting the dust left and right; we may be moving from a period in which it was fairly easy to publish poetry to one in which it is much harder. Though I think the slam and performance scenes have done the art some very substantial good, they also over-emphasize dramaturgy, and I worry that the artisan's concern for le mot juste might be endangered in the process. Performance poets learn that rhyme is not criminal because their audiences respond to patterns of sound with delight, and that's a very good thing. It's just that performance poets can be rather spendthrift with words, and might devalue the coinages. Though I love the wit and vitality I see in many areas, I suppose I've got predictably conservative tastes in the poets I really love.

Luckily, a number of the poets I really love are still publishing, still writing new poems, still doing what real artists always do--perpetually renewing themselves and their art. I'm encouraged by the fact that my students are far less dismissive of rhyme and meter than students were just a few years ago--they seem capable of delight in words,
which is fundamental to the art. Though they are very bright, I hope they're not completely exceptional in that regard.

TM You are very close to Dana Gioia, who has been as instrumental in advancing your work as he has been with respect to my own. Please discuss his role in reestablishing the primacy of formal poetry.

DM I began corresponding with Dana in about 1977, and we finally met on my return from Greece in 1981. From the start he has been an older brother to me. My real older brother died in 1979, and Dana has been such a close friend that I think of him as family in the profoundest sense. I owe him more than I can say. But I don't think of Dana only as someone who has made a place for formal poetry in this country--that's the simplistic way in which his enemies see him. Dana is a writer of all kinds of poetry--some of his very best poems are free verse. And he has championed an extraordinary array of poets who might seem antithetical to each other, but in his aesthetic good writing is good writing, whatever its formal properties. Formal and rhetorical strategies are not ends for Dana, but means; it's the passion he's trying to convey that's important.

He has been important for many more people than just me, of course, and in more ways than I can count: as a reader and critic, as a supporter of numerous literary causes, magazines and presses, as a man who puts people in touch with each other, as the co-founder of the first and only literary conference devoted to form and narrative in poetry--the hugely successful West Chester conference. Yes, he has done a lot for formal poetry, but he has a broader view of what that means than many of his acolytes, and I think he is too easily criticised under the rubric of New Formalism, which I have always said is a silly term.

TM As I have noted elsewhere on the Sphere, I consider you one of the greatest teachers I have known. Please tell us how you feel about teaching literature--as opposed to creative writing.

DM You're too kind about my teaching. I worked with a number of great teachers in Moorhead, and my colleagues here in Colorado are terrific teachers--some of them were my teachers when I was a student here in the 70s, and I
dearly love working with them.

I suppose I love teaching literature most because that's what I've most often done. I never really taught creative writing till I came to this job, except in dribs and drabs here and there, and I'm just getting the hang of it. To a large degree I still think creative writing is a slippery field, wrapped up in all sorts of beliefs about self-validation. I didn't have such buttresses when I was young, but I'm beginning to see that they have their value. If creative writing were only about recognizing one's own feelings and writing them down, I would condemn it as solipsism, but the workshop as I conceive of it is more like an apprenticeship--more like what you put students through in your tutorials.

My creative writers try different formal and rhetorical approaches, memorize and perform poems, practice critical thinking, etc. I want them to feel some joy and accomplishment in the course of our time together, but I also want them to know that this art is bigger than any of us and that we all have a long way to go. The intelligence and talent of my students here makes teaching such courses more fun every year. Teaching literature, however, I feel safer in that we're not talking about ourselves and our own work; we're talking for the most part about writers who are dead or writers whose value we can recognize because of the perspective time allows. I suppose I really believe that a young writer would do just as well to take my literature courses, or someone else's, and forego the workshops--yet I must say that workshops can be rigorous too, and I might have developed faster if I had had the sort of input you once had from Richard Howard and Mark Strand. I had a few hours of advice from a marvelous teacher named Joan Stone, a great fiction class from a man named Jim Yaffe, and then a sort of correspondence course with Dana Gioia, who had studied at all those big-name colleges and universities. If I can give these kids something of what has been given me, impress upon them the necessity of learning about the world as well as the great poems and novels and plays, then I will be doing my job. That's about all I know.

TM Your first book contains a great deal of well-written free verse, but though I see most everything you write, free verse seems to have disappeared. Why?

DM I plead ignorance. I was never trained in formal poetry, so I just didn't know how to do it, despite the fact that my favorite poets were Auden, Yeats, Frost, and Eliot (who was certainly a formal poet in many ways). You can see a dawning formal consciousness in <u>The Buried Houses</u>, an increase of sophistication in <u>The Country I Remember</u>, and some real formal strength in the next book, <u>Arrivals</u>, which I hope will be published soon by StoryLine.

I'm in the awkward position of thinking that most anyone who has read my work has not read the best of it. Despite that accidental progress, I'm fond of several poems in each of the books. I'm open-minded about them, I suppose. Trying to write what Yeats called "passionate normal speech" in rhyme and meter is my fondest occupation these days, no doubt about it, but I'm still experimenting with free verse on occasion, even rhymed free verse, or variations on it. I've recently written ten lines of Whitmanian free verse that I rather like, and gawd knows what I'll try next. I'm after poems that make the reader feel the presence of life more intensely, and I'll use any strategy at my command to get there. I want the sort of mastery that feels effortless, that compels admiration from practitioners who examine it with a trained eye, yet seems "a moment's thought" to everyone else. I admire a wide range of poets in many forms, and though I feel that by far the predominant mode in contemporary American poetry is lackadaisical prose, I think we've got some remarkable writers among us. I'm lucky to know some of them as friends, and to trust their appraisal of my work almost as much as I trust my own.

TM Thank you, David, for agreeing to spend some time on the Sphere. I want to remind everyone that I will be away beginning Dec. 30. I hope we can have some lively conversations in the next few days.