Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2006

Ryan Murphy is the author of Down with the Ship from Otis Books / Seismicity Editions as well as the chapbooks The Gales, Ocean Park, and On Violet Street. He has received awards from Chelsea Magazine and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art as well as a grant from The Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City.

BC: One of the most pleasing things for me when I was reading your book was the way that you constantly return to names, whether they’re the names of baseball players or lovers or places. Your poem “Weekend in the Century” is a perfect example of this, with the baseball scores and avenue names, then that final incantation of California. There’s something so grounding in this, like the poems can really be more free and associative when they’re rooted in a fixed name. Do you think about this when you’re writing? Does the act of naming help direct you at all when you’re working on a poem?

RM: I do have an affection for names, proper names, places, etc. I think I tend to couch most of my poems as some kind of address (in an epistolary way) and proper names are a pretty simple way of establishing that tone. I would like to think that they speak to some sort of engagement with the world outside my door, though they probably don’t. They do at least, I think, reflect my engagement with the contemporary world.

I don’t know how much grounding the names actually provide—I think that my nouns are so often pop culture references (I find it hard to read that final incantation of “Weekend in the Century” and not think of The OC). I am trying with a lot of the names that I use—from California to Kristi Yamaguchi—to use their popular readings, which tend to be culturally romanticized, as a kind of emotional shorthand. However I am aware of the idealized and facile reading that pop references tend to have, and every poem struggles to balance a desire to give itself over to that idealization with the awareness that this shorthand is insufficient, or meaningless.

However there is also the danger that this barrage of proper nouns can pull a reader out of the poem (either through familiarity or lack thereof).

There is also a great deal of dailiness that I think is essential, as I want to allow those objects to be able to occupy the poems—from the OxiClean on the counter to whatever I am listening to at the moment or watching on television—because I think that they help to illustrate and contrast the absurdity of the more romantically loaded names.

That said, the act of naming guides the poems in that there is some sort of effort to act out a lyric moment. The names are simply one pole that I hope can both attract and repel any settled sense within an individual poem.

BC: That’s an interesting way of putting it. What do you think some of the other poles are? Or what other conventions, if that’s the right word, do you find yourself using to both guide and upset a poem? Are there any good or bad poetic habits that you find yourself falling into?

RM: The guiding principles, very generally speaking, are the sincere and the ridiculous. When I address Dontrelle Willis for example (Willis is a pitcher for the Florida Marlins), it is of course ridiculous to say “I believe I can confide in you,” because I don’t know anything about Dontrelle Willis the person. But if you read sports stories or watch baseball games, there is a lot of effort put into the public portrayal of Dontrelle Willis, his background, his family, etc. and I am engaging that persona completely sincerely.

I use the epistolary poetic “O” from time to time. That is a pretty absurd convention.

I think that the range and rhythm of my rhetoric—at its most decorous for the silliest or most banal subjects, and at its most offhand for the most serious—have become a bit of a bad habit. Not that it’s a bad technique, just one that I have become far too aware of.

BC: Your poems pack such major punch. You use this hyper-precise vocabulary and syntax to build these fully loaded sentences with not one syllable wasted—a lot of the sentences are just fragments or phrases, no verbs or subjects. “Ocean Park,” for example, is so sparse, as though you’ve diluted the average sentence down to just its skeleton. I keep finding myself focusing more on the individual words as the engines of the poem rather than the sentences. Again, this is such an excellent way of freeing the poem up to be more associative for the reader. How does this work for you when you’re writing? Do you edit and pare down a lot or do the words come to you in these kind of power-clusters? What’s your writing process like exactly?

RM: I tend to write by phrase, either a couple of words at a time, a fragment, a sentence, what have you. I accumulate these phrases in a notebook. After an unspecified amount of time has elapsed—either I’ve filled a few pages with these jottings or, more typically, I feel some kind of internal pressure to actually “produce something”—I sit down at the computer and try to arrange them into a poem.

The generative process is certainly the hardest for me, and the actual construction of the poem is the most fun. There isn’t a lot of paring down that takes place; if anything I have to try to fill things out a bit. The editing process for me is largely about the arrangement of words and lines, trying to get the pacing right, the syntax, elements of interruption and synthesis, etc.

Now, “Ocean Park” (which is written in response to the painter Richard Diebenkorn’s series of the same name) was composed largely (though certainly not exclusively) from words and phrases in a passage from the World Book Encyclopedia. So that was a lot more composition and a lot less generation.

BC: In “Morandi Sequence,” you repeat this phrase, “everything I will say I have said already,” and there are permutations of this sentiment throughout the book—like a kind of argument for the futility of writing poems. At the same time, the poems seem to empower you to envision or re-envision the past and future, like when you say a little earlier, “We build our past to fit any myth.” All the poems have a sort of self-consciousness to them, as though you’re aware that the act of writing is itself transformative, even if you repeat yourself. Is this accurate at all? Is writing a futile act? What is poetry doing or not doing for you?

RM: From that same poem I think “I have said everything I will say” is more successful in that it at once closes while insisting on beginning again. The impulse and technique (though dumbed down and poorly executed) owe everything to Samuel Beckett.

BC: That makes a lot of sense. Can you explain a bit more?

RM: I think that one finds in Beckett’s prose many instances of a statement and its negation or vice versa (the famous “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” is an example). I saw Bill Irwin perform excerpts from Texts for Nothing once, and I was struck by how he had to make choices of emphasis in sentences and phrases that negated each other in the text. And I think that the non-choice of the text was something that really appealed to me.

So I definitely set out in the “Morandi Sequence” to write in a way that would assert itself and retreat or admit defeat and start up again, in phrases as well as in particular words, like the pun on “endeavor,” which, come to think of it, comes from Beckett as well.

I suppose there is a certain exhaustion to the poems (I especially think that now, writing this in the heat of summer), but I think that there is a great deal of frivolity as well, and I hope that between the two something else emerges. These two poles of self-awareness have to do with my own impulse toward a very indulgent romanticism in terms of the words I put down on the page and the transparence (in my own mind) of the techniques that I use in constructing the poem to disrupt that impulse.

I think that exhaustion is different from futility. I am not hopeless, just dubious. In fact I am perhaps far too susceptible to the lure of the transformative, but ultimately keep having to start over and over.

In terms of repetition, a lot of the time it is on purpose, but occasionally it is accidental. As I said, the generative process is a bit of a struggle and I will recycle something I like over and over. Overall I think that the use of repetition (as it interests me) creates a beginning again and again, yet there are always incremental shifts of meaning and context of the repeated word or phrase within the poems and the book.

BC: I definitely get that sense of disruption that you mentioned, especially in what you say about rooting a poem in the contemporary (or pop culture) world. It’s almost exactly the opposite of what the reader might expect from what you call the lyric moment, or a poetic revelation/revelry. I feel like a lot of poetry being written these days demonstrates this pervading urge to disrupt the romantic (or poetic) impulse through a variety of methods, and a lot of interesting work seems to have come out of that urge, both successfully and unsuccessfully. What does a successful poem look like to you? Are there any particular qualities or forms that catch your attention over others?

RM: I have been looking at a lot of Joe Brainard’s collages recently, and before that I looked at a lot of Kurt Schwitters’ collages, and I think that it is the art form that most appeals to me. So the techniques of collage influence the way I interact with poems. It’s probably a pretty popular way of writing these days (as you mention, in terms of fragmentation and pop culture references). I know that for me, these techniques are a way of adding or removing weight from various lyric or romantic impulses.

I do like to see the seams of poems, that is, have some sense of where the material is coming from or how the poem is constructed. This of course covers a pretty large swath of not only what is out there, but what is possible.

BC: Do you feel like there is a new tradition emerging in this respect?

RM: There are of course writers that I am fascinated by and who I think are writing terrific poems, and while I don’t really think that there is any sort of new tradition or redefinition currently emerging I think that there is (as there pretty much always is) a recontextualization of traditions by younger writers. You hear about the MFA program house style (which is either too narrative or too fragmented depending on who’s speaking) or the post-avant tradition (which is engaging avant-garde techniques without consideration for the political and theoretical impulses that brought those techniques about). I don’t think that either of these is completely inaccurate, but it is also a pretty easy way to dismiss a great deal of poetry by younger writers.


BC: Jumping back to your book again, specifically to your Poems for Pitchers: Why pitchers? Is there something about that position that seems more poem-worthy than the other positions? And how did you decide on these pitchers in particular? Do you play baseball?

RM: Writing about pitchers is the easiest and most direct way to write about baseball. I am going to avoid going on and on about the sport in general and pitchers specifically because it is generally pretty annoying: baseball qua baseball.

Jack Spicer and Charles North taught me that one could write about baseball in an intelligent way.

There are some personal reasons for each of the pitchers addressed as well as some architectural reasons in terms of the overall nine that were finally included.

I did play baseball through high school. Second base.

BC: What have you been reading lately?

RM: I’ve been reading Pam Rehm, Rae Armantrout, Kira Henehan, David Gruber, and Jordan Davis. I also just read A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby.

BC: What are you working on now?

RM: I am putting together a second manuscript.

BC: How is it to work on another book after this one? Do you find your work falling more naturally into book-length form? Do you feel like your work has changed at all?

RM: I’ve been writing a lot more poems in series. And I am just trying to write enough poems that I think are good to fill a book. It’s really pretty much one at a time or else the little chain of a series. I have a disinclination toward the book-length, which is perhaps a bit problematic. When I sent out the first manuscript, I got a lot of notes back about the arc of the book—that is, its lack of said arc—which I confess I still don’t understand at all. I just don’t read that way, in terms of the structure of the book, arc, what have you. Unless it is very obviously set up that way (like Mary Jo Bang’s Louise in Love I pretty much read front to back), I just tend to flip around reading the shorter poems first and so on. So the idea of putting something together that has a larger structure is something that I have trouble with.

I feel like my work has changed a lot and I think that I’m getting better. I’ve grown more aware of my own impulses and techniques, which can be frustrating, but I think that this awareness has forced me to work harder to surprise myself.

BC: What’s the best poetry collection you’ve read in the last year?

RM: John Colletti’s Physical Kind, Kira Henehan’s Seven Palms, and Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed.

Read Ryan's poems online.
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