Welcome to the 8th Wolf Twin Review!
Introducing: Sheila Murphy . . . the Gertrude Stein Award-winning author, artist, musician, and American text and visual poet.
Stasis
Furniture intacts its way
into the lodgement half
quirkily. Leave it be,
say it priestly ensigns
charged with dutiful
mantra-making (in)tended
as antonyms
for rigor mortis,
maybe, no maybe
about it. Locked and
bloated, a sort of
wheel you might
ride or writhe
upon and from there
alight to applause
bewildering and expected.
Lorem Ipsum
Chance repeals unlikely chances to
amuse amaze just grace in lieu of
participation in participle manipulation.
If I were you I'd want to be less eye
for an eye than you from the hinterlands
you from replete with hailstones and threnody.
Parched parchement seahorse semaphore guardling
my predicate nom de plume my broom asweep
near fingers laced then undone.
Protowhatchamacallit down time bloom
with others then with cheat heat sheets
blowing in breeze light dark afternoon winter warm time.
What Are You Wearing In Your Sleep?
You are always younger than the saxophone
made whole in someone else's hands
striving to find fingerings that trespass
on nasal byways of usual woodwinds.
Is yield the complement of seduction?
Whose body defaults to another person's skin?
The reverse of recollection is foretold
in a winter globe of clarity
too heavy to lift and shake.
If you dream, do you wear mirrors
from the emporium of used separates
worn by a sister in transition?
How do blood and breathing affect
your nuisance cloth? Do you accidentally
fall onto some island without a name?
How inimitable are the faultine stars
that compass you to the chosen home?
Is there a garden within that forms
some wellspring reliably sprucing up
the plot of land where you will be
someday standing by yourself
recollecting white-hot depth?
Featured Poet Interview:
Reading the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in Middle English was a signature moment in realizing my lifelong passion for poetry. In graduate school at The University of Michigan, my professor strongly advocated our learning to speak the poems in Middle English. I ventured to the language lab and obsessively worked at pronouncing each syllable of the poems with all the life that they deserved. Mr. Hamilton’s lighting up and complimenting my performance afforded me the fuel I needed to keep my Middle English alive.
I memorized the opening of the Prologue and have performed it publicly as recently as last November when attending a wedding for which the groom had grown up in Canterbury. Bringing the great bard to life continues to be a pleasure for me as an expression of making poetry my primary identity.
2. What advice would you give an aspiring poet today?
Read yourself into a new oblivion. Go to readings and/or listen to performances on YouTube. When composing poems, build structures that prompt you to be disciplined as you pour syllables and words into those structures. Allow your mind to become fluent enough to midwife into being interesting work. Do not let anything or anyone stop you. Go at it and flourish as a poet. Do not ask permission! Picture yourself as an accomplished and adventurous poet and make that true! Look for what is right in passages of your poetry. Pay close attention to what makes them good. Delete bridge material that led you to your best work.
3. In addition to the previous question: What is the best advice you've received from another poet?
Construct energizing exercises, such as Bernadette Mayer’s List of Writing Experiments: https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html
4. There is an elegant structure to your work, and often a delightful thread of playfulness. Do you find that maintaining a sense of wonder plays a vital role in your writing?
Thank you for this gracious comment. Yes. A sense of astonishment, in fact, keeps me elevated, working, and thriving. I love to empty my mind and expectations to allow for new observations, experiences, sounds, music, simple conversations that bring to life potentially life-changing discoveries.
5. You have undergone an evolution of artistic self-expression. First music, then poetry, and now also visual art. As a fellow creative, I have longed to ask this question of another multifaceted poet: Do you have to shift your mindset between the forms, or do they all stem from the same place for you? Are they intrinsically linked, yet released differently?
Both things are true, I confess. Different senses are employed when working in visual or musical spheres as distinct from verbal spheres. That said, I listen as a primary way of learning. Since engaging in drawing, I have discovered that I am more visual than I used to think I was.
The flute was my beginning, complemented by singing. From the time I was ten years old, I practiced the flute six hours per day unprompted. People in the neighborhood would comment that they could hear me play as they got ready for work or school. All singsong long in summer, people could hear my flute practice through the screens of our sunroom. I was always playing and performing.
As referenced in my earlier response, at about age 27, I consciously chose poetry as my primary artistic pursuit. Engaging with words as a way of life was natural to me. I noted that poetry was better for my spirit than instrumental music, allowing a wider range of creativity than flute and singing performance.
Every aspect of my creation is fundamental to my being. I am grateful for the breadth that seems to lead to depth in bringing together the various modes of endeavor in music, writing, and visual art.
6. What are some of your favorite words?
Words are music to me, and my favorites change by the day. Among today’s favorites are these:
Persnickety
Bumbling
Vivacity
Swipe
Effulgent
Kismet
Absolution
7. Is there a poetry related story you'd like to share? Either about writing or meeting another poet.
Once while performing at the legendary Alwun House in Phoenix in an intimate outdoor area made gorgeous for performances, mourning doves were present just past dusk and made their music in complement to the poetry reading and my flute playing that were joined together in performance. Across species, we played and performed together. That memory has stayed with me, and I hold a sense of gratitude for it.
8. What can we expect to find in your latest book from BlazeVOX Books: Permission to Relax?
You will immediately discover my love of language (“Poetry is unforgivable, and so are flowers.”), free-lineated poems, prose poems, and a range of forms, as adapted to US English: haibun, ghazal, pantoum, and a hay(na)ku sequence. A special gift in this book is a Cento gifted to me by poet Thomas Fink in honor of a decade’s birthday. Tom assembled lines from my work, employing a form I developed for the book Tommy and Neil, which Tom used to celebrate my birthday. The Cento is Tom’s, and the lines are mine from a variety of books.
9. You’re known for mastery in several forms, including one you have been credited as originating: “American Haibun.” How does the American Haibun differ from the Japanese form?
In approximately April 1984, Sulfur published Six Haibun by John Ashbery. Those six haibun had a profound impact on me. Briefly, the way I see the American haibun is a different from the traditional form, a less restrictive. Unlike the traditional haibun, nature need not be primary. Likewise, the haiku at the end of the prose passage need not consist of three lines. In the American haibun, I've explored the relationship between the relatively relaxed prose passage and the surprise element that emerges as one takes a leap away from the prose passage into the single-line haiku, which can take the form of an extended or a simple line. Remember that this single line haiku is not a sentence. It is a merely passage that allows discovery. The metaphoric leap is key to the form. I've called this a "small song" in Mudlark, No. 8, edited by William Slaughter. The idea is one of a natural and weightless effort that emerges in composition.
10. As inspiration strikes, when you’re accumulating images and sense memories that will become poetry: Do you automatically know what will be prose, what will be haiku, and what will take on other forms as you’re experiencing it? Or does this sort itself out later in the process?
Stated briefly, I do not always know immediately what will be prose or poetry. That said, I sometime plan a structure for book, as I did with Teth, and allow the book to emerge in a particular format. Thanks for mentioning the new book from Unlikely books. I look forward to that project!
11. If you were a tree, which would you be?
I would be a Eucalyptus Camaldulensis, red-river gum. Specifically, the largest tree at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, celebrating its 100th year in Arizona. In 1926, “Mr. Big,” as he is now called, was a three-year old sapling, six feet in height. Today, he is 117 feet in height, with a circumference exceeding twenty-two feet. The gray-white bark further distinguishes this beautiful, powerful tree that extends its branches to those of us who feel a sense of warmth and protection coming from this natural wonder.
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To Sheila:
Thank you so much for being our Featured Poet, and congratulations on your wonderful new book: Permission to Relax. Welcome to the Wolf Pack!
Dearest Readers:
Greetings, fellow poetry lovers. Check back next month, or subscribe to our blog to see the moonstruck poets we have lined up. Owwwoooooo!
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