Maryann Corbett

Material Witness: Remembering an Abiding Debt to Timothy Murphy

As I write, it’s six years to the day since I rode along—on July 3, 2018—with fellow poet Bill Carpenter to the funeral of the poet Timothy Murphy, traveling four hours from the Twin Cities to Fargo, North Dakota. It was a grace to be there, although it’s always a jolt to meet in the flesh people one has known only in poems. There they were: Tim’s mother, his siblings, his hunting buddies, his pastor and other clerical friends, a packed church full of local people who knew him. Meeting them underscored a truth about Tim and poetry: the confessional nature of his work and its grounding in the matter of his life.

Tim himself I had met in real life, but not often: once when we visited while he came through Minneapolis, and again at the West Chester Poetry Conference in 2012. Materially speaking, he was a slight, wiry man with flaming red hair, cigarette-stained teeth, and a forceful voice with which he declaimed to me Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” in front of the Jade Mountain in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and later upbraided me (across the breakfast table at West Chester) for speaking too softly on the First Books panel. So I knew his material self and actual voice. But I would say I knew him more truly as a nonmaterial presence, and I write here about the person I knew that way: online, and through his poems.

I’d arrived at the online workshop Eratosphere in early 2006, returning to poetry after a long time away, timid and cowed by the rules, the obvious pecking order, the whole process of online critique. To Tim’s enthusiasm as an early cheerleader, encourager, and opinionated critic of my work on poetry boards (at least two others besides the Sphere), I owe more than I can express. There are many others like me.

Tim loved to cheerlead in this way; he was adamant that poets need to support and promote each other. It must be admitted that he was also a cheerleader for his own work, especially while it was in progress. He was brash, overconfident, sometimes hasty, a performer even on a screen full of text. Perversely resistant to workshop rules, he was often the despair of poetry-board moderators. But he made himself heard, and that high volume worked to benefit poets at all levels of experience.

One of his ways of celebrating other poets was writing poems about his friendships with them. He praised them in posts on Eratosphere, too; I can search and still find the record of his staunch support of (for example) Gerry Cambridge, editor of the Scottish magazine The Dark Horse. Closer at hand, I can flip through his books: Mortal Lessons / Faint Thunder includes poems to David Mason, Rhina Espaillat, Robert Ward, Robert Clawson, Aaron Poochigian, and, in multiples, to his life partner Alan Sullivan. Several books contain poems to and about Richard Wilbur, whom he revered, visited, and corresponded with. Always churning out new work, he would toss off dream poems like this one, “Breakfast at Brennan’s,” published posthumously in LIGHT:

          After a Cajun Mass at the Cathedral

          I dream I’m buying brunch on Sunday morning,

          my guests Louisiana’s finest poets:

          Julie Kane, Gail White, and Jenny Reeser.

          We’re pigging out at Brennan’s in New Orleans:

          first turtle soup, then seafood jambalaya,

          oysters diced and tossed in a Caesar salad,

          fine Chardonnay (we’re into our third bottle).

          I step outside with cognac in a snifter

          to take a break and fire up a Havana.

          Non-smokers all, my esteemed colleagues order

          coffee and Brennan’s famed bananas Foster.

          I’d asked a sweet dream of the Blessed Virgin;

          hendecasyllables were what she sent me

          which, waking, word for word I have recorded.

          It’s a hint, girls. When can I buy you breakfast?

 (Poetry quotations compliments of Jennifer Reeser and the Literary Estate of Timothy Murphy)

Except for its meter—hendecasyllabics, rather than Tim’s more characteristic trimeter or mixed meter—and its slight matter, this is a quintessentially Murphyesque poem. It clings to his relationships with human beings. It’s in love with place, even if this is not his beloved North Dakota landscape. It’s in love with the devotions of Catholicism. It’s equally in love with sensory detail and the vocabulary of that detail—food in this case rather than farm fields and hunting, but true to his constant advice to newbie poets: use the specialized diction of your subject, however technical.

And though it touches them glancingly, it’s frank about his vices, the smoking and drinking that brought on the cancer that killed him. The vices, too, seem essential to the poems. Even the celebrant at his funeral admitted laughingly that, though he worked to help Tim overcome those vices, when he tried to imagine Tim without them, the Tim he knew evaporated. Shortcomings, struggles, troubled psychological history: Tim’s poetry is nakedly frank about it all.

In some of my favorites among his poems, the nakedness and the dropping of other poets’ names work in tandem, as here in “Dodwells Road”:

          From Charlee’s polished table

          gaze multitudes of faces

          her memory re-traces,

          the drunken and unstable

          Dylan Thomas sobbing

          before his last disaster,

          daunted by every Master

          he was reduced to robbing.

          There’s liquor in the kitchen

          untouched since John Ciardi,

          brooding on Yeats and Hardy,

          perfected his perdition.

          Now Edna Ward’s daughter,

          fretting that I’ve grown thinner,

          lays out a lavish dinner.

          Tonight I’m drinking water.           

(first published in The Hudson Review; in the book Mortal Stakes)

Perhaps we have to be poetic insiders to know that the “Charlee” who is “Edna Ward’s daughter” is the wife of Richard Wilbur and that Dodwells Road is where they lived. But we don’t need insider knowledge to see that Tim is situating his own alcoholic struggles among the immortals.

He borrows their glitter for his poetic struggles, too, as in “Psalm 139”:

          “Three flaws, but this comes very near your best.”

          I bent to work, wrestling with all his points,

          a student taking a professor’s test,

          an acolyte a cardinal anoints?

          Three nights after my failing father died,

          its author faxed “The Darkness and the Light.”

          I read it to my mother, and the stride

          of trimeter carried us both that night.

          “You know, you’re young enough to be my son,”

          lies in my secret trove of treasured letters.

          He thought me young when I was fifty-one

          and liked the verses written to my betters.

         “He can’t see you, he’s too ill to get dressed,”

          his wife, so soon a grieving widow, said.

          Propped on a cane, he’d looked his bow-tied best.

          I would have gone and knelt beside his bed.

          Darkness dims nothing for you.

          Night shines forth as day.

          For you, the two are alike,

          the darkness and the light.

(In the book Devotions, the poem is followed by this note: The quatrain from 139 is from the new Alan Sullivan translation, The Psalms of King David.)

Those who know the formal poetry of the mid-twentieth century will recognize Anthony Hecht.

But we need not be insiders—really, we don’t need more than our humanity—to be moved by Tim’s poems about struggle in his lifelong relationship with Alan Sullivan, Eratosphere’s “Editor from Hell,” the excoriating critic who called out poetic failures (as he saw them) without mercy. Some of the relationship struggle had to do with Tim’s drinking, as Tim admits in “Cold Front”:

          My love (once such a darling)

          is now a wintry spouse,

          sullen—sometimes snarling—

          because I’m a lying souse,

          because I can’t quit tippling

          or spirit us from the snow—

          or be the winsome stripling

          he wooed so long ago.

(first published in The Hudson Review; in the book Mortal Stakes)

In a poem that concentrates on the winter cold of North Dakota, the pain of estrangement is clear and not lightened by the perfect rhymes of darling and snarling, spouse and souse, tippling and stripling. Even in pain, Tim wanted the snap of perfect rhyme.

Increasingly, the pain also had to do with both men’s illnesses. Sullivan was already being treated for cancer before I arrived on the Sphere; cancer would kill him in 2010. In “Disenchantment Bay,” the sudden dangers of the Hubbard Glacier are a metaphor for Tim’s terror in the face of coming loss, not only of a life partner but of the critic who could bridle Tim’s impatient enthusiasm for his early drafts and force him to perfect his work. The timeline is somewhat knotted in my own head, but a time came when Tim’s own illness—alcoholism—was severe enough to cause seizures and to force him back into treatment. This low point came in late 2007, reported in frightening detail in one of Sullivan’s Eratosphere posts.

Whether this bout of rehabilitation worked is not clear. What is clear is that Tim recovered most of his health at that time, went on writing, went on posting, went on publishing, and kept celebrating friends for another decade before cancer took over where alcoholism had held off. During that same decade, he nudged me toward my first magazine publications, praised my first chapbook, steered me to a publisher and supporters for my second, and urged me to wait patiently before I tried a book. (I was less patient than he suggested.) He was still thriving and cheering when I won prizes.

Can I say exactly when his poems changed, taking a sharper turn toward faith? I can’t, but in more than one poem Tim points to an episode when, on the brink of suicide, he walked into the parish center at Saints Anne and Joachim and was talked down from the ledge of his despair. The books that follow from that point still celebrate the land and other poets, but are more dense, as I see it, with affection for the neighbors who rescued him, the priests who ministered to him, and the beloved ghosts who populate his memory. “Prison Chaplain” is one such affectionate poem.

It’s impossible to note all the subjects that attracted Tim’s magpie attention; it’s difficult even to list the repeating themes. But I need to do justice to the North Dakota essence of Tim’s body of work and the regular appearance in his poems of hunting and faithful dogs. For that purpose, I give you “Posted”:

          Drive with caution. This township strip of gravel

          is much impeded by a herd of pheasants

                         flaunting their adolescence,

          and it is posted thus: Restricted Travel.

          Beside me is an unmowed stretch of meadow

          Feeney and I were tempted by all summer.

                         One month hence some Hummer     

          will cast over this grass its massive shadow

          as herds of Fargo bankers, lawyers, brokers,

          who have shelled out their seven hundred dollars

                        on GPS collars

          which pointers wear like diamond-studded chokers,

          hunt on this land I once farmed to perdition.

          God bless the rich. I was one and I know 'em

                         and say to them this poem

          without a hint of malice or sedition:

          Feeney and I shall walk and flush some pheasants,

          strolling without our double-barreled Browning,

                          the one of us not clowning

          awed in September by an August presence.

(first published in Gray’s Sporting Journal; in the book Devotions)

I enjoy and admire this poem for a whole collection of reasons—reasons that, again, make it a characteristically Murphy poem. The rhymes are nearly all true, and they crackle with unexpectedness and irreverence. The vivid meadow puts us right there with the pheasants and Tim; the contrast of country plainness with whizbang technology is pointed; and the comparison of GPS collars to diamond jewelry is richly suggestive. I chuckle at the rueful tone that Tim takes about wealthy hunters and his past losses, a tone that hints at the hard feelings he claims not to have. I smile at the subtle nod to the Deity in the punning final line.

It’s a poem that conveys, through the world’s material details, Tim’s self: the complicated man to whom I and many others owe so much.

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poems, most recently The O in the Air from Colosseum Books / Franciscan University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Image, Raritan, and many other journals, and in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and Best American Poetry 2018. She is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.