Just a reminder (typed from a hotel in Belfast) that I’ll be reading in Dublin a week today. All the details below. If you’re in Dublin, or anyone you know who likes poetry is, please note the info below:
George Murray at Fighting Words
(Fighting Words is the charity creative writing centre run by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love)
July 14, 2009Fighting Words
Behan Square
Russell St.
Dublin 1
Ireland Email: info@fightingwords.ie and
Phone: +353-(0)1-894-4576
The National Post asked a bunch of literary types to pick summer reading lists. Here’s mine! A few things got edited out after I filed it, but it’s largely a good list, and one I believe in.
There is no summer for me. When I move house, I plug my wires into new walls. When the seasons change, I change what I wear at the computer. It’s a terrible life, but it’s what I’ve made. Furthermore, I seldom have the luxury of choosing what to read. Between my blogging and critical obligations, as well as the stack of friends’ neglected manuscripts on my desk, I can barely even pay attention to what’s actually out there to read for fun.
That said, on those rare occasions when I do allow a few rays from the sun to fry my pale Scots-Irish skin — for the sake of vitamin D, I tell myself, or to help the environment by reflecting more sunlight back into space — I like to have a variety of books that will challenge and delight.
Which ones I choose are based on a simple formula: entertainment + compulsion + delight = good read. What makes a book entertaining? You don’t want to put it down. What makes a book compelling? It challenges you to think. What makes a book delightful? When you do put it down you can’t stop thinking about it. Of course, you can’t tell if a book qualifies until after you’ve read it, which makes deciding which books to pack a risk.
With that in mind, I have a few recommendations (all of which steer clear of conglomerate press blockbusters — you can find those at the front of your big-box bookstores, right next to the scented candles). All my choices offer serious entertainment along with healthy doses of literary inquisitiveness and love of language.
(con’t)
I’ll be reading twice in July, first in Dublin and then back here in St. John’s. Info below. If you happen to be in one of these two places near those dates, I’d love to meet you!
George Murray at Fighting Words
(Fighting Words is the charity creative writing centre run by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love)
July 14, 2009Fighting Words
Behan Square
Russell St.
Dublin 1
Ireland Email: info@fightingwords.ie and
Phone: +353-(0)1-894-4576and
Writers Alliance Monthly Readings Featuring: Stephen Rowe and George Murray
Wednesday, July 22, 7:00pmRailway Coastal Museum
495 Water Street
St. John’s, NL
email: wanl@nf.aibn.com
Phone: (709) 739-5215
I am reading with Toronto poet David Seymour this coming Monday, May 18 at 8:00pm at the Ship Inn in St. John’s. David is in town getting some peace and quiet and working on a new ms., so of course the locals have forced him into a reading. We need to take our opportunities when they come. I was pleased to be asked to partner with him for this event and hope to provide a nice opening act for a very solid poet opening into the prime of his work.
GEORGE MURRAY and DAVID SEYMOUR
“A Brace of Poets” readingMonday, May 18th, at 8 p.m.
The Ship, Duckworth Street, St. John’sReading sponsored by Birch-Broom-in-the-Fits. These two writers are among the rising generation of poets in Canada today. Come to listen; stay to chat. (This will be a great evening of poetry—and wild-haired people are especially welcome to come celebrate this new reading series, Birch-Broom-in-the Fits.)
George Murray’s most recent book, The Rush to Here, was shortlisted for the E.J. Pratt Award (the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry) and is also shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Award. Currently Executive Director of the Association of Cultural Industries of Newfoundland and Labrador, Murray is the author of several books of poetry which have received wide acclaim. He has served as the poetry editor of the Literary Review of Canada, and is the creator of bookninja.com, a lively web forum for literary discussion.
David Seymour’s book Inter Alia, published by Brick Books, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award (for best first book in Canada). He has just completed a second collection of poems for Brick. He was a finalist in the 2009 CBC Literary Competition. Born in Campbellton, New Brunswick, Seymour grew up in Milton, Ontario. He now lives in Toronto where he writes and works in film. (Among the many tantalizing details of his bio note in Inter Alia are these: he has sailed on a tall ship, photo-doubled for Russell Crowe, worked as casting director for several films.)
The stalwart lass who runs Seen Reading (of which Bookninja was an early fan) has asked 15 poets to record themselves reading one of their own and a cover for the month of April, providing 30 poets in 30 days. I read “Crosses” from The Rush to Here and Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song” from King Log. My computer apparently can’t make good recordings for the life of it, so I had to get a pal to sneak me into CBC to do it on the sly. Hope you enjoy, and if you haven’t yet, buy The Rush to Here here.
The Rush to Here was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Prize!
The finalists for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award are:
Randall Maggs for “Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems” (Brick Books, 2008), a collection of conversational poems that follow the tragic trajectory of the life and work of one of hockey’s best goalies.
George Murray for “The Rush to Here” (Nightwood Editions, 2007), poems that combine what the poet calls “thought rhymes” with a structured sonnet form.
Agnes Walsh for “Going Around with Bachelors” (Brick Books, 2007), poems that employ the tang of Newfoundland language to meld the plain with the sophisticated.
There’s a brief poetry-month interview with me up at the National Post’s book pages, Afterword. All the poets interviewed in the series so far (Stuart Ross, Anne Simpson, Zach Wells) have been asked the same questions, so you can get a sampling of personality types in the answers.
Who’s your favourite living poet — Canadian or otherwise — and why?
Geoffrey Hill is my favourite poet. He’s an Englishman living in Boston who’s quite possibly the greatest writer in the English language. He’s notoriously difficult and gleefully inaccessible. I find reading his poems like working on tough puzzles. I’m sure I don’t get all of his allusions, but I pride myself on those I do get.
Who’s one poet you pretend to know but in reality have never, ever read?
Ken Babstock (just kidding, Ken).
I was asked by Globe Books Editor Martin Levin to submit names of writers one turns to on St. Patrick’s Day for a bit of the Irish, but didn’t have time to properly compile an answer. Poet Aislinn Hunter, however, did, and she took an interesting tack: naming names from Newfoundland’s Irish Loop instead of from good old Dooblin. I think she has particularly good taste, as you might guess, because she mentions yours truly and The Rush to Here.
Aislinn Hunter, Vancouver-based poet and novelist, asks “does the Irish Loop count?” (The Irish Loop is part of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula – and it does count.)
Poetry by Patrick Warner (b. Ireland, resident St. John’s), fiction by Joel Thomas Hynes (whose Irish Loop book Down to the Dirt was just made into a gut-wrenchingly wonderful film), and the recent poetry books by St. John’s poets George Murray (The Rush to Here) and Agnes Walsh (Going Around with Bachelors).
The opening poem from my 2003 book, The Hunter, is under review at ARC Magazine’s How Poems Work feature this month. Nigel Beale examines the poem from his perspective, providing his key for reading it. I used to like the “How Poems Work” feature in the Globe and Mail a few years ago, so it’s nice that ARC has decided to continue the tradition of providing individual readings for individual poems.
The poem works then because it attaches itself to canonical words, pushes through intriguing sets of thin, thought-provoking binary opposites, looks at the horizon, and formulates a complicated commentary both on the globe’s future physical environment, and humankind’s perilous rejection of wise thinking in favour of greedy consumption. In short, the poem’s complex ambiguity invites engagement: it’s not too late to save the world from ignorant human behaviour. Alternatively, Murray himself has described the Hunter as angry, and the poem’s ‘Promised Land’ can just as easily be interpreted ironically, apocalyptically, as it can hopefully.
The poem succeeds because neither it, nor its central character is static. He changes, like most of us do, over time. The ‘he’ in the poem evolves from a dissatisfied beast into an insatiable destroyer, from a threatening spirit, to, in the end, a loving hopeful human being struggling simply to stay alive who is intent, possibly, on creating a better world—or at least on trying to save this one. Godlike, beaten, but not dead. Not yet, at least while there is still the capacity to ‘look up’, to hope, despite a barren landscape. Resurrected. Mail fisted.
A nice little review of The Rush to Here in the Prairie Fire Review of Books was just brought to my attention. It’s amazing to see this book still getting reviewed two years later. I like how newspaper reviews allow for immediate reaction while journals take some time and perspective with their editorial. Anyway, thanks to Prairie Fire for the kind words. Excerpts below, full review here.
The writing never lets me down. It is continually smart and revealing, almost conversant and colloquial, but pulling back with the shine of poetry. The overall tone sounds world aware and observant rather than world weary.
…
Murray doesn’t cheapen experience. He examines it from any number of perspectives, and yet sets nothing in stone.The sidetracks within the poems are a modus operandi. What’s likely to be said is skirted in favour of a tangent or dipsy doodle. In motion-picture parlance, these are jump cuts that command attention, and a slowing down. A simple phrase like “Your turn is today” (70) means life is short, but, in the grand scheme of things, that your turn is the equivalent of one short day. I’m stopped. I recognize this poignancy in the face of the ongoing diurnal events. “Mostly the world waits / / patiently. Mostly people get on / with things. / Mostly they are unaware / of waiting.” Enjoy the art! Oh yes, this is one wonderful book.
