Hi all, I’m off to Chicago and New York City to give some readings and have some drinks with old friends. Please see below. Even if I don’t know you (ESPECIALLY if I don’t), please come out and say hi.
Chicago:
The Bookslut Reading Series
October 4 at 7:30pm
Hopleaf (see here for info and map)New York:
The Frequency Reading Series
October 7 at 2:30pm
The Four-Faced Liar (see here for info and map)
If other events are added, I’ll let you know here.
When I gave a reading last week in Winnipeg, a smartly-dressed fellow showed up with my book already in-hand. Turns out he was Maurice Mierau, the poetry reviewer for the Free Press. He seemed like a nice guy so, luckily, what he had to say was also nice:
St. John’s writer George Murray’s third book is The Rush to Here (Nightwood, 84 pages, $17). It consists entirely of sonnets, and is dedicated to the late Richard Outram, whose formalist poems were quite distinct from the loose conversational tone of most Canadian poetry.
The Autumn of Our Sameness is one of many beautiful pieces here, ending with this couplet: The leaves shiver themselves from the branches,/ much as a half-year back the seeds jumped from the twigs.”
Murray captures the rhetorical shape of the sonnet while avoiding its traditional prosody. He rarely goes into blank verse, and mostly eschews even near-rhyme.
This limits his acoustic palette, but he writes strikingly, usually structuring the pieces around linked metaphors. Often these links move into an achingly expressive line, like Push, whose second-last stanza ends “Lie here with me a bit and say the past exists.” Murray has a powerful ability to synthesize disparate ideas within a poem. A Silent Film, for example, moves from ancient triremes to silent films to contemporary storms and television. What might be messy in an open form is brilliantly contained in the traditional shape of the sonnet.
Remember to buy a copy at your local bookstore or, barring that, through somewhere a little larger today.
There’s a short piece on me in Eye, Toronto’s alt weekly. Aside from one rather large error (can you spot it?), it’s quite a nice, friendly little profile. I read at the Art Bar on Tuesday and it was very successful. I can’t remember the last time I saw a poet sell more than one or two books at the Art Bar, but I sold 10! I’ll be back in Toronto for IFOA in October. If you couldn’t make it out to the Art Bar, and even if you did, hopefully I’ll see you there.
Thanks to some great people and events, my fall is filling up quickly. Please see below for the reading venue nearest you.
Art Bar Poetry Series
Clinton’s Tavern, Toronto
September 11, 8pmAqua Books Series
Aqua Books, 89 Princess St., Winnipeg
Sept 19, 7:30pmBookslut Reading Series
Hopleaf, Chicago
October 4, 7:30pmFrequency Reading Series
Four-Faced Liar, New York
[UPDATED] October 7, time TBAInternational Festival of Authors
Harbourfront Centre
October 21, time TBABookfest Windsor
[UPDATED] November 3
3pm “Where Books Are Born” (Publishing panel)
8pm “Poetry Reading”
John Steffler, Canada’s Poet Laureate, has chosen one of my newish poems, “Pareidolia“, as part of his “poem of the week” program at the Parlaimentary Poet Laureate’s website. I think it went up last week, but I missed it. This is how things go.
My publisher pointed out this nice little review. It’s nice that it has a populist angle to it, as though regular everyday people are enjoying poetry. How hopeful and refreshing.
These days it seems that everywhere you look people are combining many activities into one. We drive and talk on the phone; we work while eating lunch. From this, it appears that we are the ultimate multi-taskers. The thing is, with all this mundane multi-tasking, it is definitely easier to aimlessly run through life rather than to actually living in the moment. Lucky for us, George Murray in his latest collection of poetry, the rush to here, seeks to explore the ideas of time and human nature in a way that is vivid, stripped down and frank. The language that he uses is a beautiful mixture of the colloquial and the literary, like in “Rearview Mirror” when hair and scarves are going “shitcrazy” from the wind (10). Besides the concrete language he employs, his poems take the shape of short, sonnet-like forms that work perfectly to capture exactly the image and moment Murray was going for. For instance, in “Truck Stop Gothic,” the speaker recalls a past job as a cook at some greasy spoon when he sliced the head of a fly and went back to making sandwiches without hesitation. Throughout George Murray’s the rush to here, there are moments and images that many people can relate to making it a great book for anyone to pick up for themselves or a friend.
Something called Inkwell Newswatch interviewed me recently. In fact, my ugly mug takes up most of the “cover“. Included is a short excerpt from The Rush to Here. Thanks to the folks there for asking.
I appeared last week on CBC’s afternoon arts and culture show Q with Jian Gomeshi, as part of an interview about my literary blog Bookninja and my poetry. You can here the interview excerpted in the third part of this mp3 podcast (audio). It was a pleasant experience though we talked much more about Bookninja than poetry, but this is how things go these days.
I forgot about this reading I’m giving as a guest of the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador on Tuesday, July 3rd at 8pm. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!
Who: WANL Reading featuring George Murray
Where: LSPU Hall, 3 Victoria Street, St. John’s
When: July 3, 2007; 8pm
I’ll have copies of my new book for sale, but am unfortunately out of older volumes.
There’s a nice review of The Rush to Here by Ewan Whyte in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. It’s quite laudatory, but a little choppy. It seems to capture the spirit of the book well enough and I’m very pleased to be reviewed with A.F. Moritz and his son Blaise. I read with Blaise in Toronto recently and loved his work, and of course I’m a very long time fan of Al. Al edited my third book The Hunter, so he’s a bit of a poetic, if not biological, father to me too.
from The Globe and Mail
In contrast, George Murray explores a variety of subjects: ex-girlfriends, bloody operations, social decay, children skateboarding on war monuments in sight of a soldier selling poppies, and other atypical sonnet themes. The Rush to Here is a rush to everywhere. Form, not theme, is what defines Murray’s fourth book of poetry, which consists entirely of modified sonnets, where every poem is recognizably a variation of this traditional poetic form.
Murray, an Ontarian who now lives in St. John’s, has constrained himself to 14 lines in each poem, with usually 10 to 12 beats per line. However, they do not follow standard sonnet rhyming schemes. Instead, Murray employs something he calls “thought-rhymes,” which appear to be parallels or conceptual variations that take the place of conventional rhyming. Indeed, many of his line endings are inventive, hinting at notions that can never be realized, while also mirroring the everyday wanderings of our daydreams.
In his sonnet Plain Jane, we find three strange bedfellows, God and Death and the French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard:
Who knows what we’ll endure
next in this find-a-dollar daydream
always under the falling anvil’s allure.
Yes, I see you there, hiding, lost in thought.Baudrillard says all this is how we seduce
ourselves into forgetting about the grave.
God is fear’s ghost, I say, but remain unconvinced.Reading Murray engenders thoughts subtly mystical, feelings revolving around the wonder of imperfection. In the opening quatrains in one of his most innovative poems, A Moment’s Autograph, we discover there is:
Still enough sky-glow left to distinguish
colour, even as the trees descend
through the registers of green and the stoop
becomes shrouded and difficult to discern.From a crack in the dark wall hang loose wires:
give a tug and watch society start
to unravel. There’s no real need to begin
worry, just be aware where the pulling leads.At times, the language of these poems is aggressive, even hostile, meant to engage the reader in debate and discourse. Traditional sonnets these are not, nor do they have a narrative or thematic sweep as a collection, but individually, many poems in The Rush to Here are striking, inspired and sturdy.
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