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.
There’s an interview with me up at the Northern Poetry Review. Also in this issue are poems by Brenda Schmidt and an essay by Zach Wells. Another review is upcoming in a future issue of Contemporary Verse 2.
The Books page (link to the right or here) has been updated with The Rush to Here and links to all the books on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com have been added.
If you buy the book online and have it shipped to me (write for the address), I’ll sign it for you and ship it to you where ever you are. I may even get my son to draw you a picture. Seriously.
The first review of my new book, The Rush to Here, appeared today in the Newfoundland Independent, penned by local poetry impresario Mark Callanan. There’s no link online, so I copy it below.
Ode to form
With a little ‘thought rhyme’ a new sonnet is born
Mark Callanan
The Rush to Here by George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007, 79 pages
When Robert Frost famously asserted he’d “just as soon play tennis ith the net down” as write free verse, he was thumbing his nose at poetry that played by no rules. He might have been pleased, then, to see that after a long dalliance in free verse modes of expression, Canadian poetry seems to have returned to use of form. The sonnet, particularly, is enjoying a new heyday.
Most of us have at least a passing familiarity with its two basic incarnations: 14 lines broken down into an eight-line setup (the octave), and the sea change that plunges us into the six-line conclusion (the sestet) of the Petrarchan sonnet, or the twelve line setup and two line conclusion of the Shakespearian sonnet. The beauty of the sonnet lies in the economy of its expression, and in its potential for variation.
From John Milton to Paul Muldoon, poets have been adapting the sonnet to suit their needs for hundreds of years. Ever since its appearance as a recognizable form in 13th century Italy, the sonnet has survived the loss of regularized metre, had its number of lines knocked about (see Gerald Stern’s twenty-odd lined American Sonnets), and otherwise been pinched and pulled to near unrecognizability.
In The Rush to Here, recent Newfoundland import George Murray adds another trick to the sonneteers repertoire, the “thought-rhyme.” The idea is simple enough: thought rhymes are conceptual rather than auditory in nature, bound by associations of meaning rather than tonal similarities. So, Murray can rhyme sun with light, scarves with flags,
or — less directly — bull with harassed.
There is plenty of room for playful punning here as well. Murray pairs the verb fall with autumn; bucket “rhymes” with the homonymous pale. The resulting poems are part formal experiments and part freely associative meditations on the process of maturation and the struggle towards greater self-knowledge — the stuff of the past arriving at
the present tense.
“Once I cooked in a greasy roadside spoon,” Murray writes in Truck Stop Gothic:
just like this, and during one rotten
lunch rush swiped my stainless steel knife
at a passing fly, cutting its head clean off,
right through where a neck should be. I felt divided….
The speaker, having admitted that he then “went back to slicing / toasted western triangles in a trance” with his soiled knife, apologizes to a nameless you (presumably the reader) who may have eaten that particular sandwich order. “And the quick death hiding in the bread’s darkness? / Sorry you tasted such greatness and never knew.”
Though Murray tends to vary the rhyming pattern of his opening 12 lines, he always ends on the double hammer strike of the rhyming couplet (as in the Shakespearian sonnet form). The result is often of an epigrammatic nature that could stand on its own: “It can be tricky to let yourself go / ways other than those you came in by” (Distilled Water); “There are so few barriers to proper sense, / but sense is among them, if you get my drift” (The Corner); “Open your mouth and fill it with food or rage. / The same leaf that turns to the light shies from the blaze” (Lullaby).
Purists of form poetry might be tempted to point out that the musicality of the well-placed end rhyme is absent here, and that, in choosing sense over sound, Murray has eliminated one of the sonnet’s chief virtues: its ability to insinuate itself into our consciousness through the pattern of the auditory echoes it creates. And while it’s true that we respond more viscerally to sound than we do to conceptual echoes, these poems are aimed more at the head than the heart.
In reading Murray’s sonnets, the question to ask yourself is this: Is his innovation on rhyme a useful system for developing language as a memorable and insightful fashion, or does it amount to sleight-of-hand that only ever mimics magic? I would suggest he has hit on a means of expression that works well to coax out his weighty, witty meditations. It is another kind of spanner for the poet’s toolkit. The “thought rhyme” is a fascinating concept, and one that provides limitless potential for poetic investigation. These are poems well worth reading.
–End–
Next week I am headed off to Quebec and Ontario to launch my fourth book of poems, The Rush to Here. When I return, I will launch the book in St. John’s at the Ship Inn. I hope you can join me then and there to help send the book off with a bang.
Here’s the info:
George Murray reading from The Rush to Here
(with introduction by Mark Callanan)
The Ship Inn
(265 Duckworth St, St. John’s)
April 23, 2007; 6pm - 8pm (with some hanging around after)
Please feel free to forward this announcement to all interested parties who won’t think of it as spam.
A couple of updates on locations/times for events coming in the next couple of weeks:
(Note venue change and addition of Babstock to line up)
Reading with George Murray, Ken Babstock and Simon Armitage
April 14th, 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Nicholas Hoare Books
1366 Greene Avenue, Montreal
Tickets are $5 and include a free drink
and
(Note time change)
George Murray, Blaise Moritz and Roseanne Carrara
Thursday, April 19, 7pm
Tranzac Club
292 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto
I’m reading and speaking this spring at several venues in support of my fourth book of poems, The Rush to Here, from Nightwood Editions. Below’s a list of dates for April. I hope you can make it to at least one of these events in Canada:
George Murray and Simon Armitage
Nicholas Hoare Westmount reading
Saturday, April 14, 3 pm
Bistro on the Avenue (Tickets: $12, includes 1 drink)
1362 Greene Avenue, Montreal
George Murray, “Building a Better Blog”
Ottawa International Writers Festival
Sunday, April 15, 6pm
Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa
George Murray, George Bowering and Rob McLennan, “Poetry Cabaret #1”
Ottawa International Writers Festival
Sunday, April 15, 8pm
Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa
George Murray, Blaise Moritz and Roseanne Carrara
Tranzac Club
Thursday, April 19, 8pm
292 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto
George Murray, Rick Crilly, Moez Surani
IV Lounge Reading Series
Friday, April 20, 8pm
326 Dundas St West, Toronto (across from AGO)
If the continental divide is getting you down, just buy the book either at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.
I’ll have a short reading tour in Quebec and Ontario this April and I hope those of you there can come. As more information becomes available I’ll update this post.
Event: Book Launch
Location: Nicolas Hoare Bookstore, Montreal
Date: Saturday, April 14th
Time: TBD
Event: Ottawa International Writers’ Festival
Location: Library and Archives Canada (395 Wellington Street), Ottawa
Date: Sunday, April 15th
Time: 8 pm
Event: Book Launch
Location: Tranzac Club (behind Future Bakery on Brunswick at Bloor), Toronto
Date: April 19th
Time: 8 pm
Event: IV Lounge Reading Series
Location: IV Lounge (on Dundas West across from AGO), Toronto
Date: April 20th
Time: 8 pm
If you would like me to appear at your venue in southwestern Ontario between April 17th and April 22, and not obviously on one of the above evenings, please let me know by emailing george [*at*] bookninja [*dot*] com.
