Silliman's Blog

Shanna Compton has made available Poems by Joan Murray, another neglectorino who died young – in her case just shy of her 25^th birthday from a heart ailment – who published a lone volume, having been awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize posthumously in 1947, some five years after her death. Having contracted rheumatic fever as a child, Murray was largely home schooled, as we would say today, the daughter of an illustrator & a “diseuse,” a professional reciter. My understanding is that it was Murray’s mother, the reciter, who put her rough manuscripts into the hands of an editor, Grant Code (a name virtually impossible to Google), who cleaned up texts (especially when, as was often the case, there were multiple versions), often adding titles. And while Murray appears to have studied acting, I find no evidence of her connecting with any literary scene during her own lifetime. She might as well have been Emily Dickinson. Here is a sample text:

You think you complain of the ugliness of people.
Meet your own bed.
Smell what you said.
Your words, unmitigated, dead,
Sink like a noon sun in the crass tomb beneath the steeple.

Two feet above the sand, look down
A tartan shore,
A clan, a clack, a whore,
A mobile open door,
To the dog against the tree, the brittle mugging clown.

Claws like tumbled fingers here
Stand for hands,
Elastic bands,
Minds and trends.
Thighs sprout here enough to breed the honor of your morganatic leer.

Murray’s lines are usually more regular – these could be sung to an old Dylan tune – but the quality of her choices – I used the phrase “absolute oddness” yesterday to describe Greenberg – demonstrates just how far outside the usual palette of literary phraseology she is. A more subtle & simple poem suggests that this isn’t accidental, that she understands exactly how “far out” each phrase stood:

Three mountains high:
Oh, you are a deep and marvelous blue!
It was with my palms
That I rounded out your slopes;
There was an easy calmness,
An irrelevant ease, that touched me,
and I stretched my arms and smoothed
Three mountains high.

The key term in this poem is irrelevant, an adjective completely out of context. The effect is not unlike the use of stones in a Zen garden, forming a circle & then pulling one stone visibly out of place so that the mind has to complete the effect &, in so doing, creates roundness all that much stronger.

Murray’s work, like Greenberg’s, suggests a native modernism quite apart from that generated by American expats in Europe, such as Pound or Stein or Eliot, nor their good buddies back home, like Williams or Moore. That, I suppose, is to be expected – the other side of dying young is dying unread, or at least not yet connecting one’s own reading with the literary communities of the time (in this regard, Murray & Greenberg are pure outsiders, while Helena Bennett & Marc Kuykendall were already part of thriving scenes). Which may in turn account for their impact on later poets who discover their work – they’re almost free-floating signifiers, emissaries from a literary universe that could have existed but never really did. A third poet whom one might join these two with or thru would be David Schubert, whose work & life are outlined in greater detail in John Ashbery’s Other Traditions. Add maybe F.T. Prince & the sonnets of Edwin Denby – contemporaries with these two – and you might even concoct something approaching a movement, a modernism that connects even to Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens.

I’ve described the poetry of Canadian Louis Dudek as reading rather the way I suspect Duncan’s might have if only Robert had never met Olson. And that’s not far from how I read Murray & Greenberg et al as well, as a plausible poetics, but one that, for many reasons, never truly took root. Yet, look, here we are decades later, still trying to figure them out.

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