Wait Until After 50: On George Murray’s Problematica*

(ECW, 2021) and ona Myselfa*[i]

A Review Essay by Shane Neilson

The close of the second decade of the twenty-first century has seen a flood of straight white guy Selecteds, including Jay Millar’s I Could Have Pretended to Have Been Better than You (Anvil, 2019), Paul Vermeersch’s Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems (ECW, 2020), and Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words (Gaspereau, 2020). Al Moritz’s The Sparrow (Anansi, 2018) sets the bar for aesthetic quality in terms of the work itself. Another of the white guy titles, Gary Barwin’s for it is a pleasure and a surprise to breathe (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019), sets the bar for production quality. The flood has naturally made me think of what a Selected, or a New and Selected (I think of these essentially as the same thing, just with the boundaries at a slight variance) should ideally be, not only in terms of the aforementioned books, but prospectively in terms of that mythical book to come, should it: my own Selected Poems. In the (neuro)divergent prose to follow, I will use Al Purdy’s anti-example to illustrate some rules I’ve learned along the way. Then I will look more deeply into a more recent white guy’s Selected.

Part I:
Rules for Rent in the Outer Planets

1. The first thing I want in my Selected is to get out of myself, to be free. Only editors is another way to put this rule.

Writing poems was freeing in their composition, though in their revision I found another confinement to self. But when imagining their eventual collection in some bulk and at length, I’ve always surmised some kind of senate is required, a proverbial sober second thought to sift and sort. For I know my limitations as a poet: I overvalue emotion. Further, existing as an emotionally dysregulated soul in the realm of art, I need poems to be moving in an unconscious fashion. There is a long history in the art of making essentially the same distinction here – the Lowellian ‘raw’ and the ‘cooked’, the Apollonian/Dionysian divide, etc. – but rather than be pedantically pretentious, I’ll just be frank. A poem might be emotionally incontinent, and I’ll fall for it, thinking it slaps. Thus, a certain kind of editor can really be protective for a poet like me.   

A matter I’m less sure of is: who should have ultimate decision power over poem inclusion and exclusion? If the book is truly to be edited, then the power struggle must be resolved at the outset: the editor has control. But what of poems I love, that I need to include, that don’t find the editor’s favour? And of the opposite case: what of the poems I can’t abide, but that the editor wants included?

In 2019, I curated a book of New and Selected poems for R.M. Vaughan that was accepted by its dream publisher, but which has run aground because of foolish literary executing. Richard taught me something as I worked with him: he knew my constitution couldn’t abide meddling, but he also explained his constitution couldn’t have poems in the book that he didn’t respect. Thus I gathered together the best ones I could find, agreeing that he could chuck the ones he was embarrassed by, and as it turned out, he approved the selection in its entirety, without hesitation or reservation. This is probably not a common experience for editors, finding such perfect affinity, but it’s the best outcome possible.

Lesson: plead the case for the poems I like and leave their ultimate fate to the editor, but stamp out poems I don’t like. Thanks, Richard.

George Murray does not entrust his fate to an editor. He handles the selections himself, which attests to a criterion I’ll develop later in the essay – obsessiveness. We’ll never know what otherwise might have been should he have retained an editor, but I can’t claim it was a complete disaster in this particular case – just a minor one. In contrast, the Moritz Selected’s set-list was developed in collaboration with Michael Redhill, and one can’t argue with the exemplary results, for every page sings.

Looking at Al Purdy as a test case here is telling. As Dean Irvine explains in “Beyond Forgetting: Editing Purdy / Purdy Editing,” amongst the truly stupendously profligate cohort of nationalism-era Canadian poets, Purdy uniquely clusterfucked his Selecteds. Consider: Poems for All the Annettes appeared in 1962, but was reprinted in ’68 and ’73. Purdy himself declared Annettes to be Selected poems involving all work “prior to 1965.” Unfortunately, as self-editor, he was the one who picked the supplementary poems.

Purdy’s impatience here is truly astounding: having (in)famously only become ‘good’ in his 40s according to the popular legend, he had to retroactively curate himself in a Selected of his own making at the age of 49 (Purdy was born on December 30, 1918) within less than a decade of writing well (according to his own self-mythologizing account uncritically taken up by his cronies). What ensued is a true explosion of Selecteds: thereafter, he published Love in A Burning Building in 1970, a thematic grouping of his particular brand of love poems (Guess who picked ‘em?) followed hard after with Selected Poems in 1972. McClelland & Stewart demanded that there be no overlap between the contents of the volumes, and once again, Purdy picked this peck of pickled peppers. You can imagine what kind of art results from such a two-bushel predicament. Even Dennis Lee, Purdy booster extraordinaire, is on record as saying that, based on so many poems being confined to arson within Love in a Burning Building, the latter Selected is a “con job.” Only by combining it with Love, Lee said, could you get the whole Purdy picture.

The mess persisted into the future, of course, with 1976’s The Poems of Al Purdy: A New Canadian Library Selection, making for a probably never-matched career number of 5 Selected poems spanning the stretch of a poet’s 40s and 50s. Once again, Purdy curated the self-inflicted damage. I write that numeral “5” facetiously, because Purdy actually did the trick again with Being Alive in 1978 when he was still 59, though this time with a difference: Dennis Lee was enlisted as editor, giving Lee the chance to live up to his criticism.
​
Because Purdy was addicted to producing books, he had to self-sabotage again with Bursting into Song: An Al Purdy Omnibus in 1982, just four years later. And get this: Bursting is a book he acknowledges he made because he was too good and multitudinous to be successfully contained in Being Alive. Purdy may just be the absolute worst example of a Canadian poet to follow with regards to issuances of Selecteds. The term should be Sequentials, or Serials.

2. Barring early death, the poet should be over 50. No more excuses is another way to put this rule.

If you’re over 50 years old, then society generally expects you to be grown-up. If you’re a poet who’s grown up, then you’re expected to put out books that you don’t look back on with regret. The poems that constitute the Selected will now be your representatives to most of the readers you’ll hope to find, going forward; looking backward is forevermore gauche. The truth in my case is sadly not so grown up, for I look back on every book I’ve ever done with regret, thinking of poems that, even as I neared publication, I had doubts about; and those doubts have only intensified with time, to the point where I reject the poem-ness of many. Too many. . .

Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, for there are worse cases. I recall again Al Purdy, who included “On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems” in Beyond Remembering (Harbour, 2000), a bad poem about writing bad poems. There is no excuse for preserving such material! Poetry is serious work – at least I’ve always found it to be so. Thus severity must rule the day. Stand behind everything that you’re putting forward in a Selected, it’s your last chance to be the best version of yourself while such is in your power. You can’t outdo yourself, but you can sabotage yourself.

I remember talking with Steven Heighton one night about the regretful impulse, about the temptation of always rueing that which I’ve published – an impulse that comes from being heavily shamed for most of my life, for being taught to not trust myself, to doubt my best intentions – and his answer was Parnassian, something imposing and unforgiving, something Eastwoodian, something like “But you published the poems, and now they are yours! There is no going back. If you doubted them, you shouldn’t have published them.” A few years later, though, I discovered that he republished Flight Paths of the Emperor, a book of short stories originally published on the Porcupine’s Quill in 1992 that he heavily revised for posterity on Vintage.

Being me, I called him on it. Steve, being Steve, laughed.

George Murray turned 50 as of 2022, but published his Selected in 2021 when he was 49. In contrast, Moritz was far older when The Sparrow came out, a not-coincidental determinant in the greater quality of his text. Amongst the cohort I’ve mentioned, Vermeersch was the one in a real hurry, publishing his Selected at 46. Millar was born the same year as Murray but published his Selected 2 years earlier, meaning he threw his mediocrity out there at 47. Steve, who at a quality level probably outdoes Moritz for my money, published his Selected at age 59. And I’ve already told you about Purdy. Seems like the greats do what they do for a reason . . .

Hey, kids: don’t trust any poets under 50, me included.

3. Selecteds should have a good introduction. The unlikely great poets of history’s ‘beyond remembering’ need a champion is another way to put this rule.

See (1). The editor can do the intro, but anyone who can do a good job would work. The trick is tough, though, so much tougher, apparently, than writing great poems, since the aesthetic high bar in the grouping, Moritz, lacks one. Indeed, some in the group, such as Millar and Vermeersch, are the worse off for the ineptness of their intros. Only the Barwin is actively enhanced by Alessandro Porco’s introduction, and I celebrate the feat because a good introduction can really make a poet seen, their greatness less announced than recognized, made coherent in an essentialized fashion. I don’t mean to say the introductory essay to for it is a pleasure and a surprise to breathe is revelatory. It’s merely a good entry. But by being ‘good,’ it satisfies my criterion.

The last time I’ve come closest to finding a truly fine job in CanLit was Don McKay’s introduction to Moritz’s Early Poems. I recognize this entry reflects the deficiencies in my reading, and no doubt readers could name more recent instantiations that are more diverse than my white dude frame. But I’m betting that within that specific larger readership purview, it remains true to say that a great introductory essay is far, far rarer than a great poem. (Even McKay’s doesn’t completely manage the job, since it’s a mite short.) I look at McKay’s essay on Moritz authoring so much of the criticism that was to come on Moritz, shaping to such a positive degree how he was read and interpreted . . .

Looking back, have I done such an idealized job for other poets? Perhaps I’ve done it twice, and for the same poet: my essay on Lane introducing The Collected Long Poems of M. Travis Lane (Goose Lane, 2017) and for an essay in How Thought Feels: the Poetry of M. Travis Lane (Frog Hollow Press, 2015). The former I give a ‘pass’ to myself akin to Porco’s job with Barwin’s book; but the second essay, I think I did the trick on par with McKay’s treatment of Moritz.

Adam Sol wrote the introduction to Problematica*. His piece isn’t scholarly, which isn’t a surprise; Sol is a poetry popularizer, an exemplary engager of the poetry-naïve and close-reading presider who can discuss the workings of poems with a minimum of technical jargon. Sol’s critical work of late (e.g. How a Poem Moves) focuses on readings of poems designed to connect with a mythical general reader of poetry. Thus his pop-reading style seems perfectly suited to a pop-poetry writer. Notwithstanding the breeziness of Sol’s take and its conversational ease (which I admire), I fear the job is as hermeneutically unambitious as Murray’s work. Sol’s introduction does two things: (1) it suggests that Murray played the fool early on with his first book (Carousel), only to deepen the purely comic portrayal of the fool to more tragic registers as his career progressed; (2) it offers a book-by-book summary of Murray’s work that flits by at a paragraph-a-text. This isn’t much. No compelling reason is given to read Murray, no contextualization amidst greater contemporaries, no inkling of greatness provided at all. The introduction is as humble about Murray’s talent as it should be, being 3 and a half pages long, taking a full page of scene-setting before getting into the poet’s work.

4. The book must be chronological. No facelifts is another way to put this rule.

The true test of any poet long enough in the tooth is to say, This is me. Here I was, here I went, and here I am. Remixing is foolish. We can’t be other than we are, no matter how childish we may wish to remain. The only way to stay a child is to never grow up, which explains Vermeersch’s choices in Shared Universe. He permanently fixed himself as kid by re-ordering his Selected so that a preponderance of later work occurred out of sequence, appearing early. I like to think of Gary Barwin as singularly able to channel a child-like interiority as well as capture/observe children, but in contradistinction, Barwin has a big boy Selected because his poems appear in chronological order. . .

5. To edit or not to edit?

​Note that the rule in this case has not cemented in bold font as I’m simply not sure what to do. Edit the poems I’ve written, to make them their best selves according to the poet I am now; or leave the poems alone, trusting that their original selfhood is the kind that is most effective and felicitous? I think this is basically the central question at the heart of writing, what to do?, is this any good?, etc.; and it strikes me that returning to Rule 1 makes a good deal of sense. If tempted to intervene, check in with the editor and make a request first. Even so, the words of James Fenton about Collecteds (speaking on this occasion about Philip Larkin) encourages me to arson:

It is very strange that a poet whose key work lies in three rather short volumes should have caused such difficulties for his editors and such controversy among his readers. But the readers pay him the tribute of a sort of possessiveness and concern: they want their poet to look his best. And it’s hard for a poet to look good in his Collected Poems, if by “collected” we mean anything like “complete.” Most poets’ collected works will include things that would make the author cringe. Presented in untidied form, such gatherings remind me of nothing so much as those yard sales characteristic of recession America, in which families set out on their front lawns the contents of their closets and dens—the Frisbees, the old scooters, the clothes neither wanted nor needed, the dreadful joke presents—all in the hope of raising a little cash.

Painters are known to curate their oeuvre by means of occasional bonfires of botched canvases, and experience has taught us that the better the painter, the better advised he is to stand over that bonfire and make quite sure that what he wants burnt does indeed go up in smoke, and is not squirreled away by his admirers and assistants, whether through misguided motives of preserving the legacy, or by the thought of providing for their old age. Michelangelo, in the last days of his life, making a bonfire of his drawings and the cartoons for the Sistine Chapel, may horrify us now, but he was well within his rights. What an artist does with his property (as long as it is still his property) is his business. What executors and editors do is another matter, because their rights (if they have any) are to be balanced against a duty toward posterity.  

Collecteds are of course impossible tasks for quality, but Selecteds, being (theoretically) within the realm of perfection, must therefore be subject to a higher degree of severity. Yet there is a shadow side here that Fenton doesn’t acknowledge. Too many flames. Remember Kafka’s oeuvre? What about burning the self out of poetry? I worry about that.

Part Two:
Books on Parade

The number of poets who call their shot, deciding what kind of poet they want to be at the outset, and then deliver on that kind of poet lifelong are few. I’d call these our most obsessive, narcissistic, or antisocial poets with real venom if I didn’t recognize the impulse in myself, which I do; so, I dilute the venom. What poet who seeks publication isn’t narcissistic, at least a little? What poet who seeks to write memorable phrases isn’t obsessive in that pursuit? And who among us who wishes to diagnose culture – poets are always doing this, it is an incidental byproduct of relatively pointless aesthetic activity – isn’t antisocial? We might call it love that delivers the truth (certainly beauty delivers the truth), but it takes a real prick to indict. Prosecutors have personalities.

Thus, I love it when/that poets change. Indeed, my ideal poet is modelled squarely on American pop culture’s pedagogy, from whom I learned, as a young child, that the pinnacle of artistic expression – perhaps even the reason to be an artist – is to transform with each album release. I think of three performers in this vein: Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Madonna. Nevermind the disparateness: somehow little reading Shane (my mom read Star! and People Magazine) and television-consuming Shane (my mom watched Entertainment Tonight daily, shout out to Mary Hart and f.u. John Tesh) learned that it wasn’t enough to be great. One also had to morph constantly in that greatness. I’ll spare readers itemizations of how Dylan, Bowie, and Madonna – avatars of their respective generations – changed, trusting that the cultural icons I’ve chosen are famous enough that most are familiar with their transformations over time.
​
Lucky for me in this essay, George Murray thinks exactly the same way I do, for in an interview in the Northern Poetry Review, he writes, “I’ve always prided myself on treading new ground and had sworn I would never write ‘the same’ book twice.” Murray kept to his word, more or less, but the feat would have been more impressive should he have written great work.

Carousel
​(Exile, 2000)

​Murray’s first book is a kind of comic take on Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology in which the poet writes a series of, to quote the book’s bumpf, “eulogies, elegies, obituaries and panegyrics” concerning a circus troupe. Here’s how Fraser Sutherland summarized the text in the Globe and Mail: “The subtitle, A Book of Second Thoughts, in fact would have better served as the main title because Murray's work resembles less a whirling merry-go-round than a set of careful rubbings made in a graveyard for recently deceased carnies. Each poem performs a postmortem on some emblematic, even heraldic, figure.” Fraser seemed to appreciate the book’s formal elan, writing that Carousel was “highly impressive” for its “spatial sensibility” and “cool precision.” The first poem in this collection of sonnets – “The Carnie’s Obituary,” one singled out by Sutherland too – is consistent with the rest:

Dead in a Ferris-wheel crash at forty-three, he was laid
below an overpass by the highway, clad as he would
have wanted in his best: rattlesnake boots, jeans,
a leather vest, two arms full of greed dragon tattoos;
& they had an open casket as the cars whizzed by
above, brought balloons, pink clouds of candy-floss,
sticky pinwheel lollies, shabby brass darts
with bent red flights, a string of flashing marquee bulbs
in patio-lantern covers, an orange tiger on a leash;
& in a moment of silence from the bullhorns, the bells
of the carousel, the speeding traffic, his will was read,
the inheritance handed out: for each a Throwing Ring,
a single chance to toss a winner, to circle his head
in a rubber halo & help him bluff his way into heaven.

There’s an appealing – albeit limiting – mildness about this, an object-heavy naming that gives the work some sonic and spatial density. But other than its obvious competence, the only other notable thing that might be said about it is the gimmicky ending that becomes grating in poem after poem, for in Carousel, each poem must endure a terminal slide into tame comedy in which a deflationary twist occurs. In the case of this poem, a carnie’s funeral involves a game where the carnie himself must try to fool the supreme gamesman. In the next, “The Medium’s Observance,” a medium archly declares her fraud:

She always predicted she would return
to betray answers to the question of life,
universe, & death (Be in my studio,
she said, three days after I am buried & all
will be revealed!), yet when
they arrived in droves, the pedals
that shook the table, the switches that lit
her crystals, the strings that levitated
her chair, the bellows that moaned
like lost souls, all lay exposed & in
disrepair; a note on the hollow table
full of bones & wet tea leaves reading,
for some questions, any answer is good
enough. (Twenty-five dollars, please.)

A ha ha, right? Cleverness, check? You can keep checking off the rest of the poems in this way – and the same could be said for the back half of Murray’s career, as you’ll see as we move through his books. Carousel’s poems could be likened to a poem-long pun. The other important thing to note in analysis is that, technically speaking, Murray has formal ability. The sonnets are unrhymed and enjambed but feel effortlessly composed, without strain, featuring enough internal music to carry the production.

The Cottage-Builder’s Letter (McClelland & Stewart, 2001)

​Ever the loose conceptualist, Murray designs another book-tentpole operation by creating a nameless cottage builder character whose lineage is investigated using imaginative means, a lineage that has homology with the Irish of Murray’s own. What stands out about this collection, however, is the depth of its vision. Murray ranges through the Western canon while situating himself in his own history in a way that feels individualized. As Derek Webster writes in a take uncannily close to mine, Murray’s vision is one of “a northern Ontario of religion, drinking, former wars, weather (it’s always turning to winter), pent frustration and Irish dislocation.” As with Carousel, “[t]here is quite a lot of dying, too,” but Webster argues that a balance is struck by sheer “creation”, for “[t]ime is not linear in these poems: instead, there is an atmosphere of both past and present, the before and after of events, mingle to create the history of a place.” I trust this all sounds quite grand, and far more promising than the morbidly silly Carousel. I can even capture within quotes a quality that suggests to me that Murray could have been great, would he have abandoned his quest to be a fool. Consider the following powers of pure seeing as reflected in description from “The Last of the Sinners Waits on a Rock for Noah”:

I stood with the calm of a hunting stork,
the patience of a scarecrow: arms outstretched
for balance, one foot drowned to the ankle
in the floodwaters, the other tucked
inside a knee, one sole gripping my leg,
the other palming like a fist that highest peak.
I lost count at forty days, but still know this –
by twenty the water had chased us up here,
by thirty the heads of my people had sunk below
the rain, by forty memory deserted me
the awareness I was now all body: bones
and skin waterlogged and salted into this pose.
Around me at times birds flew: sparrow,
split-tailed swallow, nightingale and thrush,
each winging on its last breath
then spinning down into the sea –
never one with a moment’s thought given to
saving itself on an arm where blood still flowed.
Sometime recently, I couldn’t say when,
a strong but, later I learned, unfaithful crow
came gliding just above the hushed surface –
its cry petulant, as though tired of carrying
the sky: those ailerons, suited to soaring,
camouflaging it like a thief against the Black Sea.

This is Heighton-grade writing that continues for a further six stanzas. So precise, so closely realized, that within its breadth only time is indistinct (and purposefully so). The Cottage-Builder’s Letter reflects a poet enamoured of image and marks Murray’s high point as an artist, probably because he found a way to short-circuit his own proclivities to ha-ha-ho-ho. As Sol writes in the introduction, “George does not build his poems from personal anecdotes – there are precious few biographical details of the kind that some poets make the heart of their work.” Carousel had tepid-funny gallows humour as its sole emotional register; this book comes closest to a real, wise sadness, mostly due to how carefully it captures the failed dreams of its dead speakers through vivid language, though – I shouldn’t oversell the case – many of the poems seem emotionless for all their descriptive ingenuity. The metaphor I’d make here is one of cinematography. The picture is always beautiful, but only sometimes affecting.

Yet this kind of writing wasn’t sustained.

The Hunter
(McClelland & Stewart, 2003)

​In this book, Murray (and he’s on the record about it) goes full-Ashbery and Hill, describing his epic as “a much darker, crazier, fractured . . . work” that’s culturally-atmospherically inspired by 9/11. He adds in the Northern Poetry Review that it’s “a book of excess and ranting declamation,” an “apostrophic response to times [he] felt weren’t being responded to well. The poems were longer, jamming images and thoughts up against one another in a disconcerting fashion, sometimes several to a line. It was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting in words. It was, in essence, a jeremiad.” Like many turns to angry art, Heighton among them in his Patient Frame, Murray’s language suffers as a result. His strength – virtuoso description – is given over to abstraction in “Hunter”:

The forest lies quiet immediately before the axe,
the desert gives up accelerating the wind.
Across the earth game birds and salmon go still,
deer and bison and hoary goats freeze instantly.
It is he who stepped on a lizard’s throat and called it
a dragon, he who defeated a mountain village
and named it a kingdom, he who hung for a night
and bled song from his wounds, he who chases
the chariot sun across the sky and never catches it.
Let us retreat to a time of less and more sin, he says,
let us entreat our wives and sisters to birth monsters.
Let us return to the roots of our earliest prophecies.

The language slackens as he talks about wounds and songs, no? And wind. There’s no rootedness in specifics given us within The Cottage-Builder’s Letter. To Murray’s credit, he went for a high tone that is at least Hill’s (Ashbery I find harder to detect), but the vagueness of the language, ie. “Crane” and

By which road did they come,
the one through the jungle
or the one through the desert?
The one through the mountain pass.
Ah, is it open again?
It is open to them. All roads are open
to them? They don’t require roads.
They seldom use them?
They float above all roads, they move
as the crane flies; all roads lead
somewhere and, with a little
thought, here could be somewhere. . .

I find utterly pedestrian, unlike the actual stork-like posture described in the sophomore collection’s “The Last of the Sinners Waits on a Rock for Noah.” Murray’s decline isn’t terminal, however; we’re more in a state of slow decay.

The Rush to Here
​(Nightwood, 2007)

​As a book comprised of self-described “thought sonnets,” meaning that the form is sonnet-ish (14 lines) but instead of end-rhyme with sound, Murray relies on conceptual chime instead, The Rush to Here is yet another Murray soft-concept book. Consider “Days of Glass”:

These are the days of glass, each pane clear
enough to show what’s beyond, yet stacked up
against one another, they begin to blur.
Faint warps, lone motes of dust, fingerprints raised
in ghostly stains; each insignificant
and nearly clear to the unaided eye,
but seen through, back to back, and in quantity,
twisting distance into a barrier to sense.
Lined up like atoms in a brick, these unseen
flaws wait, and the further you try to look
through, the better odds what’s next will be missed.
Polish them as you like, see what you see.
This dust can only be cleaned by the hammer.
To reach the quick one must go through the nail.

Taking the first stanza, “clear” is an antonym to “blur”; “up” and “raised” are synonyms. Forgive me if I don’t find this terribly groundbreaking, nor do I find Murray’s stated impatience with the sonnet’s sonic structure – the reason he went in for thought-rhyme as opposed to, you know, rhyme-rhyme – terribly convincing: “the more I wrote, the more I didn’t like the faux Elizabethan sing-song sound that comes from the linguistic acrobatics necessary to complete the rhyme contract.” Murray deems his new work “more successful poetically” than the kinds of sonnets he used to write, but I have to ask: which sonnet do you prefer, the examples that came before in the discussion of Carousel or these oddly terse, thought-jumbled ones that move in a herky-jerky way?

Thinking this point through more in my own paragraphical way: perhaps Murray never needed to be inoculated against sound because his sonnets worked in Carousel due to their noun-density and rhythm, not their rhymes. Much of Murray’s slackness is probably attributable to his lack of an ear, and it’s especially notable in The Rush To Here because everything is about completing the thought-rhymes and filling out that form on a cognitive plane rather than an aural one. Any poet who wants to throw out half of what makes poetry good, then be my guest I guess. Happy to lap you.

​Strangest of all, Murray is at his most personal (at least in terms of persona-less pronoun use) in The Rush to Here, but he’s also at his most emotionless. Consider “Ditch”:

How many feet was it in front of my home
that I fell in the ditch that opening night
fifteen years back, drunk and rank of some town
girl’s perfume? The bank and weed’s tall theatre
drew a blackout curtain over my prone
form and swayed, a shushed and respectful crowd
viewing a well-known/well-appointed corpse
laid out in the roadside’s funeral home.
From a civil bed to the misty primal;
spin me, stars, until I am erect.
Take me by the neck like a mother would, that first
clutch at the nape, lift me to your breast.
Dumb, the cars’ searchlights passed my dim cradle.
Dumber still, I lay agape and slept.

Sure, this can’t be taken literally, there’s the mythical “speaker” at work; but the “I” is at least useful to be somehow proximate to the self, an imagining-into. Note the same morbid eulogy structure of Carousel, but more ragged in execution, thinner, lacking even the tepid terminal joke. I hesitate to nominate another of Murray’s choices to being equal to the abandonment of sound as a property of verse – for me this is a cardinal sin – but he made an equivalent decision on the road to thought-rhymery that led to peril: a penchant to craft Jack Handey-isms in the sonnet container where the objective is to be clever and be clever only. We’re back to a variation on the whole poem-as-pun idea from Carousel, but in this instance more of a poem as a set up for a joke rather than the whole poem as the performance of a joke, if such a distinction doesn’t strike you as being too fine. Here are some of the proto-aphorisms of Murray:

Seeking a higher power means, sincerely,
I climbed these stairs just hoping for more than yours.
(“Automatic Doors”)
 
Fatigue is just a step towards thrill,
And standing means you’re alive, at least for now.
(“The Devil”)
 
There are many worlds we can’t tell from our own
Because some choices don’t matter at all.
(“Many Worlds”)
 
When you throw pieces of yourself into
the world, do you consider it discarding
or decorating?
(“Silence is a Dead Language”)

Glimpse
​(ECW, 2010)

and

Quick
​(ECW, 2017)

are full-on collections of aphorisms that are not included in Murray’s Selected, and for good reason: they’re foolish. I’ll make the most cogent comment I can by way of analogy. If I asked you who would be the most unwise character reference possible in Canadian Poetry, and you said, “Michael Lista,” then you’d be right! Here’s Lista on Quick in Quill and Quire:

However wonderful these aphorisms are on their own, Glimpse’s real accomplishment is in its sequencing. The page is its own unit in Glimpse: each group of five aphorisms is subtly interlocked to its page, and each page to the collection as a whole. It’s this sophisticated curation that prevents Glimpse from becoming a kaleidoscope of bon mots or a burlesque of cracking fortune cookies. Instead, we get a glimpse into the soul of a man – eloquent, wry, contradictory, profound.

Lista is qualified to judge people’s souls?[i] Maybe in the George-W.-Bush-looking-into-Vladimir-Putin’s-eyes kind of way.

Whiteout
​(ECW, 2012)

​This book is not interesting to me save for a review of it (that I agree with) from Candace Fertile in Quill and Quire, who writes that Murray’s poems “that make use of rhyme” are “particularly effective.” That’s about as much as I’d praise this text, cinching together as it does my earlier critique. Besides, it’s pointless to keep hammering away at the same deficiencies over and over again. Right?

Diversion
​(ECW, 2015)

​Wrong! The same deficiencies keep recurring. Murray was quite late to the early 2010s Jeramy Dodds-influenced Hipster Joke Party Poetry in his sixth, or eighth depending on how you score it, book of ‘poetry.’ Crabwise to the Hounds dropped in 2008, a flurry of clones followed in its wake, and Murray finally got around to copying the already-copied. Here, his poems deliberately riff on social media. Consider #CivilDisconvenience:

Civil unrest always evolves into parties.

Police hunch over coffee with their heads bowed and gun heads twitching.

Rows of driveways straight as bars on windows.

A Streetcar Named Covet.

I just realized my dick and head both loll the same way when tired.

Dollarama looted but the bookstore left untouched.

Staff the barricades!

We used to say don’t go into the woods whereas now we say don’t read the comments.

Cave wall shadows only work if there’s a fire.

It appears that decimate now means to reduce by a factor of holy fuck. Can anyone tell whether it’s kindness or malice that’s reached homeopathic levels?

Allow me to apologize in advance for my humanity.

Type that line as though something depended on it.

Your door rattles in the jamb but the lock is sturdy and continues to hold.

The armchair uprising has begun.

The likeness to Dodds’s Glitter Dolphin-verse is uncanny, but also Murray’s lack of an ear (as compared to Dodds’) shows too. Murray’s work is unserious, as far from real emotion as can be – it’s meant to be amusing, suggesting its author is compiling jokes rather than writing whole poems that become terminal jokes (Carousel), or whole poems as apparatus for clever aphorisms (The Rush to Here) or aphorisms alone as cleverness (Glimpse, Quick). Now we have a joke per line that either lands or not. Problem is, the poems don’t land as poems. They land as manic Chevy Chase pratfalls stitched together.

Part Three:
Military Parade or Cenotaph?

​Poets are supposed to want Selecteds. I used to think I wanted one too. After all, I relied on them to give me the first glimpses of the greats I’d come to love. William Carlos Williams’ Selected poems. Elizabeth Bishop’s. Anne Sexton’s. This list is so long . . . but it is overshadowed by a more powerful phenomenon. The Selecteds were merely gateway drugs, the enticements to reading every single poem such a poet wrote, to get a sense of the multitude of their multitudes. This led me in many cases to Collecteds, and if that was not possible, to library visits and binge online antiquarian purchases of a poet’s ouvre. The point is, I learned to become dissatisfied with mere selections, even when done well; I came to distrust selectors, and I began to truly mourn the poems that weren’t included that were on opposite pages. They had lost their friend, and their friend had lost them. I began to suspect Selected poems not as a parade of poems marching in aesthetic precision, but instead as Thriller Zombie Dance achievements, as designations that a poet is “worth” wrapping together like a mummy. I’ve become ambivalent, then, about a Selected poems in my own case. If it weren’t for the fact that the introductory essay has such a positive power in creating the conditions for readership, as well as my awareness that Selecteds are efficient cultivators of future comprehensive readers, I’d be convinced the practice of late-middle-aged poets republishing their work was foolish. Which is to say: I think Selecteds are for the people, and not for me. 

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[i] I’m trying to stay in the spirit of the book and be problematic by injecting myself into the criticism.

[ii] Consider this moment to be my own “section-as-entire-joke” moment.​

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Shane Neilson (mad; autistic) is a poet, physician, and critic from New Brunswick. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Literature and Medicine, Prairie Schooner, and Verse Daily. In 2023, he published The Suspect We (Palimpsest Press), a book of poetry concerning disabled lived experience during the pandemic, with fellow disabled poet Roxanna Bennett. Also in 2023, he published Canadian Literature and Medicine: Carelanding with Routledge.