Miguel Murphy Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand

 

 

One thing I became aware of at a relatively young age is that we are stuck in our bodies. I don’t mean that we’re separate from the body we live in, though it feels like that sometimes. We’re inseparable from our bodies in many ways, but we can control our bodies only to a limited extent. Our bodies affect our moods, our cravings, our desires, our perspectives… One thing I love about these poems is that this reality is screaming through them. Different people have different relationships with their bodies. How would you characterize your relationship to your body, or the way you understand it? How does this affect you as a poet?

 

Oh I go for Whitman in this regard. Hankering, gross, mystical, nude. One of the roughs—disorderly fleshy and sensual, eating and drinking and breeding—the journeywork of stars. I’ll take that. Also angry, falling apart in a hell of awareness. I think about the torment of the body that listens to what Beckett called a dirty story, told at some colossal pitch of pure smut, the bawdy innuendo of eternity that beats at this moment in vain against our eardrum. Then there’s Ernest Becker who wrote this brilliant book published the year I was born, 1974, The Denial of Death, in which he says something like our basic nature is paradoxical, being half-animal, half-symbol, simultaneously worms and gods, gods with anuses. We watch ourselves defecate. I like a lot of gender criticism that thinks about the body as a filter for the world, in which the whole tiresome palimpsest of self-identities is important. I like Audre Lorde saying, I am a Black Lesbian Woman Poet with Cancer. I think about having a body and I’m furiously pissed off. Also enormously thrilled. It’s a terrible joy, blood against cold space.

 

To sing is a species of revenge. As a poet, I lock myself up to be unapologetically alone. This is my small rebellion. Capricorn in Exile is my earthly norm.

 

 

In your poems, you use risky phrases that could make less highly-crafted poems fall flat. For instance, the lines “when the rains of despair overwhelmed / even the ancient goodness of your voice” in the poem “Banishment of Rain in the Heart’s Blue Mesquite” could, in another poem, sound abstract and overly dramatic. But in your work, lines like these work – it seems to me –because the emotional undertow pulls the reader through them, and they end up adding to that undertow, making the poem sound epic. Could you give us some insight into how you make this work?

 

I’m not sure it does work. I know I want music more than anything, so I have to really work hard at having narrative, an anchor, vulnerability. The journalism of most poetry bores me to death. But so does overly conceptual work. I want to be spoken to, in a way that never happens in real life, but in a way I need. I don't need a poem to be smart. But I do need an intimacy. It's a risk, to speak to the reader in a tender and honest way without abandoning the obvious brutality of life. Clarice Lispector, Jean Genet. These are my favorite poets, even though they're writing novels. I can't get through a single page of their work without feeling that I'm being held and struck down at the same time. I want that, a conversational privacy filled with horor and longing.

 

 

At some point, I realized that I have separation anxiety. I’m getting better about temporary separation, but permanent separation is still horrifying. In the poems you’re sharing with us here, you’ve tapped into my greatest fear: separation from the person I love the most. The emotional pull in your poems is astonishing, like the ocean sucking us out to sea. Would you share with us the (emotional / chronological) place from which you wrote these poems?

 

The immediate emotion of the poem is an invention, but I’d also say the poem is a kind of monument, or feeble testament to a feeling that is lost. Life is so painfully boring, all these silly things that happen. Who’d you sleep with, who’s pissing you off in traffic, if you like sushi. It’s endless Reality TV. Everyone is dispensable, like everyone else. But there are those moments for me that stay, those images I can’t get free of, the after-image of some lived moment. I’m not sure how to talk about feeling, though the occasions are pretty clear: the death of a bee, a letter to a sick lover, a toothache, therapy, a medical procedure. See? Hella boring. Nobody cares. I don’t know if the poems are successful, but the attention in them is to the feeling of an experience, and that’s more elusive.

 

I want to steal something back from the Abyss, or commit some violence against it. Have you seen the photograph of Earth from the outer rings of Saturn? The best poem is probably a suicide, but so far I’m a coward.

 

 

What is your greatest fear?                

 

Do Not Resuscitate.

 

 

I saw online that you live in one of the most interesting places I’ve been to: Venice Beach! What’s it like to live there? Will you share a story about an experience there?

 

My spot is right in the crescent between the Venice Pier, the marina jetty to the south and Malibu to the north. Winter sunsets over the ocean, summer over the Santa Monica Mountains. Some days the moon hangs full to the south over the Catalinas while the sun is still on its descent over the palm trees between Small World Books and Breeze and Brooks and Sunset and Dudley and Rose Avenues, then off to the Palisades. The panorama is like nowhere else, it’s dirty, wild, clamoring, vast. Absence here is urge. The sun hangs on our heads. The beach is our church. The locals wear flip-flops and board shorts year round. The homeless and their dogs are on a first name basis with the cops. My favorite time of year is winter when the boardwalk slows and the chilly beaches burn. The surfers climb out of their wet leather like amphibian moonwalkers. Dolphins daily. Outside my window a eucalyptus speaks to the sea and I can walk or skateboard or ride my beach cruiser to 6 coffee shops, Cow’s End on Washington, 3 Square Bakery on Abbot Kinney, Café Cielo on Main Street. I walk my dog through the canals. I work out at Gold’s. I touch Angelica Houston’s wall. I buy my flowers at four farmer’s markets each week and the whole year is summer. Holy Guacamole’s, or I grab a slice of pizza at Abbott’s and do the RoosterFish until I’m bored. I cruise the lifeguard tower at Ocean Park and Pacific, watching the Ferris Wheel after midnight. I ride up the back alley alone in a briny starlight. It's Dogtown. It's home.

 

 

For you, what is (or what should be) the intersection between poetry and politics and/or pornography/sexuality?

 

Poetry is a private act meant for privacy. I’d say it intersects politics when someone reads a poem alone and no longer feels alone. When I read Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language, being a gay person is validated in a palpable, triumphant way. I’m made legitimate, in a way I recognize in myself, even if the political world is still in a ridiculous childish debate over a question of sin, and marriage, and a definition of the family, and the responsibility of the state, red values and blue values, and God. The poem is alive in private, and its liberty exists like the body’s—it supersedes political debate, religious doctrine, the law. Poetry is unsaid truth.

 

Publishing is porn.

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Feel It Splinter

 

 

Feel it as it darkly drips & floods

a tooth-ache a small pain to keep the time

 

Feel it clock of absolute silence

the fiery licks

 

it will take to trick this skin off

this mind         feel it

 

Red-dark & daring

To remind me always is always ending

 

like a bad memory in the future

I woke without you

 

Wanting to kiss you wanting oblivion

Dribbling down           all alone

 

But for the bare moon broken

like a dim chandelier in the eucalyptus

 

And moaning in the palm trees

Ripping themselves sweetly in this darkness

 

Hear it the sea pulse in and

empty. Carve like the night my ancient bone.

 

A weight in my skull  Feel it Splinter                      

like the half-lit litanies of copernicium

 

Feel it the painful honey of a sunset

Paradise & painkiller

 

each and every second of the night

blowtorched into my gravedark jaw

 

 

 

Lorca

 

 

What did I want to witness

More than the blackness I hated

 

Like a permanent silence

Inside my own skull? In the shade

 

Underneath the flowering

Fiery roses, the dying bee

 

On the concrete sidewalk in an agony

Flickering like a painful lamp

 

Against darkness, little furnace—Myself.

I wanted to welcome this

 

Music—to save what I could not see—

Smash with a stone, or to grind with my heel

 

The body’s final angry burning—

The center of your last great movements

 

The cold grass short and stiff and dark thorns

Piercing the beach mist. I stopped for you,

 

I stopped and listened and watched while you died

And heard a black ocean in the distance—

 

A single drop of blood, wildly burning. Manic

Scimitar of your twitching, I stopped for you

 

Like stopping for myself in someone else’s future.

Gypsy. Picked Seed.

 

Perishing, plucked hearse. Blackish & deliberate.

Failing and persistent and musical—

 

Like the hand of a guitarist

Plucking the invisible—Little Spasming

 

Ripped Wing, your only instrument

in a minor nocturne for sunlight and wind.

 

 

 

Colonoscopy

 

 

I don’t know the apple

of my insides. Is it fire

 

or guts? Is it opening

Rose? Is it unfolding

 

the many burning thresholds

of the body’s inner doom, red

 

and endless? Am I coming? Am I caverns

of closed flesh pulled back? Are the doors

 

diminishing, flying apart, tearing at

the dire ruby like flayed shadow

 

a wine-dark dawn? Are they hands, wings

of the struggle—urge before flight? Am I

 

a question endlessly

welcomed, sung to, abandoned, loved

 

by name—or like this, tightly folded

and forgotten? Are they waves

 

where I wake

do I wake

 

only once? Is the mind the night?

Is the body silent, is it

 

shedding itself to reveal

the opposite of never, the star—

 

Is my voice peering into

the broken bright center where it pours?

 

Am I in the memory of who I am

already, am I shining

 

seed buried inside

another shining seed?

 

Is my father walking through me, like he used to

wearing his military blue suit?

                                                          

Is home where my mother keeps, like an angry bird

singing me my name, calling hijo, mijo,

 

hijo, like some sweet, sad stranger

out of her past? Are we children?

 

Am I new? Am I risen like an answer

asleep in the marrow, am I perfume?

 

Will I walk like a constellation turned inside-out

with hunger?—What if I cut into the apple,

 

will my nothing bleed? Is it white

and calciferous? Is my death

 

beautiful, the rising

green Earth’s philosophy? Is it daylight? Is my body

 

alone in this likeness, rabid

sack of moonful organs? Isn’t the heart

 

tendentious, cruel, math-like, exact,

questioning itself to be? to be? to not to be?

 

O tireless calculations—I can see into

dirt and heat

 

the two directions of the end

of my story, can I sleep now? Wordless

 

World, where will I begin?

Will I dream

 

another or this same wakefulness? Inner

Body, you are answerless—

 

But, who else can I speak to?

Where else is there to live?

 

 

 

Couple’s Therapy

 

 

We follow the psychologist upstairs to the attic

to summon the chemistry of a phantom.

 

Suns, human guts, rages and punishments,

we don’t know why. We don’t know why

 

we’re so thirsty. The shrink’s face is silent

like the painting of a face painted on an urn

 

filled with shade, or that color dying in

an abandoned goblet filled with wine:

 

Shame  Fear  Guilt  Hurt       

On the other side of childhood are the seasons.

 

And the two of us begin to talk,

like sleep and rain, angry and crying

 

more for ourselves than anyone. Child, the night

inside is vagrant. I see you 

 

counseled by a skull like a dark-hearted Hamlet alone

laughing with tears in his eyes.

 

“I don’t want to have to. I want to.”

Sex  AIDS  Sunlight  Anger       I look

 

into your eyes    sentencing myself

as if I were coming inside you.