Jim Murdoch grew up in the heart of Burns Country in Scotland. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevance—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in 1973 he read Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney' and felt as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. How could something so... so seemingly unpoetic be poetry? He aimed to find out.
Now Then
We say things aren't as bad as
we remember but mostly it's
the other way round because
no one recalls hurt or pain with
any degree of accuracy and why
would they want to?
We're fighting a losing battle
on two fronts from an
untenable present.
Wondering what we'll
misremember tomorrow is the
least of our problems.
Expectation is the Mother of Disappointment
"A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words." - William Carlos Williams
Williams was right, half-right at least,
although a poem is less of a machine
and more of a tool:
closer to a backscratcher
than a two-stroke engine.
True, there are simpler machines—
pulleys and screws,
wedges, wheels and axles—
but no one thinks of them.
We expect too much from our poets.
Poems, most poems, are a
means to scratch an itch
and little more
and it's never even the reader's itch.
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