GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct literary magazines and websites and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears and Poetry Scotland that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and, whenever the mood takes him, next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels: Jim, not the cat.

 

Having

  

The problem with wants is we imagine they’re needs

but whenever we get a thing we thought we wanted

we soon realise it wasn’t what we wanted or needed.

  

Needs are all about what’s lacking in our lives—

not necessarily what’s simply absent,

that we’ve mislaid or lost and might even miss—

but things that, if we had to live without them,

would lessen and possibly injure us.

  

Missing things can be replaced.

Damaged things are challenging.

Some can be repaired but most

repairs are only temporary and,

eventually, all things disappoint.

  

This, of course, returns us to our original problem:

i.e. what we want, need and might someday need.

Friends are not hearts and hearts are not teacups.

  

The sad truth is both wants and needs are luxuries.

We make do with what is available.

Life rarely hands over what we want or even need.

We have what we have until we no longer have it.

But at least we had it, at least that.

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living in Cumbernauld. He's been writing for over fifty years and his list of rejections is voluminous but he keeps at it. He's written most things over the years--novels, stories, songs, even plays--but he thinks of himself primarily as a poet and is currently producing poems at an unpresented pace. There are worse things to be doing in your sixties.

The Curse of Dimensionality

  

…refers to the phenomena of strange/weird things happening as we try to analyse the data in high-dimensional spaces – Swapnil Vishwakarma

  

Poems exist on a page, in the air,

in many minds, as bags of words,

as symbols and ideas within ideas.

  

Poetry exists in five dimensions:

three spatial, one temporal and

one existential.

  

The first four are positional,

either/or or here or there

but meaning is contextual

  

so,

in layman's terms,

it depends.

  

Meanings are not are or are not.

Meanings only ever seem.

Meanings are spooky.

  

And don't get me started

on the observer effect.

  

  

It Takes a Minute To…

  

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago. – Jim Bishop

  

…get started,

make a first impression,

say the Lord’s prayer—twice,

listen to a third of ‘A Fifth of Beethoven,’

figure out where you are

     and what comes next,

make a cup of tea (to fortify yourself),

read a page of Being and Time

     and not understand it,

be silent (in remembrance),

find your feet/phone/groove/voice,

copy 40 words out of Moby Dick

     and maybe understand them,

be the hero,

let the truth sink in,

take out the trash,

water your plants,

feed next door’s cat,

travel 22,000 miles through space,

watch a couple of ads on TV,

ruin a perfectly good relationship

     and have plenty of time to regret it.

Habitus

  

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us 

– John Dryden

  

I see the old man at dawn most days—

mostly dawn, no later than daybreak—

with his plastic bag and downcast eyes.

  

He never picks up anything but sometimes,

sometimes he lingers—no, attends—

and I wonder if he might and he might.

  

He’s sad—sad-looking, at least—or maybe,

maybe I’ve got it all wrong and maybe,

just maybe, it’s the other way round.

  

He’s like a writer wandering about

with a dried-out pen in his pocket.

And no notebook.

  

Or I may be reading way too much

into that damn carrier bag.

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch lives down the road from where they filmed

Gregory’s Girl which, for some odd reason, pleases him no end. 

He’s been writing poetry for fifty years for which he blames Larkin. 

Who probably blamed Hardy. Jim has published two books 

of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

 

 

The Ship of Theseus

 

 

There are many kinds of memories,

wallows, flickers, triggers and icons,

but the most vital of all are anchors,

tethers, ties that bind us to our past.

 

Some refer to them as proofs which,

is probably a more appropriate term

as proofs require outside verification

and Reason cannot be bought off.

 

The opposite of remembering should

be dismembering I would've thought

since remembering is reassembling.

Now if only it were as simple as that.

 

At what point do you stop being you?

I'm not the child I once was but insist

I'm the same person despite the fact

we don't have one atom in common.

 

What was definite is now indefinite.

I don't remember the bench we sat on

but as one bench is much like another

does it really matter which bench?

 

Memories, like every part of a human,

are short-lived and in a constant state

of flux but there is a limit and in time

even anchors get displaced by beliefs.

 

Beliefs supplant memories with ease.

Like stem cells they become whatever

they're needed to be and who can tell?

I believe we sat on a bench you and I.

 

I believe. I believe.

 

 

 

The Week of Indescribable Things

 

(for Carrie)

 

There are many things people describe as

indescribable that are eminently describable.

 

Vomit, diarrhoea, acrid piss: all are

easily describable. We just don’t want to.

 

What I want to describe,

what should be easy to describe,

 

is the pleasure water provided me at the time,

cold water running over my hands.

 

My hands are not sore but

hands know how to read the pain.

 

Afterthought

 

There were other indescribable things this week,

the way my wife cared for, endured with and simply

endured me. No words. No words. No words.

 

As she sat with me as I cried as I read

the first part of the poem to her in the dark.

No words. No words. No words.

 

 

Bishop, Bukowski and Me

 

 

The reason my poetry disappointed me

for so long

is it wasn’t great.

I thought poetry should be great.

Not necessarily great thoughts

     (not everything’s that profound)

but do great things with words.

 

Took me sixty years to realise

all poetry needs to be is poetry.

 

Occasionally,

like a Philly cheesesteak or a meat sub,

it’ll be great

     (more by fluke than design

          (some happy confluence of events))

and that’s great, really great

but, hey, even a not-so-great Mac and cheese

fills a hole, right?

 

People imagine Bishop was a better poet

than Bukowski and, technically, yeah, maybe.

What does “better” even mean?

 

I should stop beating myself up over this.

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

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.

GAS Featured Poet: Jim Murdoch

 

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct literary magazines and websites and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake and Eclectica, that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives in relative obscurity in Scotland with his wife and (occasionally) next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

I Have No Words

In Memoriam Birdy

Most pains find their way into words readily

and there are so many to choose from.

Words and pain go way back.

That said words cannot always be relied upon.

Nature made pain, humans, words;

there were bound to be issues,

to wit, I know of no word or combination of words

that comes close to containing all I feel right now.

They’re all too refined, too evolved, too damn fiddly.

A scream likely would do the trick.

It's a kind of word: primal, natural,

language at its rawest.

The Rule of Three

My bird has died.

I feel very clingy

and follow my wife

like a little stray pup.

Please don't die.

Things die all the time

but mostly in threes.

If my wife dies I’ll be alone

and I don't want to die alone.

I should buy a plant in case.

I wouldn't mind if a plant died.

The Natural Order

My bird has died and

I can't stop writing poems.

I'm so conflicted.

I like writing poems but

I miss my bird too.

I tell myself I'm keeping

him alive in the

poems (some small part of him)

but that's not it, no.

I couldn't stop him dying

any more than I

can deny these words their right

to life.

           What does the

world need, another bird or

another bloody poem?