Sheila Murphy

Sheila Murphy 2010

Sheila E. Murphy (born 1951 in Mishawaka, Indiana) is an American text and visual poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. Green Integer Press. 2003. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

She earned:

With Beverly Carver, Murphy co-founded and coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series for twelve years. Murphy has engaged in a broad range of poetic styles for more than three decades of writing and publication.

Poetry

Toward a New Year
One whittles something, perhaps to reckon with an atmosphere
in which the strategy remains produce, send forth, consume.
From cold the wild geese fly away. In a pattern of advance/recede,
velocity’s amended. The human spirit falls to virtuosic silence.
As if to shift the factual in favor of the show. Perception’s
inexperience informs oncoming history. Whose viscosity inverts
clear thought during deliberation of a wind quintet.
A trellis poised mid-snow, hosting the myth of climb until it’s so

The emphasis on sound and the use of neologisms and cadences derive from study of music theory and performance. These same linguistic processes are evident in Murphy's prose poetry. As Jen Tynes[1] noted in a review of Proof of Silhouettes published in the February 2, 2005, issue of Verse, "The varied structure of the poems creates a super-awareness of prose versus broken line that seems organically fitting--[sic] the reader is never quite lulled into recognition of the landscape or movement of this book, and yet it manages to move together, to speak a whole thing with clarity but without oversimplification. The form of the book as a whole creates...its own considerate and considerable relationship between lines of verse and prose, progression and procession..."

In referring to Murphy's prose poems in Letters to Unfinished J., Simon DeDeo (Rhubarb is Susan, Feb. 2006) wrote that

Murphy has the sensual fluency of Gertrude Stein..." [and possesses] "... a decided openness that leads to the sensation of risk, of stopping the torrents to speak directly ... that maintains a distinctly non-narrative attitude, filling the writing ... [I]t is in that pouring that we get the whole Murphy ... the Murphy who wants to point out, to judge, to indicate.

Recently the prose poem has been the form of choice for Murphy, who coined the term for a new kind of prose poem, the "American Haibun",[2] which is quite separate from the traditional Japanese form. "American Haibun" is being written by other innovative, English language poets, suggesting a possible trend.[3]

Collaboration

Sheila Murphy writes, "Collaborative projects allow a writer or visual poet to participate in a larger creative mechanism than the usual self, placing the writer in a new, larger system that brings about art that is different from that created by either of the individuals involved. While separate from the individual writer's work, collaboration strengthens muscles that can benefit the individual writer, but not not bear a direct relationship to the writer's individual projects."

She has or is currently collaborating with poets and artists such as Douglas Barbour, Dan Waber, Scott Glassman, Charles Alexander, mIEKAL aND, Lewis LaCook, Peter Ganick, K.S. Ernst, C. Mehrl Bennett, John M. Bennett, Scott Helmes, Al Ackerman, and David Baratier.

Writings

Anthologies

Exhibitions of visual poetry and art

Visual poetry book publications

References

  1. ↑ versemag.blogspot.com
  2. ↑ unf.edu
  3. ↑ Mudlark A Sound the Mobile Makes in Wind: 50 American Haibun by Sheila E. Murphy Mudlark #8

External links

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