2 poems by Jim Murdoch

Jim Murdoch created “The Eye” (click here to read) from a 1910 translation of The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales by Jean-Pierre Camus and “Smitten” (click here to read) from the 1922 novel The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.

About the poems the process of composition, Jim Murdoch writes:

Although I’ve been writing poetry for over 50 years and have, at the time of writing, just completed my 1800th poem, I’ve shied away from “constructed” pieces—occasions where I’ve sat down and deliberately set out to write anything: prose, poetry, lyrics, or dialogue—so I’m unsure what attracted me to Heron Tree‘s site because I literally had nothing to offer them. But I decided to have a crack and last year, much to my surprise (frankly, I was flabbergasted), they took two.

So, I decided to have a crack just for myself because, despite being out of my depth, I’d enjoyed the challenge. The result was “The Eye.” As before, the text was selected pretty much at random, only two or three being rejected as not containing a great enough variety of words, and once I started, I let the growing poem itself be my guide rather than the text. By this stage, I’d settled on an approach I felt comfortable with: greying out the unused words rather than redacting in black, which, frankly, I find a bit ugly. The epigraph, however, is not part of the found text.

After a while, Heron Tree‘s name appeared on my database as due for something else, so I found another two texts that met their preconditions. Again, I deliberately made my choices without a great deal of forethought and, as a result, found myself working on poems I wouldn’t have attempted otherwise, that weren’t me, which is oddly stimulating. The resulting pieces felt a bit artificial, but the three were sent off and two promptly accepted. When the proofs arrived, however, and some time had passed and I’d forgotten about the process, I found reading the poems anew…illuminating, better than I remembered, worthier. Still not a me I recognized, though.

Also by Jim Murdoch at Heron Tree: The Gates to Mesopia and Transference.