The Measure of Influence: Ryan Murphy

Ryan Murphy shows us the potential of the language collage. Evoking the Expressionist school of painting, Murphy distorts reality to enhance his poetry’s emotional effect. Though populated by the features of our familiar world, the world of his poems is parsed, fragmented, its disparate images lashed together with the bonds of lineation and lyric space.

“What black light
founders your words.
This ringing quiet.
Nostalgia debris in the shipyard.”

Murphy can trace his lineage to the juxtapositions in Kurt Schwitters’ angular acts of assemblage, but Murphy is a poet at play in the architecture of his own time, a time when database-driven cultural objects proliferate, objects whose fundamental structure depends, as in Schwitters, on the act of assemblage: montage in film, on television, edited sequences of independent images over which trademarked names, advertising slogans, and scrolling headlines have been superimposed. Murphy’s poems teach us there is a unique kind of beauty in these hyper – mediated forms:

“patchwork bulk of sea-script.
Needlepoint night.
The last breath I hear
is always out
And the second hand.”

Murphy offers poetry for the present, and in doing so, gives us literature that is timeless. Its luxurious rhythms, linguistic precision and demanding silences are an antidote to the onslaught of that which is discordant around us.   —    Carlin M. Wragg, Editor