This interview was conducted through email between Elizabyth Hiscox and Patricia Colleen Murphy in June of 2008.

Elizabyth Hiscox teaches creative writing and composition at Arizona State University at the Polytechnic Campus. An Assistant Poetry Editor for the online journal 42 Opus, she was also a 2007 Poet-in-Residence at St. Chad's College of Durham University, England. Her work has most recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Foundation, and The Journal of Modern Literature, and is soon to be featured as part of the Seventh Avenue Streetscape in central Phoenix.

Patricia Colleen Murphy teaches poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction at Arizona State University at the Polytechnic campus. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review. She has received awards from the Associated Writing Programs and the Academy of American Poets, Glimmer Train Press, The GSU Review, and The Southern California Review.

EH: Traditional stanza structure is used in the poems that appear in this issue of Notre Dame Review, but I know that prose poetry and more experimental forms are also part of your practice.  In what direction do you see your work currently heading?

PCM: I often use form as a tool for revision. I’m a narrative poet with a tendency to be wordy, so I play with stanzas and line breaks to limit dead language. This helps me write poems with more weight per line. Recently, though, I’ve been trying to let the composition process be less about exerting control over the language and more about channeling the language. Prose poems allow me to access emotional territory I might otherwise avoid. Right now I’m writing a memoir. Writing prose is also a good lesson in letting go. 

EH: In “Studious,” you represent a teacher / student relationship that allows for the kind of intimacy that arises in the classroom: one where professional distance is maintained but interpersonal connections are made.  Can you talk a bit about the process of navigating that explosive space on the page?

PCM: I’ve been teaching at the university level for 15 years, and the events of that poem took place in the spring of 1998, my fifth year at ASU, when I was 28. Phil was in what we call a “stretch class”—we had the same room, same teacher, and same 14 or so students over two semesters. We all knew each other very well. I had a counselor take over two of my class sessions after Phil died because we were really a wreck. I did have dreams about Phil coming back to our class, and those dreams were full of “teacher” images. I think those classroom details help highlight the professional nature of the relationship, while the personal details about Phil show that I cared about his life very much. And the brother image at the end of the poem ups the intimacy ante by punctuating the student’s importance in the life of a young teacher.

EH: The palpable presence of location in “Tempe Arizona, 2000” begs the landscape question: what role do you see place playing in your verse and would you consider yourself a regional poet at this point?

PCM: I wouldn’t call myself a regional poet, but I might call my book Sun Damage, the collection in which that poem appears, a regional book. Many of those poems were written during a time when I was exploring Arizona wilderness areas. I was also getting used to living in the desert after growing up in Ohio where we had rain and snow and humidity and winter coats. I always write as an exploration of some emotional or external conflict in my life, and that poem touches on a theme that is very important to me.  I truly do have this terror about our planet. I have this enormous guilt over my own impact on the planet, which is the sense of helplessness you see in the poem. Other poems in that collection also point to issues of land abuse in the southwest.

EH: There is an essential musicality to your work, a vibrancy of language that nods to the oral / aural tradition of sound play.  I imagine that at least part of this is a natural ear for what clicks, but I wonder what emphasis you place on the sonic aspects in the initial composition stages?

PCM: Musicality is something I highlight in my poems and in my classes. I ask students to re-write flat lines to include assonance, consonance, slant rhyme—musical devices that elevate prose to poetry. That’s harder for students who haven’t read extensively because they don’t have those sounds in their heads—which is what I think of when I hear the term “natural ear.”  I was very lucky that both of my parents loved music and literature. I remember my mother reading Robert Louis Stevenson to me. Behind every poem I write I hear, “How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue.” I also hear my father singing Fats Waller’s “Mad at ya cause your feet’s too big.” Both of my grandfathers were musicians. One of my favorite poets is Langston Hughes because I can hear piano and clarinet in his verse. Sound often comes to me before language does. In early drafting stages, I sometimes know the beats, but I haven’t found the words, so I fill in the blanks with a ba-bum. In revision stages, I make careful choices. In the stanza, “watch the prostitutes clucking/back, perfumed and still desperate” the slant rhyme between cluck/back and the alliteration between prostitutes/perfumed are choices I probably made in early revisions.

EH: In terms of content, personal experience seems like a well-spring for your work.  Would you speak to your unique points of inspiration and how they arrive or, perhaps, how you actively enter into the immense possibilities of memory and manage to surface with a single poem?

PCM: For me, without image there is no poem. It’s the first lesson I give my beginning poetry students: there is a difference between a journal entry and a poem. It is image. However, there also is no poem without emotion. The trick to poetry is to evoke emotion rather than explain it (as in a journal), and this occurs through image. When I remember Phil I see a pontoon boat. When I think of my impact on the planet, I see an air conditioning unit hovering over my head. I want readers to learn something from my personal experience. So I make an emotional appeal to the reader using images from my personal life.
A student said to me once that she was giving up writing because she didn’t think she could influence anyone. I asked her, then, did she plan to give up reading too? Texts influence us. This student was writing about her husband who died of Alzheimer’s in his 50’s. It was moving and meaningful work. I asked her to think about all the times she had read something that deepened her understanding of the world. She could do that with her writing. I hope to do that with my writing. It is why I delve into the personal so often. The single poems surface because I have worked through some conflict. That’s my offering to the reader—a single observation. If I’m lucky, I’ve done it with enough emotion that it teaches them something they did not know. This is the job of the poet—choose an image, make it musical, make it beautiful, let it go.