Ginger Murchison's poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Chattahooche Review, Terminus Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Southern Poetry Anthology and in her chapbook Out Here.
Ginger is Editor in Chief of Cortland Review and is on the Board of Trustees of The Frost Place. With Thomas Lux, she helped found Poetry@TECH at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she was Associate Director as well as one of the McEver Chairs. She served six years as a member of the conference faculty for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She lives with her husband Clyde Mynatt in Ft. Myers, Florida.
everything about the South boiling over like another consequence in the heaving night air pungent with mildewed magnolia blossoms ripened to rotting, dank end of the blooming season — from "Every Last Time"
Since that class, I placed a heavy emphasis on writing in my classes and — always — in a volunteer creative writing class after school. After
moving to Georgia and spending the last 13 of those 31 years in the 8th grade, I was absolutely sure I wanted to read something an 8th grader
hadn’t written, but though nudged to write something of my own, I didn’t know what I could possibly write… something non-fiction, maybe,
something inspirational, about how the days went with a special-needs daughter. I had the first sentence, but past that, a blank page.
My desk-top computer was brand new and somehow I stumbled into a poetry workshop online. I didn’t know what a poem was at that
point — not really — but I could tell there was something going on in some of those “poems” that I couldn’t find in the others, and the
discussion in that chatroom, one day, about line breaks intrigued me. This was an art form, something that could be learned — a kind of
writing that would require more of me and more of the language than anything I’d done so far — something like play, and for the first time in
a long, long time, I had time to play.
Then, the exciting phone call from Tom Lombardo: he was accepting the manuscript for the Press 53 Poetry Series. Because he’s a hands-on
editor with extraordinary skill and commitment to both the book and the poet, he verbalized his own vision for the book. I had to explain why
I was laughing when he told me he wanted to open the book with “The Failure of Archaeology.” From there, the book took shape around Tom’s
vision. That’s what a really wonderful editor does. I give Tom Lombardo all the credit for how the book, finally, morphed into its published
shape.
Even now, just as when I first started writing, my brain tells me I have to get everything else done first, my house in order as it
were. That’s a great cop-out. Because my house is almost never in order, I have this wonderful excuse to keep from facing down a blank page. I
don’t write every day. I don’t even write every week. Actually, I “avoid” writing until something starts muscling its way through my mind and
I can’t ignore it. The more poetry I read, the more often that happens. What’s evolved is the level of my comfortability with that. I used to
panic when I wasn’t writing. Now I know it will come. I spend far more time revising than writing.
The wind billowing out the seat of my britches, My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty, The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers, Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight, A few white clouds all rushing eastward, A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses, And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!
The rest of us, still wearing the heavy afternoon into evening the floors still unswept, watch commercials to remind us what it was we used to want someday. No surprise we end up unzipped in a hotel downtown unsaying I love you the marriage over everyone always already knowing the mistake it had been.
Thank you, Maurice, for these smart and thoughtful questions, for giving me the opportunity for this conversation. There’s nothing I’d rather
talk about than poetry and the making of a poem.
Ginger Murchison’s debut full-length collection, a scrap of linen, a bone acts as a photo album into the writer’s past and present, a distillation of memory from personal and family experience. The natural world serves as a reflection of and backdrop for the human experiences. The book begins by showing us how to interpret the book, as a work of family archeology, with a poem entitled “The Failure of Archeology”:
. . . the scholars will, inch by inch dig down to a bracelet, a scrap of linen, a bone and write the story without us—
Many of the pieces present a dusty sepia reflection of the writer’s parents and grandparents. The family is recreated from the exterior — they are poems of resurrection. These poems reflect a hardship of life in a dry Kansas. A grandfather’s death, is described in “Vocabulary” with:
Carved faces looked at him, then at the wall, the flowers there dead-brown as he was.
Everything is brown and dry, the living and the dead. The author’s own childhood is presented in similar tones, as in “Hardwood Floors” where
the work of laying floors with her father leads to “he and the house all dust.”
As the book progresses, water seeps into the poems and the author’s life, but not always as a comfort. Water is a life of the writer’s own,
children, found moments of leisure, but also danger. In “From the Deck in Mid-November” this dichotomy is summarized by “The hydrangeas have
one-by-one died from drowning or thirst.” There are moments spent on the banks of a river, catcalling to rowers or watching a son drift off
on a raft. These are peaceful, easy moments. The rain can also be joyful, as in “Lesson with Flashcards” in which the author watches her
daughter with the family dog:
I know I’m as close as I’ll ever get to how grass feels in the rain.
Or in “Connemara” where “The kiss of rain rinses the road.” There are also images of the “bothersome river” and over the
South “boiling over.”
Several of the poems in this collection utilize language itself as a self-reflective symbolism. In “Small Craft Advisory,” as the writer’s
son is preparing for a trip on his homemade raft, the following advice is given to him:
Take some water, bread and honey, apples, too, and, especially, a friend. It will take both of you to untie the language and discover the insignificance of speech.
Speech might be insufficient but words are powerful. Again, from “Vocabulary” as the young author is living her first experience with death, it’s the word that is substantial:
but that whole farmhouse tilted toward the casket with the weight of my new word.
Or, alternatively, in “At the Holy Well of Tobernalt,” in which we find a woman bringing her disabled son to a well for healing, the boy’s name, a word, is a potential talisman:
His name, he says, is Evan, his hands, knots in his jacket pockets as if Evan were a stone hidden there for making wishes.
Another theme within the collection are the uses of color and birds. These are welcome escapes from the dusty, hard world of survival. Their
presence in the brown and yellow tones of personal history stand out even more brightly. An orange is dropped on a lap, yellow bananas greet
East Berliners visiting the West, bluebirds dive for berries, a crayon-bright purple orchid blooms brilliantly after being thrown in compost.
These moments startle and give us hope.
a scrap of linen, a bone is ultimately a book about personal history, memory, connection with the natural world, us. Ginger Murchison
is a poet to keep an eye on. We’ll be seeing her again.