57. Jim Murdoch

Much published Larkin enthusiast who hails from Scotland.

Jim Murdoch grew up in the heart of Burns Country in Scotland. In fact, his first poem was in butchered Scots. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevances—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in secondary school the teacher handed out badly-roneoed copies of Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney' and he felt as if the proverbial scales had fallen from his eyes. How could something so... so unpoetic as far as he could tell be poetry? He's been trying to answer that question for the past fifty years during which time his work has graced the pages of many now-defunct magazines and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears and Poetry Scotland, that are still hanging in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and (increasingly) next door’s cat. Jim has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

Poems

4am Reading Larkin
House Clearance
Soulmates and Kindred Spirits
Transference
Philip
Poetic Reality
The Hedgehog and the Goldfish

4am Reading Larkin

The fish sees me up
and demands food.
He has me trained.
He thinks me soft.
 
He gobbles his flakes
with ease and greed, 
looks for more but
I’m not that weak.
 
Finally, he quits,
forgets, starts to
dig through the rocks
and shit below.
 
What choice does he have?
He makes a meal
of his life but
that’s all he has.
 
He eats and he shits
and swims and shits.
I make coffee
and a light snack.
 
I choose a book and
read old favourites:
‘Mr. Bleaney’,
‘Church Going’, ‘Toads’.
 
Nothing goes in.
It wastes an hour
but I have loads
of time to waste.
 
Philip would get this.
I don’t expect
he owned a fish.
He drank like one,
 
an expression that
I’ve never quite 
understood as
fish don’t drink.

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House Clearance

originally published in Turbulence #12

(after Larkin)

‘This was my late father’s room. He’d always
wanted a place where he could write in peace—
somewhere quiet.’ Bookcases, coated in dust
line the walls and crowd around a tired desk
 
on which there sits an ancient Dell PC,
a Pentium III. ‘Dad wasn’t one to
throw out something that still had life in it.’
Clock, ergonomic chair, lamp, no pictures
 
on the walls, no family snaps or prints—
‘I’ll sort it.’ So, I pack a lifetime’s worth
in boxes and crates and stub out my fags
on this heart-shaped dish his wife seemingly
 
brought him back from America. ‘I don’t
want a thing,’ his daughter said, ‘Sell it all.’
You learn a lot about a man by what 
he leaves behind and what he takes with him.
 
He loved the classics: Vaughan Williams and Bax, 
the poems of Larkin, plays by Beckett.
The book he was reading waits by his chair
a receipt from Tesco’s keeping his place.
 
Once I expect he’d have stood here like me 
and looked around at this now empty shell
imagined the things he might do in it
and shivered at the possibility
 
that one day he might think some great thought here,
might write something down that could change the world
or at the least make some sense out of it.
Perhaps he did. No one will ever know.

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Soulmates and Kindred Spirits

When people talk about having a moment
some imagine looking across a crowded room
and making eye-contact with the one,
the love-of-their-life-to-be.
 
Me, I picture a similar room, dingier though.
catching Larkin’s eye and
thinking, to myself, Shit.
 
You know the kind of thing one piece of shit mutters
when it recognises another piece of shit in the dark
right before both cross the road
to try to avoid each other.
 
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Transference

Larkin sent my poems back so
I didn't bother Beckett who
likely would have replied,
if only a brief, bluff scrawl.
Ah well. Too late now.
 
Don't meet your heroes they say.
Oddly enough I never longed to
but I would like to have touched
the hems of their mantles before
they passed.

<<<

Philip

It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
The face he did not see to be his own.
—Philip Larkin, ‘The Writer’
  
All solitude is selfish, so Philip wrote.
He wrote it in a poem so who’s to say
if he believed it or what he meant by it.
 
He was, it has been said, a selfish man.
I doubt he would deny it but he might
object to what we thought that proved.
 
Poems are not diaries or confessions
or contracts or suicide notes but often
his were resignations (the other kind).
 
Philip was often resigned, resigned to
live in a world without mirrors though
not reflections (again, the other kind).
 
Talent is a burden, life, a wilderness
and fame (of either kind), the final straw.

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Poetic Reality

originally published in Fleas on the Dog #15

A dog is dozing in the garden
like a poem I think,
a dog-shaped poem
sprawled across a page.
 
So not a sonnet then
and nothing epic.
 
Something Larkinesque I’d say
and not just because he has his jowls;
he has his eyes too and as lugubrious a bark
as a bark can hope to get.
 
The dog was a lie.
A cat is in the garden.
But “dog” works better.

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The Hedgehog and the Goldfish

Garfield is my spirit animal – Henry Zebrowski

If I was Larkin, I’d be famous by now
and have infamy to look forward to.
Be dead too, come to think of it. Still,
so far, I’ve fought off the drought.
 
If I was Larkin, I’d have seen and fed
and killed a hedgehog. I’ve seen, fed
and killed a goldfish but there was
no poetry in it, not for either of us.
 
Poetry is a lot like love. Sometimes
it’s instantaneous. Mostly it’s what
remains after reason and emotion
have had their say.
 
Now picture a pudgy hedgehog
leading Larkin across an Elysian
field and him carping, “So you’re
quite sure this is the scenic route?”
 
Which makes me wonder: can a
goldfish be a spirit guide? Would
it need a bowl or what? I mean
how would that even work?

<<<