Jim Murphy
Jim Murphy was born in 1971 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father spent twenty-five years working for the Rock Island Railroad, and his mother was a librarian in the public schools. At an early age, Jim began to look for the common ground between his father's and mother's careers. Through blues, jazz, and rock music, and through reading that engaged a range of American sources, Jim was introduced to the subjects and styles that have become his abiding interests. He received his A.B. from the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied poetry writing with Sherod Santos and Sw. Anand Prahlad. From Missouri, Jim went to the University of Cincinnati, where he worked with poets Don Bogen and Andrew Hudgins. He received his Ph.D. from U.C. in 2000.
His chapbook, The Memphis Sun (Kent State U. Press, 2000) is a winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Award. Jim's poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Alabama Literary Review, Brooklyn Review, Cimarron Review, Fine Madness, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly, among other journals. His criticism has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies and is slated to be published in MELUS. His book reviews have been featured in Dayton, Ohio's Impact Weekly and in First Draft, the publication of the Alabama Writers' Forum.
Jim teaches at the University of Montevallo, just south of Birmingham, Alabama. He lives in Montevallo with his wife, Glory McLaughlin, her cats, and his dog.
Jim has this to say about his poems: "I've always been interested in the syncretic nature of American art forms--the way traditions cross to form something entirely new. This is most prominent in jazz and rock and roll, but it's also very apparent in American writing. I think of poets like Walt Whitman and Robert Hayden as chief exemplars along these lines, because their writing to me represents a working out of uniquely American problems. First Whitman had to reckon with the great formal precedents of English verse in the face of a vastly different landscape and an entirely different spoken idiom than that which existed in Britain. His solution was to draw on the cadences of the Bible--the one book that could be found in almost any home in the United States--and to open his poetry to the rawness of the American frontier. Almost a century later, Robert Hayden adapted the machinery of High Modernism to fit his vision of African American history and culture, and I think his poetry includes breakthroughs similar to those of Whitman, principally because, like Whitman, Hayden works in the spaces between what might be thought of as academic and vernacular aesthetics.
In my own poems, I attempt to draw from the tensions between these kinds of sources as well. I don't like to pretend that receiving a doctoral degree during the postmodern era hasn't affected my writing. On the other hand, I'm not willing to retreat entirely into the coy self-referentiality that marks much postmodern writing. I feel that if I'm not risking something by engaging the culture I live in--its history, its variety, its achievements and its embarrassments--then I'm wasting time. Of course, I've taken some hits for doing this, especially when it comes to saying anything about race. So much of the very best this country has to offer comes from ways people have found to get out of the straightjacket of race thinking, creating something positive out of what seems to be a complete mess. I can't imagine what American culture would be like if our writers, musicians, painters, and other artists had left the issue alone. I'm not about to do that."