CHRISTOPHER BREAN MURRAY INTERVIEW

Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize. It was listed by The New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2023. Murray served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, and other journals. He lives in Houston, TX.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

The line breaks in “The Ghost Writer” stuck out to me because they reinforce the story you tell in the poem. For example, in the first four lines, “A logging truck plowed into the side / of his car, decapitating the young writer, / crushing his spleen, truncating his promising / career. His first book, a novella, had just appeared” (8).

The enjambed first line creates anticipation for the events that follow (the crash and subsequent decapitation), and the enjambment on the third line creates a syncopated rhythm but also a slant rhyme on “career” and “appeared.” What are your favorite tools—formal or otherwise—to use in order to engender anticipation (or other feelings) in the reader?

I make these choices based more on intuition than deliberative thought. I go with what feels right. I hope what you’re saying is true, that these choices “engender anticipation…in the reader,” but I wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote the poem. I was just sensing whether the choices felt right. I use internal rhyme throughout the book, but it would be difficult to say what my theory about rhyme is. I use it to propel the poem forward, to create a music that will keep the story or meditation moving.

As for a preferred technique: I often use questions. I ask questions in poems partially because the speakers are curious and uncertain. The poem “The Wayward Brother” consists largely of questions, but they may tell you more about the psyche of the speaker than about what events have actually taken place. A story unfolds, but each sentence ends with a question mark. Thus, the speaker’s account is largely speculative. Mostly we know that he’s trying to warn us about this wayward character.

In different sections of the book, I wondered about the connections between the figures and spaces that come up in the poems (including the Black Observatory itself), and how they were connected across time and place. Would you please tell us about your approach to world-building (if you don’t mind that phrase)? Did the idea for the book start with a concept, or did it develop as you wrote the poems?

I didn’t begin writing Black Observatory with any preconceived concept. During the years I spent composing poems for the book, the image of the black observatory popped up several times. I found the image striking. I wrote a series of poems in which each is titled “Black Observatory” (only one of these is in the book). For a long time, the manuscript had a different title. I assembled a chapbook that contained some of the poems from the manuscript, and I called it Black Observatory. Then I realized that that was a better title for the full-length manuscript. Once I’d retitled the book, it gained a focus it had previously lacked.

As for “world building,” I’ve been hearing that phrase a lot lately. I take it to mean the creation of a plausible imaginative space. Certainly, that’s central to what I do. Often, I set my poems in a physical place as a sort of grounding of plausibility (or, to use Richard Hugo’s phrase, “a base of operations for the poem”). When I first started writing poems, image was perhaps the thing that most interested me. I remember being drawn to poets like Norman Dubie and James Wright because of the striking images contained in their poems.

Eventually, I became interested in other aspects of poems, like music, diction, and rhetoric. However, I find generally that creating a vivid material setting allows the poem to become “real,” not only to the reader, but to me as I’m writing. I can, in a sense, be transported into that place to have the kind of experience I’m looking for in a poem.

Do you share your work with trusted mentors, friends, or family before they reach your editor’s desk? Do you see them as similar to your audience? Do you write for a specific audience, a general one, or for yourself?

In my twenties, I got lucky and met some like-minded poets who became my friends. I still share my work with them and seek their input. Although I don’t think about it much, I’m probably still writing for them as I have been for decades. I was working on Black Observatory when I was in the PhD program at the University of Houston. Therefore, I received feedback from professors and fellow writers.

As I note in the acknowledgments of my book, the input of Kevin Prufer, who was my professor at the time, was invaluable. It pleases me when people respond positively to my work at readings, or when they tell me they enjoyed the book. However, I don’t really think about an audience beyond myself and a few like-minded poets. If my work speaks to others, that’s fantastic. I’ll never forget the experience of being a young poet encountering a book that would, for a time, bewitch me, or even change me. I have no idea whether my work will do that for others. It would make me happy if it did.

There are such strong juxtapositions in this book between quiet—even peaceful—images, such as butterflies migrating in “Endless Dictations,” and other, more violent ones, for example the one previously mentioned from “The Ghost Writer.” What is your approach to depicting violence in a work of art? How do you judge whether to include it explicitly, implicitly, or not at all?

George Lucas (supposedly) said it was easy to get an audience involved in a story—just have someone step on a kitten. I find that cynical, and I hope I would not include violence as a cheap ploy to stimulate an audience’s interest. But I do sometimes include violence in poems. In the one you mention, the writer must die young, and his death must be reported on the radio. The most likely situation in which that would happen is a car accident.

The description of the death scene is explicit because I wanted it to feel real. Likewise, the poem is, to some degree, a ghost story, so the violence at the beginning colors the events that follow. More generally, violence sometimes appears in the book because it appears in life. The poems’ speakers encounter a world that can be filled with wonder, love, and beauty, but also alienation, confusion, and violence.

I’m interested in the idea of “artistic greed,” from “Get Segovia.” Would you please give us some examples of artistic greed and how it could be a good or bad thing? Are you ever tempted to be artistically greedy?

In that poem, the fictional character, Segovia (a guitarist), is driven by “a sort of / artistic greed.” I’m not talking about a greed for career or recognition. Segovia is a slightly absurd but committed artist who pursues an intense aesthetic experience. At the end of the poem, the speaker recommends him to the reader “without reservation.” I tend to agree with speaker. The downside of being in the grips of “artistic greed” could be, I suppose, self-indulgence or self-destruction. But I do view this dogged pursuit of one’s artistic vision to be a requirement for a good “art life” (to use David Lynch’s phrase). Doing so may detract from other aspects of life, but that’s the deal Segovia made at the crossroads.

In the same poem, you write about the sublime. In art history, the Sublime is usually accessed in the context of a vast landscape or undiscovered/otherworldly frontier, so to speak. In “Get Segovia,” it’s conjured through music. Do you think of the sublime as something to encounter or something we can create?

It seems you’re referring to Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime. In “Get Segovia,” I am referring more to the sublime in the sense of exalted, elevated, or pure. By combining the western classical music tradition with Segovia’s bluesman persona, the poem seems to explore the collision of high and low. Segovia is described as someone to whom purists will object, but he avidly seeks a sound described as “sublime.” I’m probably saying something about art and artists in the poem, but I leave it to readers to sort that out.

In “Endless Dictations,” the speaker remarks that the watercolors in the poem “do not so much describe the sky as dictate its possibilities to the day” (15). In “Spartan Gavotte,” there is another reference to “a painting that’s both fictional and true” (7). Why do you think so many writers and artists use fiction (or artistic representations of non-fictional situations, or—usually in the realm of visual art—abstraction) to talk about emotional truths?

When I first started writing poems, I mostly used stories and details from my life. Later, I started to invent fictional scenarios, characters, places, and details. Allowing myself to invent gave me a freedom and flexibility the other approach lacked. Amidst the fictional material, however, I do sometimes recognize places, people, and details from my life reconfigured in surprising ways.

Occasionally, I will still write a poem that is essentially nonfictional. That said, I believe that the “lying” one does when one invents can often get one closer to a certain kind of truth. In my poems, the guiding principle is generally not the intellect—it’s intuition. Fictionalizing frees me up to go where intuition leads. My poems may seem, even to me, odd, foreign, and very different from my everyday life. However, I will sometimes discover—even years later—that I was writing accurately about something I was experiencing.

I recently noticed that one of the poems in Black Observatory, written years ago, was about someone I knew, but it had taken me a long time to see that. Had I tried to write about my experience in a direct way, I don’t think I would have written about it as truthfully. Mind you, the truth I’m talking about is more emotional than factual. I am interested in biographies, documentaries, memoirs, and other nonfictional texts. But, in my own work, I generally have to lie to tell the truth.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.