Abby E. Murray: “I wrote this while sitting outside my daughter’s school, waiting to pick her up from engineering club where they learn to make balloon-powered cars and popsicle-stick catapults in a world armed with steel and fire. All the children killed at a school in Tennessee this week were the same age as her. That morning, the Washington Post offered in-depth coverage of ‘The Blast Effect,’ or what happens inside a child’s body when an AR-15 round pierces it, because it is considered ‘critical to public knowledge,’ and I suppose they’re right. We, as a public, are being ignored by government officials who do not care how many times a day we’re forced to imagine our own children dying, or worse, experience it. We are being shown how to picture it more vividly, how to maintain ourselves as part of the problem. My own hope can sometimes feel small as a dry kernel; my daughter’s hope, which is expansive and certain, is what might save it.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I write poetry because it is the only thing I have been able to take with me everywhere I’ve been sent. I also enjoy it. As Marvin Bell said, I write poems ‘because it feels so good.’” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I was talking to a friend the other night about how, whenever anything painful or sad happens on a national scale in Britain, there’s a part of me that is, for a fraction of a second, surprised—like I’ve grown to expect ineptitude and blatant disregard for humanity in the U.S., and seeing it in Britain is about as unsettling as seeing my mother drunk (which is, for the record, about as likely as me seeing the Queen herself show up at my house in the wee hours, blitzed). Even heat waves brought about by man-made climate change, which affect us all, are being spoken about as wholly unanticipated in Britain. So I’m kind of making fun of my sense of problematic surprise, even as I move to correct it.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I was in the middle of writing about joy and who has the rights to it when it happens to them when I saw Dmitry Kokh’s photos of polar bears inhabiting the abandoned weather station/village on Kolyuchin, an island in the Chukchi Sea. They poke their heads out of the windows to get a look at the camera, which was mounted on a drone. They sniff the air. They sit on their bums in the grass. They curl up like dogs. Every time I see polar bears I think about how we are killing them, but damn, they look happy right now! My writing turned into this meditation on joy in the face of so many crises, even when it is gratitude for a blue sky in the midst of bomb cyclones, nor’easters, and climate change.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “This is a poem of thanksgiving—maybe not so much in honor of the holiday as in celebration of people who know how to be together through a crisis. In my case, I’m thinking of my seven-year-old daughter. Although I’m vaccinated, I contracted Covid and it’s been brutal. I wrote this on a good day.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “Because of the timing (Mother’s Day weekend), it seems this poem is occasional. But I wrote it in response to new data that shows birth rates are down in the United States, and the ensuing conversations about whether the pandemic is to blame or some other ‘trend,’ such as—I’m just throwing these out here—lack of jobs or housing, violence against women, unequal pay, racism, broken systems meant to protect mothers and children, broken healthcare, or thriving sexism. I know I’m not the only one who suspects Captain Obvious edits most newspapers (‘people aren’t wearing masks and Covid is getting worse!’), but I wrote this to remind myself that I am just as valuable to this world for being a mother as I am for my own life, just as I am loved for loving others and naming what isn’t right.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “On Monday evening, Marvin Bell (author of the Dead Man Poems) died in his home in Iowa. He was my professor at Pacific University, where I got my MFA as part of a half-baked survival plan during my husband’s combat tours. A veteran, Marvin convinced me I was a delight even when war left me feeling shipwrecked; he gave his students the sense he was tickled to be trusted with our poems even as he shredded them, asked for more, praising us, glad we made it—because it was so good we had made it to poetry. He could tell a story about anything, coax joy out of anyone, play longer and with more conviction than a dog at the beach. And I have to admit, I am feeling a little shipwrecked again. When someone this influential dies, I find it useful to inventory what they left behind for us to handle their absence. He taught me to be unafraid, even when a gaping absence scares the water from my eyes. I cried to write this. Not the poem. This.” (web)
