Southword Poetry Podcast · Munster Literature Centre

Gerry Murphy: The Humours of Nothingness

·50 min·4 clips

Gerry Murphy shocked the Cork poetry scene by crumpling his poems into balls and flinging them at the audience.

Patrick starts with why Murphy matters to him: he met the poems young, inside Cork's poetry scene, and the memory has stayed put. He sketches readings in the seventies and eighties as careful, almost stubbornly monotone events, where poets tried to keep themselves out of the way. Murphy did not fit that room. At a student organized reading in UCC's old theatre in the Maltings, alongside Elizabeth O'Donoghue, he left the kind of mark a seventeen-year-old listener keeps. The episode uses that memory as a way into the poems. Murphy can be serious without losing his taste for the sudden turn. Endings get a lot of attention, because a last line can make the whole poem snap into place. The comedy is not garnish. It is how the pressure gets out. Murphy accepts the word punch and keeps the explanation practical. A poem may start with something seen or overheard, like a funeral cortege followed by an ice cream van, then work out why the image has lodged in the mind. He dedicated that poem to Matthew Sweeney because its small surreal film of a scene felt near Sweeney's territory. Cork stays in the room too, as friendship, influence, and imaginative ground people sometimes claim or borrow. By the end, Violet Club, failed force, blast radius, and fission pull the humor into a harsher theatre of power and damage. The signoff is plain.

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