Ralph Waldo Emerson said the poet is “the complete man” who “apprises us of not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth.”
He is also general manager of the Chicago office of Ruder Finn, a highly respected New York-based public-relations firm; he presides over PEN’s midwest chapter and serves on its national board; he periodically lectures on public relations at Columbia College and Northwestern University; and he races his sailboat, paints, and served until very recently on the boards of directors of several not-for-profit organizations–he’s still on the board of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. He collects pipes (more than 200, most of them English and most of them unsmoked), antique pistols (about 20, mostly from Europe), toy soldiers (also about 200, also mostly English, but including a few Nazi soldiers from Germany), and paintings (mostly European figurative work). He keeps a fanatical watch on all the Chicago sports teams, drinks regularly with his buddies, with his wife Joanne is raising three kids–Caitlin, 16, Michael Brendan, 14, and Megan, 11–and goes to church on Sundays.
Murray stopped smoking about ten years ago but there’s still that charge to him of the nicotine fiend briefly between cigarettes, and every so often he’ll take out one of his hand-carved English pipes and light it up. He drinks fairly steadily after work. He has to do something, one feels, to draw off the energy that drives him.
“My vocation? Oh boy! I think it’s writing.”
Is sitting on a bar stool pouring small amounts of rum into a tall Coke at Riccardo’s while bullshitting with his friends Murray’s form of relaxation? “Yes, I’m pretty devoted to my friends. It’s kind of passing time between this stuff, which is usually going crazy,” he says, waving his arm over his desk, “and then going home to either do more of this stuff or write. Thank God Riccardo’s is so close. It’s literally on my way to my car.”
important beyond all this fiddle.
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Marianne Moore would approve of the poetry of G.E. Murray. The imaginary gardens that abound in Murray’s poetry are mostly urban gardens, filled with the real toads of urban decay. As a reviewer in the Kansas City Star said of his first book of poetry, Repairs, in l979, “Murray explores the urban landscape–the relationship of natural man to an unnatural environment. Murray’s flair for the striking image, the incongruous metaphor, supplies the poetic mainspring of insight and revelation.” Consider this long fragment from the first poem in Walking the Blind Dog, “Swear to God: A Prologue From Memory”:
