Peter E Murphy: How I Wrote ‘Bad History’

Interview by

Frances Turpin

Content warning for this interview: mentions of suicide and addiction

“I have a hiraeth for Wales which, cliché alert! nourishes my soul and gets my muse all excited.”

I climb the steps to the High Line
at 34th Street and walk downtown.
Before it became an elevated park,
freight cars hauled dead animals
from the Meatpacking District
to Hell’s Kitchen. When I was a kid,
before my mother did what she did,
I stood outside Kenney’s Bar & Grill
on 19 th Street and watched the parade
of bootblack engines lug car after car
of carcasses uptown. Now, tourists trample
the wildflowers while posing for selfies
they post on Instantgrat.

I walk past a homeless guy holding a sign,
           i could use some help
Next to him an evangelist holds a sign,
           Turn to Jesus for Help
This is how the world is. Always has been.
My mother could have used some help,
but when she turned to Jesus he answered
in Latin. A young man hits me up for a fiver,
says he wants to finish his graphic novel.
Are you going to get high? I ask.
No man, he says, I’m done with that shit.
I want to be somebody. I give him five bucks
and wish him good luck.

At 19th Street I walk down the steps, cross
10th Avenue and become again that little boy
standing in front of the bar, listening
to the noisy trains lumber along the tracks.
How many times, how many times do I look
through the window and imagine her sipping
her highball? Mother, I whisper, my breath
fogging the pane of cold glass,
           I could use some help
           I want to be somebody

This dynamic poem captures the energy of New York very well as well as the sadder aspects of the city. It seems to be a city of memory here. How did you balance the past and present in writing this poem? 

A student once wrote in a story about trick or treating, “I visited all the houses in my development.” He didn’t intend the ambiguity, but it struck me. I recently wrote in a poem set in an airplane flying from the UK to the US, “I dwell in a city called Nostalgia where no one I know is alive.”

My American father, stationed in Wales during World War II, fell for a young barmaid in Newport before storming Omaha Beach on D-Day. After the war, he returned to marry her, thus beginning World War III. My mother, who had been “happy as the grass was green” in Wales, fell apart in New York City and plunged into depression and addiction before ending her life when I was seven. I was shuffled from home to home, eventually plunging into depression and addiction myself. 

I don’t know who to blame for my mother’s suicide and my fractured childhood, so I blame Hitler who appeared in earlier drafts of “Bad History.” When I realized he was trying to take over the poem I evicted him. However, his stench remains in the lines “freight cars hauled dead animals from the Meatpacking District to Hell’s Kitchen” and “bootblack engines lug car after car of carcasses uptown.” 

How do you think about form? Line breaks seem to be an organising principle in this poem, as in much American poetry.

I try to break lines on concrete nouns or action verbs to stress a heightened moment or suggest a surprising ambiguity. I also like my lines to look fairly even, not wild like they need a haircut.

I’m a compulsive reviser, and this poem went through more than eighty drafts as I was trying to discover what it was hiding from me. Around draft thirty-five the poem decided to break from a forty-five line blob into quatrains. Then it tried tercets, couplets, etc. None of them worked. Eventually, it came upon the three almost even stanzas that appear in this final version.

Could you talk about your experience of being a writer as someone connected to both Wales and the United States? Have you learned particular things from each place? 

I grew up in New York City with a lisp and a Welsh accent but knew nothing about the country of my birth which I probably couldn’t find it on a map. Years of speech therapy “cured” my accent, but alas, the lisp, which I’m good at hiding, remains. On the cusp of my 21^st birthday I was tricked into getting engaged to a troubled woman I didn’t love. And when she got me a thousand dollars in debt to a Mafia-connected dentist I decided to run. I didn’t know where to go, so I fled to Wales. Eventually I discovered my mother’s family in Tredegar and felt actual love for the first time in my life. I learned to love them, and as I got sober, to love the family I returned to in the United States. 

I return to Wales once or twice a year to visit cousins, hang out with friends and to write in various places around the country. My name “Peter” comes from the Greek, Petros, meaning “Rock,” and I especially love the rocks of Wales from the Millennial Centre in Cardiff, to the cliffs of Pembrokeshire to Yr Wyddfa. I have a hiraeth for Wales which, cliché alert! nourishes my soul and gets my muse all excited.

Peter E. Murphy

Peter E. Murphy (he/him) is the author of twelve books and chapbooks including the forthcoming A Tipsy Fairy Tale, A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption about growing up in Wales and New York City. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City.

• @murphywriting
• @murphywriting
• www.peteremurphy.com

How I Write a Poem is our bi-monthly interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.