On Books

Death of brother stirs musician poet in Arkansas

Book cover for Jason Morphew's "Dead Boy"
Book cover for Jason Morphew's "Dead Boy"

Pike County native Jason Morphew was a presence in Arkansas for more than a decade. A literate singer-songwriter who married a lo-fi folky sensibility to a pragmatic application of synthesizers, he produced a clutch of deeply interesting albums such as 1997's Transparent and 2003's The Duke of Arkansas as he bounced from Little Rock to New York and Los Angeles, perpetually on the verge of breaking into the medium time (when such a strata still existed for recording songwriters).

That a book of his poetry should show up on my desk wasn't a complete surprise. Jason and I had a mutual friend in the late Miller Williams, the poet who founded the University of Arkansas Press. But dead boy (spuyten duvil, $15), Morphew's first full-fledged collection after a couple of chapbooks, is an assured examination of what comes next; a funny and powerful response to the confusing fact of one's own survival.

Organized around the unexpected death of his younger brother, dead boy documents the strangeness of the commonplace, encounters with old friends with bad memories and the absurd obstensibility of adulthood.

Here's a sample:

Every piano should have a dead key

a forced rest

in the song

a dead part

where things go wrong

a little cancer

that will spread

until silence is music

and everything is dead.

Morphew's book has a publication date of January 2018 but is available from online sources now. I asked him a few questions:

Q: Catch us up on what you've been doing since you left Arkansas.

A: ​Since I moved back to Los Angeles from Little Rock in 2004, I've become married with children. I got a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature at UCLA, where I now teach. I've released music, new and archived, and collections of poetry. I write screenplays and teleplays. Even sold one a couple years ago -- an adaptation of my wife, Lauren Kate's, novel Fallen. (They ended up shooting a different script.) ​

Q: Reviewing one of your albums, music journal CMJ writes, "Morphew's got the soul -- and, more specifically, the lyrics -- of a poet," but poetry is very different from writing song lyrics. I understand it's lucrative and glamorous, but other than that, why poetry?

A: You're joking, but you've already answered the question in a way. Poetry's difficulty, the study and practice and commitment it requires, combined with its commercial obscurity, appeals to my perverse nature immensely. All of this effort and if anyone I don't email this poem to ever happens to find it, he almost certainly won't understand it! Oh yeah, let me write another 3,000 of those.

But poetry predates any other creative activity for me. It predates any other creative activity for the human race too. It underlies everything we make. You don't need to like poetry to partake in it, all day long, everywhere you go. Poets devote themselves to overhearing themselves (and others) make poetic gestures, and resisting the urge to push that overhearing away.

I'm glad you say that writing poetry is very different from writing song lyrics. That's a rare observation. When writing song lyrics, if it sounds good, it is. Song lyrics don't need to mean anything. They usually shouldn't mean anything other than "I love you." Songs essentially are vehicles of praise. Political songs are no exception, though their transparent reluctance to praise does make it harder to write a good political song. Whenever a songwriter is stuck, she should ask herself who or what she's saying she loves and cut out whatever's blocking her from saying that directly. Morrissey is good at that -- his political songs remember to plead for love.

This is not to say that poetry has to be serious or that poetry doesn't praise. Much recent poetry is about linguistic play. That resistance to meaning brings poetry closer to song. I'm just talking about myself, I guess. When I was performing and releasing records all the time, most of the reactions I got referred to my lyrics. But I never cared much about lyrics. I certainly never worked at or revised them. Song lyrics are decorative notes, transparent flakes of melody, another form of harmony. The best song lyrics get out of the way. Titles are important, though.

Q: Do you have any particular influences, mentors or teachers? Who do you read and for what reasons?

A: I can hear Miller Williams on almost every page of my book. He is an enormous influence on me. When I was 18 at the University of Arkansas [Morphew would, with Williams' encouragement, eventually graduate from Yale], he read an essay I wrote about an old friend of his and invited me to stop by his office. He gave me 30 books and told me to send him poems as I wrote them. That's something I did for years -- mail poems to Miller, get them back with his red pencil edits in the margins. Much of that marginalia is brutal. I think he may have only liked one of those poems, about my Aunt Lorene.

I stopped sending Miller poems because I stopped writing them. I was living far from home, dying of loneliness and needed to find some way of interacting with people. So I dusted off the guitar. The next few years were a blur of song after that -- a career emerged and faded. Now I couldn't get lonely if I tried. So I'm free to be poetic.

I had two teachers at Lakeside in Hot Springs who encouraged me to indulge the poetic -- Lonnie Leuben and Carla Mouton. Their kindness was and is invaluable. I didn't grow up feeling encouraged to appreciate the poetic. That's unfortunate because the good book consists in large part of exquisite Jacobean poetry. It's not a sin to acknowledge the artistic beauty of the one book the world I grew up in values.

Q: I remember us talking about Miller before.

A: For a period, I would always pull out Miller's books at parties in Little Rock. I imposed him on a lot of the local musicians of that early/mid-'90s period. By the way, two of the poems in the book address two of those Little Rock musicians -- "Listening to California (for Jason White)" and "John Pugh XI" for John Pugh XI.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the conceit of the book -- the Left Eye/Right Eye division, the structure of the work, when you began work on it, and how long it took to finish?

A: The scholar Alexander Shurbanov writes that "A poem does not describe an event, it tries to be it." Everything about the book involves me trying "to be" the death of my younger brother David. I conceive of the book as a skull looking out at the reader, reading you. ​

Q: What can you tell me about the cover?

A: ​Carrick Moore Gerety did the lovely cover. His band the Push Kings and I used to play shows together in New York and New England and L.A. Carrick also directed videos for two of the poems in the book. [They're posted on our blood, dirt & angels blog.] This spring, we're going to shoot about 35 more videos and edit them into a feature-length film.

The mask on the cover is from my collection -- I bought it on the street in Guadalajara a few years ago. I asked Carrick to make the title look like the title font on [David Bowie's] Young Americans. He nailed it beautifully.

Carrick and I play tennis every Friday. I play tennis four to six days a week. I've only gotten a couple poems out of it.

Email:​

[email protected]

blooddirtangels.com

photo

Jason Morphew, circa 2004

Style on 12/24/2017

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