Murphy, Timothy 1951-

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MURPHY, Timothy 1951-

PERSONAL: Born 1951, in Hibbing, MN; son of Vince Murphy (a farmer, teacher, and insurance agent). Education: Graduated from Yale University.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Waywiser Press, 9 Woodstock Rd., London N4 3ET, England. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: Poet, business executive, and farmer. Timco Farms, Murphy Brothers Farms, Orchard Glen Development Company, and Bell Properties, managing partner; Bell Farms LLP, Speedy Rake LLC, and Bytespeed LLC, director and founder; V. R. Murphy and Sons, Inc. (venture capital), president.

WRITINGS:

The Deed of Gift (poems), Story Line Press (Ashland, OR), 1998.

Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir, (prose and poems), woodcuts by Charles Beck, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 2000.

Very Far North (poems), Waywiser Press (London, England), 2002.

(Translator, with Alan Sullivan) Beowulf, Longman (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Timothy Murphy grew up on his ancestral farm near Fargo, North Dakota, the first of five children born in six years. As she held her son for the first time, his mother—a theatrical performer—recited A. A. Milne's "The Cradle Song," from which his name was taken. Murphy told Cynthia Haven of the Cortland Review, "My first sounds of human speech prefigured the direction that I would go as a writer." His mother also exposed him to Shakespeare early in life, and at age seven he acted in his first Shakespearean play.

Murphy attended Yale University, where one of his advisors was Robert Penn Warren, former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner. After graduating from Yale, Murphy wanted to join the literary elite on the East Coast and become a poet in residence at a prestigious institution. He wrote in Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir, "I needed to cultivate the sense of place which I so fervently admired in Yeats, Hardy, and Frost, but which I had not yet found in the land of my own birth." Warren, originally from a southern tobacco farm, refused to recommended him and counseled him instead to return to North Dakota and buy a farm.

Murphy eventually followed that advice, but he first spent several years in Minneapolis studying business. Upon returning to his roots in North Dakota, he joined his father in insurance and land development; bought a farm; spent the next twenty years as a farmer, venture capitalist, and businessman; and all the while whittled and honed his poetic skills. He told Haven: "I don't think I really had a good poem till I was twenty-five. . . . That is because I am not an incandescent genius like all those romantic poets who died young. But it is no different from playing the piano—you don't simply go and noodle on the piano. It's a great art. You spend a couple of decades practicing the scales and working your way up from difficult compositions to more difficult compositions." He also told Haven that his rural existence gives him material for his works that no university professor could possibly get from an academic life surrounded by young students.

The Deed of Gift, Murphy's first collection of poetry, is composed of poems written between 1976 and 1996. Upon its publication in 1998, the volume quickly sold out its first printing and was well received by critics. Set the Ploughshare Deep similarly earned critical kudos.

When reviewing Murphy's 2002 poetry collection, Very Far North, Pamela Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted: "Murphy writes of harsh seasons, of a father's death, of depression, love and lust. He writes about farmers, horses, boats, wild animals and other poets. In one poem the language is colloquial; the next one is rife with classical allusions." And as Anthony Hecht wrote in the preface to the volume: "If Fargo, North Dakota, seems off the beaten literary track, it has not kept Murphy from the sort of mental voyages abroad that [Emily] Dickinson liked to make: and in this volume the reader will encounter excursions into Norse mythology, Inuit legend, Sioux lore, Japanese art, Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Latin sources, including a terse condensation of the first choral ode of Sophocles' Antigone."

When Haven asked Murphy what prompted him and Alan Sullivan to translate the classic English text Beowulf, he answered: "Mr. Warren making me learn Anglo-Saxon. . . . It took thirty-two years before I became a good enough writer to even attempt a translation of 'the Wulf.' . . . I'm very, very pleased with the result."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Murphy, Timothy, Set the Ploughshare Deep: A PrairieMemoir, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 2000.

Murphy, Timothy, Very Far North, Waywiser Press (London, England), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1998, Ray Olson, review of The Deed of Gift, p. 1710.

Library Journal, June 15, 2000, Heather McCormack, review of Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir, p. 83.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), September 3, 2000, Chuck Haga, "Embracing the Prairie. With Their Toes Deep and Comfortable in Home Soil, Poet Timothy Murphy and Woodcut Artist Charles Beck Have Combined to Show Farm Country As They See It: Rich, Beautiful, Troubled and Loved" (interview), p. E1.

Tulsa World, September 2, 2001, Mike Nobles, "Tales from Down South," p. 1710.