Overview

In Prophetic Voice Now: Crafting Space for Visionary Thinking and Practice, Rich Murphy dives deeply into a robust analysis of the state of poetry, the arts by implication, and culture in the United States. Moreover, he calls for prophetic voices to propose a new narrative for stabilizing global culture and explores how poetry, as well as the arts and humanities generally, might craft a narrative that will lead us from the current brink and navigate the interrelated transitions of the Anthropocene, post-industrial Capitalism, and post-humanism. Murphy draws on a wealth of writers and thinkers such as, Northrop Frye, John Ashbery, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ted Kooser, Jorie Graham, Arthur Vogelsang, Jacques Derrida, Yuval Noah Harari, Slavoj Zizek, Fredric Jameson, Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Spender, Paul Valery, Giorgio Agamben, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, Bob Perelman, Hugh Kenner, William Empson, Allen Ginsberg, The Frankfurt School voices, in addition to modern and postmodern poets to develop nuanced poetico-philosophical meditations. Through a careful and inventive analysis of current norms and assumptions about education, the individual, creativity, voice, and space, Murphy develops a compelling prescription for the vital and necessary expression of visionary thinking and practice now.

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9781863351935

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To challenge the (self-)alienating and disempowering effects of ideology-driven illusions, Rich Murphy's often provocative voice blends three dominant streams of enquiry: updating and re-affirming the old Blakean ideal of 'Giving a body to Falshood'; advocating a post-symbolic kind of poetic fashioning that favours only temporary patterns of understanding over fixed and inherited cultural associations; and passionately defending the right to a literary/philosophical education as well as the formative role of poetry and the arts on the path to overcoming our selfmade or internalized mental prisons. Contemplating the contingencies of the future, the essays collected here may no longer share the confidence of Walt Whitman's 'So Long!', but they nevertheless hold on to its announcement of 'a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold.' Therefore, whether one agrees or disagrees with some of Murphy's challenging ideas, his essays offer precious mentorship and encouragement to any individuals refusing their creative spirit and existential self-promise to be crushed. -- Franca Bellarsi, Universite libre de Bruxelles

Author Information

Rich Murphy has taught writing and literature in colleges and universities for 34 years. He is currently visiting lecturer at Massachusetts College of Art. Two of his five book-length poetry collections have won national book awards. He has also published five chapbooks and essays on poetry and poetics in a number of journals.

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