Review of Voyeur in Pedestal Magazine

Voyeur
Rich Murphy
Gival Press
ISBN Number: 978-1928589488

Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


Rich Murphy is a voyeur—an obsessive observer—of an era. He pries. His subjects, men and women dwelling in suburban homes, are exposed. Their “assigned universe[s] of feeling,” their “cowhide vulva[s]/ and oxblood foreskin[s]” are revealed.

Watching fixatedly, Murphy concerns himself with the degeneracy entailed in “[t]he slow rapes of free wills” occurring in bedrooms and at kitchen tables. There’s not one culprit in such defilements; the losses and entrapments that Murphy points out are systemically reinforced. The institutions that govern and limit conduct provide primary context—marriage, for instance, which “bottles behavior and delivers it” and “give(s) birth to a civil nation.” Murphy speaks in generalities—of husbands, wives, and homes—more often than he portrays specific individuals who embody these roles and dynamics.

In a gathering of societal observations, Murphy identifies compulsory heterosexuality and the way it’s branded. Indeed, sexual pairing can be read as purchasing. A poem prefaced with an Adrienne Rich quote elucidates this point. The Rich epigraph states that “woman [sic] have been a luxury for man…,” and the poem runs with this metaphor. The beginning of the relationship is described as such:

Having purchased luxury for the passenger seats
Of their life journeys, the young drivers
Speed off as though warrantees came
With the navigator of nothing.

Then this relationship’s trajectory brings about the following situation:

The leather upholstery now carries
wrinkled cow hide satchels emptied
of their prestige and giggles. Either
another gift to blunted sensibilities comes
along for the ride and Cubic-Z’s long face
to the adventurer’s grave
stays at home steaming curtains
or the excessorized safari loses its caddy.

Notably, the poem is titled “Accessories,” and this punning is characteristic of Murphy’s style. The word-play serves as something like comic relief in a book chock-full of loaded subject matter.

To open the book is to find the entrenched modes of relating laid bare. There are dangers here, hazards that are physical: In the opening poem, “The Ark of Oops,” a hermit wonders why people “don’t wear/ surgical masks when meeting in nightclubs.” Murphy’s fingers are deep into fleshiness. His subjects are viscerally presented. However, they’re cyborgs, of a kind, too: “Bigger strides in the manual/ suggest sharing limbs, appendages, and orifices/ that do and don’t exist.” Bodies are technological, are as-yet-unrealized ideas.

Voyeur reads our contemporary situation in terms of assembly lines and typecasting. It extends the workhorse metaphor to describe the personal secretary’s situation. This is political poetry that speaks to the convergence of labor and gender issues. “Men hire women to be children,” Murphy writes in “Labor Law.” “The well-suited infantilizing sitters// employ their wedding to keep/ grown ups with hips from stocks/ and bonds.”

This book follows a long lineage of political theory. And yet, Murphy’s style of thinking is idiosyncratic. Murphy finds his pleasure in forming new names, writing in a poem titled “Body Language,” “I’d love to wrap my tongue around/ one of those unformed words.” Though not riddled with neologisms, this book does refashion social commentaries on marriage and gender. Murphy is a splicer—soldering one line of thinking on to another.

Murphy moves beyond the readily recognizable. This is owed not only to technique but also to his active attempt to distance himself from his familiar selfhood. He describes the Voyeur project in a book trailer he has circulated on YouTube: “I found myself interested in trying to empathize with women…. What I ended up doing was coming up with these poems that were distancing myself from men…distancing myself from behaviors that I had always been involved with and also with different understandings of relationships, which led me to looking at, with a critical eye, the power dynamics and politics of relationships and writing about them.”

The degree to which it’s possible to enter another gender identity is of course questionable, as Murphy notes in “Hormone Olympics”: “Muscular kinks and knots,/ skeletal mutations, and height restrictions/ render gendered imitation steel sujud.” Given the problems of identification, Murphy’s task is ambitious. It is a sustained study of gender—how gender functions socially and how it is constructed by societal institutions. Murphy calls attention to the weight of this task in his dedication page, which includes a fragmented excerpt from Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life: “only when women no longer live their lives isolated in houses and the stories of men.” The implied task—for women to claim home and story—is, by all appearances, also Rich Murphy’s. What will result when women gain what Heilbrun speaks of? Murphy doesn’t overtly offer an answer, but the book’s surrealism helps one to reimagine women and their roles, exploring alternatives to their current domesticities.

Following Heilbrun’s epigraph, subsequent epigraphs pull from a variety of texts that speak to female experiences. There’s Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves, an exploration of the wild woman archetype by a Ph.D. Jungian analyst. Murphy also excerpts The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, a sourcebook on women’s health and sexuality that sprung from the feminist movement. Among the other sources that Murphy draws from are Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Thelma and Louise, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This panel of sources is a varied assortment; it situates Murphy as a researcher, rather than a pundit. He’s clearly not out to have the last word on the evergreen topics of gender and relationships.

Though not the last, Murphy’s are important words. And the book has garnered the praise to prove its importance. It received a slew of nominations, including the 2009 National Book Award for Poetry, 2009 William Carlos Williams Award, 2009 New England Book Award for Poetry, 2009 Los Angeles Book Award for Poetry, and the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. It is also the winner of both the 2009 Los Angeles Book Festival Award for Poetry and the Gival Press Poetry Award. Voyeur is Murphy’s second full-length collection. The book is a milepost, marking where we are and how far we have to go.