The Old Poet reading his verse in 2016 at a Tree of Life Haystack's Coffee House and Open Mic.
As a would-be poet, I am sometimes asked what creative process I use. The answer is, many different ones depending on topic and inspiration. But no matter how original the conception is, most verse requires a process of refinement.
Moss agate stones polished in a tumbler.
How Poems Come to Be
An inauspicious lump of gravel
tossed in the tumbler,
turned, turned,
until gleaming smooth,
handsome moss agate
admired and mounted
on a new bolo tie slide.
A thing of pride and beauty.
But how much more did it yearn
to be a geode
struck once just so,
split to reveal
the perfect,
dazzling crystal.
—Patrick Murfin
On the other hand, sometime a verse emerges whole. This one actually did come to me in a dream, or at least the catch phrase “Beckon the Night.” Quite early one morning I woke up suddenly with the phrase in my head and headed directly to the computer to pound out some verse, which subsequently underwent far less than usual editing and revising. It was directly inspired by film noir—but that genre had its roots and got most of its stories from cheap detective pulp magazines. The two forms were meant for each other.
It Came to Him in a Dream
“It came to him in a dream!”
The urgent, rumbling voice intones,
architectural letters scroll the screen—
Beckon the Night.
This gift of Morpheus
sticking, as almost nothing ever does
when brought bolt upright
by an insistent alarm.
I’ll need a double shot
of Dashiell Hammett for this,
pulled from the second desk draw
next to the snub nose
poured into a greasy tumbler.
And a dame, gotta have a dame,
ash blonde and weeping
wreathed in Herbert Tareyton garlands.
A snap brim hat and trench coat,
’41 Ford Coupe headlights
to glimmer on wet pavement,
a bluesy cornet riff.
What else ya’ gonna do with
Beckon the Night?
Write a goddam fairy tale?
—Patrick Murfin
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