Life & Wisdom Quote by George Murray

The line reads like a shrug, but it’s a carefully calibrated one: a poet narrating his own momentum without performing urgency. Murray’s “still interested in the long or serial poem” quietly plants a flag in a particular aesthetic camp. Long poems aren’t just longer; they’re a commitment to accumulation, to obsession, to a mind returning and worrying at the same material. Saying “still” signals loyalty and maybe defensiveness, as if that ambition has been questioned by time, attention spans, or the market.

Then comes the pivot: “but have written a few smaller things.” The “but” is doing emotional labor. It acknowledges reality without conceding identity. Smaller work can be craft, recovery, or survival - the kind of writing you make when life fractures the attention required for a serial project. It also hints at a pragmatic understanding of how poetry circulates now: journals reward discrete units, not sprawling architectures.

“I may start sending to journals again in a year or so” lands with a mix of modesty and fatigue. Subtext: there was a period of not submitting, not participating, possibly opting out of the tiny economies of validation that journals represent. The timeline (“a year or so”) is deliberately noncommittal, resisting the productivity script that artists are pressured to recite. It’s self-protection disguised as casual scheduling.

“That’s about it” functions as a curtain drop. No myth-making, no manifesto. The intent is anti-branding: to present a working writer’s life as intermittent, unglamorous, and ongoing - which, in a culture that demands constant announcement, is its own pointed stance.