Life & Wisdom Quote by George Murray

You can feel the modesty move here: Murray insists he was "writing notes", not "composing poems", as if to preempt the romantic myth of the poet channeling a finished work in one immaculate rush. It’s a demotion of authorship that’s also a claim to honesty about how art actually gets made: in scraps, half-lines, marginalia, and provisional language that doesn’t yet deserve the dignifying label of "poem."

The phrasing matters. "Notes" implies utility, private shorthand, something for the writer rather than for an audience. "Composing" suggests intention, structure, a public-facing confidence. By drawing that line, Murray lets the reader watch the moment a project crosses a threshold: when accumulation turns into coherence, when the mess starts to resemble design. "Fragmented process" isn’t just a confession of disorder; it’s an aesthetic stance. Fragmentation becomes a method, not a failure.

Then the title drops like an animal stepping into view: "The Hunter" began to develop. That verb, "develop", borrows from photography and biology at once, implying the work emerged in stages, revealed gradually, shaped by conditions. The subtext is that the poem wasn’t hunted down by the poet so much as it was discovered through attention and return. A hunter, in this telling, is also someone who waits, tracks, revises their assumptions. The poem becomes the thing that stalks back out of the notes, demanding form.