Life & Wisdom Quote by George Murray

“My self-editing process is intense” is the kind of line that sounds modest until you hear the quiet brag inside it. Coming from a poet, it’s not just a workflow note; it’s a statement of ethics. “Intense” frames revision as labor, not inspiration cosplay. The subtext is a refusal of the romantic myth that poems arrive clean and finished, dictated by some benevolent muse. Murray’s telling you the opposite: whatever grace a poem has, it’s been wrestled into place.

The phrase also telegraphs a particular anxiety of craft culture. Self-editing is solitary authority: no committee, no producer, no market research. That freedom is exhilarating, but it’s also a trap. If the editor lives in the same head as the maker, the danger isn’t merely perfectionism; it’s self-censorship disguised as refinement. “Intense” hints at the knife’s edge between sharpening a line and sanding away its weirdness, its risk, its heat.

Context matters because contemporary poetry is published into a noisy attention economy where sincerity is currency and speed is rewarded. An “intense” process is, implicitly, a counter-tempo: slow enough to catch the lazy metaphor, ruthless enough to cut the line that “works” but doesn’t tell the truth. Murray isn’t promising ease; he’s promising discipline, and maybe asking readers to respect the invisible struggle behind a poem that looks effortless on the page.