Historian, comedian, storyteller:
a conversation with poet Campbell McGrath

Campbell McGrath, associate professor of Creative Writing at Florida International University, is the author of four volumes of poetry: Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago and Road Atlas. He has been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Cohen Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and, most recently, a 1999 MacArthur Fellowship. The latter honor, often referred to as a "genius grant," included a $280,000 unrestricted award.

In his poems, McGrath makes connections between disparate things, dipping from a deep well of knowledge that includes history, music, economics and popular culture. Characterizing himself as a free-verse poet, McGrath displays an enormous range that encompasses lyric meditation, epic poetry, prose poems and some formal poetry. Alice Quinn, poetry editor for The New Yorker, called McGrath's "The Bob Hope Poem," an epic 70-page work in Spring Comes to Chicago, "full-throttle, democratic, open-ended" and cited it as one of the most exciting contributions to contemporary poetry.

Lyn Millner recently spoke with the poet in his Miami Beach home, where he lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two boys, Sam and Jackson. In the interview, McGrath discussed his current project, Florida Poems, his just-published book, Road Atlas, and his views on poetry.

Saturday, May 23. Jackson is exactly six months old this morning, wriggling behind me in the baby backpack, grasping at my ears, yanking the cord of my sunglasses as if to rein in a runaway horse. In four more days it will be Sam's fifth birthday. Five years since that morning in Chicago, five years into the new geological age, the Samocene Era, the Neo-Jacksonian Epoch. Time, like the funicular, flies on tireless wings, but the three of us are hoofing it, hiking the arduous cobbled roadway of the picturesque castle in the harbor, shooting invaders from every gun-slit and portico.

- from "A Letter to James Wright,"
Road Atlas

FIU Magazine: In your poems, you share some really lovely details about your children and about your life as a father. In other interviews, you've discussed how becoming a father had an impact on your career, in terms of actively pursuing a full-time teaching position. But I wondered if you could talk about how fatherhood has affected your poetry.
McGrath: Fatherhood has infiltrated my poetry, in the way that whatever I'm doing in my life takes over. My poetry reflects what I'm doing. I started writing about fatherhood in "The Pregnancy Triptych," predating fatherhood - but, realistically, most of "The Pregnancy Triptych" was really written after I was already a father, just looking back to that moment. I'm at a point now where I don't know if I'm going to be writing about Sam a lot more because now I feel like I would be invading his privacy. Because now he's old enough to be who he is.

FIU Magazine: You make many references to music in your poetry, and in talking about your revision process, you say that "a poem must sing." Can you talk a little about the connection between music and poetry? Do you listen to music when you write?
McGrath: No, I don't as much as I used to. Usually when I'm upstairs working, I also have to be keeping one ear out for Jackson to wake up from his nap or for the phone to ring with some message from Sam's school or something. When I listen to music I listen to rock and roll music, like punk rock and its various offspring or various kinds of grunge. It gives a kind of energy to my poetry and a kind of cultural sense. When I'm not listening to music, I'm more likely to write a more meditative, travelly-er, looking-out-the-window or nature kind of poem.

Floating in the gulf, on a hot June day, listening to the seashells sing.

Eyes open I watch their migrations, their seismic shifts and tidal seizures, as I am seized and lifted, lulled and hushed and serenaded. Eyes closed, I drift amid their resonant sibilance, soft hiss and crackle in the tide wash, ubiquitous underwater, a buzz like static, or static electricity - but not mechanical - organic and musical, metallic as casino muzak, piles of change raked together, a handful of pennies down a child's slide.

- from "The Gulf,"
Road Atlas

FIU Magazine: Critics have talked about the auditory quality of your poems. Do you read your poems aloud as you work on them?
McGrath: As a poet, you tend to hear your poems. You pick it up as if you were picking up something you had nothing to do with, and you try out the sound of it. And in the act of hearing it, you invariably discover new things. The words are being attended to for their musical, sonorous and euphonic (quality). Euphony is a central part of poetry.

FIU Magazine: In a recent interview with The Miami Herald, you indicated that poetry can play an important role by encouraging a sense of sacredness and myth for Floridians to rally around. Some would say you've chosen a challenging medium to attempt this, that the audience for poetry is a small one. Are you frustrated by what many would call a scarcity of readers? And do you believe that the poet has an obligation to change that?
McGrath: I think poetry ought to have an audience. But having an audience is very much of a two-edged sword. Because the bottom line in America is that things are oriented on a market basis, having an audience is the same thing as having a consumer group. As soon as you have an audience that's recognizably large, the money machine invades that area. In other words, Elvis and Chuck Berry invented rock and roll and they just did what they wanted because they were making it up. But as soon as there was a thing called rock and roll, it became corporatized, and you got people churning out a commodity.

FIU Magazine: How do you think poetry addresses themes in ways that other forms of writing or art can't?
McGrath: The beauty of poetry is that its medium is language. You don't need anything. I have always had this great desire to control the means of production. That's what made it beautiful for me - its flexibility. You don't need to stop and get cameras out. It's just there. And it just really was a pragmatic decision in that it's what worked best for me. I think it's because I have these broad interests, you know, I like to be a historian, I like to be a comedian, I like to be a storyteller, I like to talk about stuff, and lyric poetry is a form of talking.

FIU Magazine: How has teaching influenced your poetry?
McGrath: To teach a craft you have to know it in a way that you don't have to know it just to practice it. You can practice a lot of things sheerly on intuition. To teach, you can't do that at all. You have to explain, not only what you're doing, but how this other person would achieve X, Y, or Z. Teaching has taught me so much more. I have learned and I continue to learn everything I learn about poetry in the classroom.

FIU Magazine: In talking to readers about your poetry, I hear again and again that your poems are "not like most poetry." Readers seem to agree that your poems are more accessible than most poetry, and I'm wondering if you have a sense of why that is.
McGrath: I always wanted to write about the external world in a very concrete way, and I have a strong documentary urge. That's not often taken as poetry's task. People think of poetry as being emotional and expressive, but for me it's a very excellent documentary form. Myself as part of the documentary, but the world around me even more so. I can't talk about the world around me without talking about me, because I don't want to present my observations as some kind of objective knowledge of the world. They're not. They're the subjective speculation of one person.

FIU Magazine: One of the things you said about the Bob Hope poem was that it was very deeply personal and that you were a little surprised that it resonated with such a large audience.
McGrath: Very surprised. My first two books were books that people could pick up and appreciate and see what I was trying to do. I thought the Bob Hope poem would be viewed as formally and thematically unusual, so particular to one person's concern, the way the things are jumbled together and the obsessiveness of it. But, of course, the opposite has proven true. People have said, "Wow, I read that and I really get it. I see why that person's doing what they're doing."

I'm sitting on a hill in Nebraska, in morning sunlight, looking out across the valley of the Platte River. My car is parked far below, in the lot behind the rest stop wigwam, beyond which runs the highway. Beyond the highway: stitch-marks of the railroad; the sandy channels and bars of the Platte, a slow wide bend of cottonwood saplings metallic in the sun; beyond the river a hazy, Cézanne-like geometry of earthy blues, greens, and browns fading, at last, into the distance.

- from "Plums,"
Road Atlas

 

FIU Magazine: What led to your latest book, Road Atlas? Why did you choose to write it?
McGrath: I didn't really choose to write Road Atlas, interestingly. Road Atlas wrote itself in a weird way. Road Atlas was like a free book. I'd be up in my office trying to finish some of these sections of the Bob Hope poem, but at a certain moment, I'd be very frustrated, and instead, something would show up that was really clear and simple. "I'm just going to write a prose poem about sitting on that hill in Nebraska." And it would seem like a huge relief from all this Bob Hope stress. And the gist of the poem would be right there. And I thought, "Oh, that's neat, I'm writing some prose poems on the side." I had already started writing Florida poems, and I thought, Bob Hope will be finished and then I'll write about Florida. But instead, these poems had just shown up, and I thought they ought to be a book.

If they had any sense
of history
it would be called Landgrab,

it would be called Exploitatiania

for the bulldozed banyans,
lost cathedrals of mahogany and cypress,
savannas of sawgrass and sabal palm,
mangroves toiling to anchor their buttresses,
knitting and mending the watery verge.

Beautiful and useless, flowers
bloom and die
in every season here, their colors dissemble,
soft corpses underfoot.

If there was any justice in this world
it would be named
Mangrovia.

- from "Florida,"
Mangrovia

FIU Magazine: The naming of natural things comes out as a passion of yours.
McGrath: Yes, especially in the Florida poems.

FIU Magazine: Can you talk about how naming ties in to Florida's myth?
McGrath: There is little myth in Florida to fasten on. There's little history. The history of Florida is incredibly unappealing. Texas' history isn't that appealing either, but they share this belief that there's a Lone Star Republic. These things aren't necessarily true. It's just that people believe them and they build their sense of self around them. And therefore, there are certain things that we are and we aren't, and therefore we won't accept this. Florida has no such identity and therefore people will accept anything. Texas has the Alamo, and we have Alamo Rental Car. That sums up Florida. What is Florida? Even on the postcards. "Fun and Sun Capital." What is that? That's nothing. I really feel like the 20th century is a prologue for Florida. It was like the 19th century in California. It will be in the 21st century that Florida defines its sense of self.

. . . already Sam has begun to master the local customs, youngest and most flexible, first to make landfall, betraying the generational nature of acculturation the way the poems of my students at the state university do, caught between past and present worlds, transplanted parents looking back to Havana while the children are native grown, rooted to the soil, though the roots of las palmas are notoriously shallow, hence their propensity to topple in a hurricane . . .

- from "El Balserito,"
Road Atlas

FIU Magazine: Where do you think Florida's definition of self is leading?
McGrath: I don't know exactly. That's the key question. But I think that you could possibly help influence it if you spoke up. By virtue of Florida not having these identities, there's a chance to influence the discussion far more than there is in, say, Chicago.

FIU Magazine: Do you see yourself in that role, of speaking up?
McGrath: Not really. I think that it should be Floridians. The message really isn't that I'm doing it. The message is that I'm teaching people whom I hope will do it. We should teach the arts and create a whole generation of people, whether they're painters, poets, sculptors, environmentalists, thinkers who stand up and stay, you know, "I'm actually from Florida" in that way that people say they're from Texas or California or Chicago. "I'm a Floridian, and therefore, I believe this and I want this."

FIU Magazine: You've often been compared to Whitman in terms of craft and voice, but I wanted to ask whether you see a similarity between your poetic vision and his, specifically in the belief that poetry has the power to bring people together.
McGrath: I think art is one of the things that has the potential to take human beings outside of themselves and make them think. The act of thinking may make you have happy thoughts or may make you have bad thoughts. People shy away from art because art can be dangerous. You might find yourself coming up with some realizations that are uncomfortable or difficult to accommodate. But nonetheless, not to come to them is just to hide from things. So I think art has that potentiality, and that potentiality is what Florida needs. Florida needs consciousness. Florida needs to be kicked around. "Wake up. Wake up." I don't care what the conclusion is that Florida comes to. But it just hasn't attempted to think its way out of the paper bag that it's found itself in. So "The Florida Poem" is going to be the poem to attempt to kick Florida in the head and say, "Wake up. Go jump in the spring. Invigorate yourself."