Campbell McGrath, Cohen Award
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners -- each of whom receives a cash prize of $600 -- are selected by our advisory editors. The 1997 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 1996, Volume 22, go to Andrew Sean Greer and Campbell McGrath:
Campbell McGrath for his poem "Praia dos Orixas" in Winter 1996-97, edited by Robert Boswell & Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Campbell McGrath was born in Chicago in 1962, and grew up in Washington, D.C. He attended the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1984, and he graduated from Columbia University's M.F.A. program in 1988. McGrath -- along with wife, Elizabeth -- then returned to Chicago, where he served as Visiting Poet at the University of Chicago in 1991. He has also taught at Northwestern, Columbia College, North Park College, and, he quips, "anywhere else that would have me." His son Sam was born in Chicago in 1988, and his son Jackson was born last November in Miami Beach, the McGraths' current home. For the last four years, McGrath has taught in the M.F.A. program at Florida International University. His three books are Capitalism (Wesleyan, 1990), American Noise (Ecco, 1994), and Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco, 1996), which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares several times, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and Antaeus. He has new work forthcoming in The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and The Kenyon Review.
" 'Praia dos Orixas,' " McGrath writes, "is one of a series of travelogue-like prose poems I've been writing over the last two or three years, part of a soon-to-be-completed (I hope) manuscript called Road Atlas. So, on the one hand, the poem is part of an exploration of the form of the prose poem, specifically the notion of moving the prose poem beyond closed-off, block-like paragraphs. In general I wanted to see what happened when one broke the prose apart on the page in a sculptural way, not as lines, in a prosodic sense, but as fragments of varying lengths and types. This idea seemed to me to open up a hidden world of spatial possibility and great textural range, constrained by neither poetic nor prose notions of propriety -- the world between the line and the paragraph. As I look at it now, 'Praia dos Orixas' seems pretty conventional on the page, its divisions predictably ordered by syntax and narrative; but the notion of prose/poetic hybridization and formal freedom was central to its original intent.
"The idea to work with open-ended prose forms was suggested to me by Robert Hass's poems, especially the beautiful sequence of 'strophic' poems at the beginning of his book Human Wishes. This was one good reason to dedicate 'Praia dos Orixas' to Hass. Another was the poem's interest in language as subject as well as medium, and in the disjunction or collision between the symbolic world of language and the not-quite-expressible thingness -- or erotics, to use one of Hass's terms -- of the natural world. This is a long-winded way of saying that one of the poem's concerns is the so-called mind/body dilemma, a frequent subject of contemporary American poetry. Thus 'Praia dos Orixas' ironically embodies the idea of the limits of language in its roadside encounter, another amusing anecdote from the great epistemological road trip of life.
"And it's a true story, for the most part -- a composite of several different excursions we undertook into the backwoods of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, about ten years ago, when Elizabeth and I went to visit her brother, Joshua, who was conducting anthropological fieldwork in one of the larger shantytowns outside the city of Salvador. The incident of the broken fan belt, as I recall, took place somewhere on the island of Itaparica, where we saw the sign for Praia dos Orixas, which translates as 'Beach of the Gods' or 'Beach of the Spirits.' (More specifically, the orixas are the gods and goddesses of Candomble, the Brazilian folk religion descended through generations of African slavery from animist religions of West Africa -- an exact counterpart to Spanish-Caribbean Santeria, where the orixas become the orishas, and to Haitian Voodoo, where they are known as loas.) What did the sign mean, in that weird, beachless backwater? Who knows. Is there really a place called 'Praia dos Orixas'? I think so. If not, there should be.
"Lastly, upon completing this poem, I was particularly delighted with its final line, which seemed a stunningly concise and clever conclusion to both its narrative and intellectual concerns, resolving the mind/body duality by playing off the suggested meanings of 'speaking in tongues.' It was a lyrical enactment of the poem's conceit, the forging of a kind of erotics of language. It was also my third and most important reason for dedicating the poem to Robert Hass, since it is in fact his line that ends 'Praia dos Orixas'-stolen almost verbatim from the poem 'Spring,' in Field Guide -- a fact I realized with some chagrin several weeks after completing the final draft of the poem. While I thought I had been engaged in a critical dialogue with Hass's work, it turned out I had been plagiarizing it -- which is an entirely different kind of glossolalia. Oh well. It still seems like a great line, and a great ending for this poem. For which I am thankful to Robert Hass and the rest of the orixas."