About Campbell McGrath

Just a glance at the spines of Campbell McGrath's five full-length collections of poetry—Capitalism, American Noise, Spring Comes to Chicago, Road Atlas, and Florida Poems—suggests both his favorite subject, American culture in all its exasperating, glorious abundance, and his favorite setting, the open road. McGrath's first book, Capitalism, simultaneously hymned and lampooned 7-11 stores; in his latest, Florida Poems, it is Chuck E. Cheese that comes in for his less-than-affectionate abuse. This my-country-right-or-tacky spirit presides over all of McGrath's poems, which are set in locales from sea to shining sea and make remarkable use of geographical places as mirrors (by looking deeply at a place, the poet discovers new territory inside himself) but also as stages, even soapboxes, from which McGrath delivers his barbed and witty commentary on contemporary culture.

Asked about the importance of travel in his work, McGrath takes an almost scientific tack, echoing Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry. "I'm a kind of documentarian, and just seeing new things to document gets me going," he says. "It's like turning on the camera to record new landscapes, new cultural observations. Collecting specimens, like a naturalist." It's true that McGrath's work has exhibited a strong documentary impulse from the beginning, and does still. Florida Poems, for example, features a long collage, "William Bartram Beset by Crocodiles or Alligators," drawn from the eighteenth-century naturalist's Travels. But McGrath's poems are just as often driven by awe, or a kind of passionate confusion, a sense that certain things can only be discovered through the thrilling alienation of travel. Both the documentarian and the quester are visible in the first lines of "Sunrise and Moonfall, Rosarito Beach," Capitalism's first poem.

What I remember of Mexico
is how the glass apple of mescal glowed
and exploded like a globe of seeds
or something we couldn't pronounce
or know the secret name of, never,
and even when the federales shook us down for twenty bucks
as they must, to save face,
I couldn't lose the curve and rupture
of that sphere-half-full, hand-blown, imperfect
as our planet.

Hunger for experience, humility before the ineffable, droll acknowledgment of corruption, the mixture of high and low diction, keen attention to musicality, and the sudden leap from the personal to the universal—all these have remained consistent features of McGrath's poems over the years, even as his writing has grown ever more capacious and flexible.

McGrath was born in Chicago in 1962 at the University of Chicago's Lying-in Hospital, where his father was completing a medical degree. To pay his way through school, his father was an ROTC student, and after he graduated the family was stationed at a military hospital in Washington, D.C., where McGrath spent most of his childhood. Later, McGrath returned to the University of Chicago to complete his undergraduate degree. This was the first in a continuing series of returns to Chicago; the city in general, and the University of Chicago in particular, have been of great importance to both McGrath's life and his work. He met his wife, Elizabeth Lichtenstein, while attending U of C (her parents met as students there, too), and his best-known work, "The Bob Hope Poem," has much to say about the history of the city. McGrath did well in school, and was always interested in the creative arts. He worked on the literary review, played in a band, wrote and (with Ms. Lichtenstein) co-directed plays, and elected to take the creative option for his B.A. thesis, submitting a manuscript of poetry, which won the English department's best thesis award.

McGrath's parents had both come from working-class Irish Catholic immigrant families in Manhattan; both his grandfathers had worked as ticket takers on streetcars, buses, and subways. Like most second-generation Americans, his parents had hoped for a better lot than their own parents, and a better one still for their children. There was never any doubt that education would be the means to those ends. "Books were considered to be among the best things going," says McGrath, "and I absorbed that attitude unthinkingly." Poetry may not have been the most promising career path available to McGrath, financially speaking, but his parents placed a high value on literature and the arts—"Perhaps it was a vestigial Irish thing," he speculates—and were sanguine about their son's choices. "They were always supportive of my undertakings, whether baseball or poetry. The expectation was that one should be smart, ambitious, and intellectually focused. They let me find my own way, which happened to accord pretty well with their desires."

McGrath completed an M.F.A. degree at Columbia in 1988, and just two years later published his first collection, Capitalism. The book garnered attention for its irreverent variety of forms, which included both strict rhyme schemes and expansive prose poems, and the irreverent variety of subject matters McGrath channeled into those forms, as in the oft-quoted "Capitalist Poem #5": "I was at the 7-11. / I ate a burrito. / I drank a Slurpee. / I was tired. / It was late, after work-washing dishes. / The burrito was good. / I had another."

But perhaps the most fascinating poem in Capitalism, and certainly the one that best presaged the poet's future direction, was "The Cult of the Individual," a long meditation on the American experiment incorporating disquisitions on real cowboys and TV cowboys, collaged passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark, and McGrath's firsthand impressions of the "terrible loneliness in America, in its vast empty spaces, its distances and recesses, its prairies and deserts and its endlessly retreating mountain ranges . . ." It is a tremendously ambitious poem, whose dialectics between the personal and the public, and skepticism and celebration, rooted in the American landscape, quite naturally earned McGrath comparisons to Whitman and Ginsberg. The poems of American Noise (1993) were also set in far-flung places—"Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas," "Sugar Skulls, Oaxaca," "Shrimp Boats, Biloxi"—and oscillated between cynicism and praise, leading Garrett Hongo to coin the term "ironic romanticism" in his attempt to describe McGrath's style.

Even before American Noise was published, McGrath had already begun work on "The Bob Hope Poem," his magnum opus (so far, anyway) and the centerpiece of 1996's Spring Comes to Chicago. "It was a monster that devoured my world," McGrath says. The comment will surprise no one who has experienced this sprawling poem's seventy pages of historical reportage, personal musings, struggles with poetic influences, cheerful invective, and close analysis of the culture of celebrity as represented by Bob Hope. It is a remarkable poem, the sort of poem Whitman might have written if he'd had access to Baudrillard, cable television, People magazine, Thorstein Veblen, and Wittgenstein, and it brought McGrath enormous recognition. He received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1997, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Witter Bynner fellowship in 1998, and a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1999.

In the late 1990's, McGrath's poems were growing larger, his line was getting longer, and his style was becoming more and more discursive. It was perhaps quite natural, then, for him to become ever more attracted to the prose poem's capacity for digression and essayistic techniques. The prose poems that comprise Road Atlas: Prose & Other Poems, published in 1999, came so naturally that McGrath has called the collection "a free book": "I'd be up in my office, trying to finish some 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." McGrath continues to write prose poems, and to argue in interviews for greater recognition of the form's possibilities.

McGrath's next undertaking, a translation of Aristophanes's The Wasps, may have seemed like quite a departure to some. But not to David Slavitt, who suggested the project. "Having read 'The Bob Hope Poem,' " McGrath recalls, "David recognized that I was—sometimes—a social satirist in the Aristophanic vein. I saw the logic myself. To Sophocles I would have said no; to Aristophanes I felt like I had to say yes." McGrath worked on his version of the play for a year and a half, and "took a lot away from the project, in terms of my understanding of comedy and voice." But the most obvious, immediate, and tangible payback, McGrath says, was "A City in the Clouds," the long poem addressing, among other things, overdevelopment, consumerism, and utopic fantasies of Florida which opens his latest collection, Florida Poems. "It wasn't just the obvious model that Aristophanes provides with Cloudcuckooland, but also the notion of writing a poem that is basically a fable, or a political parable. I don't think that would have struck me if I hadn't spent that time on The Wasps."

Florida Poems? What happened to Chicago? Nothing—McGrath still occasionally teaches at his alma mater for a semester here and there, still speaks fondly of the city as "a marvel of human energy and cultural fervor," and still considers himself a "serial Chicagoan." But some eleven years ago he accepted a teaching position at Florida International University in Miami, and—somewhat to his own surprise, one gets the impression—he lives there still. McGrath never imagined himself in Miami before moving to the city, "but as a student of American culture, I've loved it." Now that their two sons are in school, McGrath and his wife intend to stay put for a while, though it seems quite apt that this chronically itinerant poet would choose to put down roots in what may be the most rootless state of the union. "Basically," says McGrath, "Florida is fantastically beautiful, but also one step away from pure chaos."

McGrath has always worked on several projects at once, and reports that he has at least three in the pipeline now. A new collection, Pax Atomica, will be published late in 2004. A book-length historical poem about a minor character on the Lewis and Clark expedition is in its early stages. And a memoir-like project, tentatively titled Civilization Notebooks and utilizing both long prose passages and series of haiku, is also in the works. Between working devotedly with his students at FIU—"I love my job," he says frankly. "I think we have one of the best M.F.A. programs around"—and trying to keep up with his young sons—"One wants to be a professional surfer, an artist, and a doctor; the other a dolphin trainer, professional skateboarder, and paleontologist"—you might consider it a wonder that McGrath gets any writing done at all. But this poet, like his poems, seems to have a boundless supply of energy and ideas. Describing his family's love of travel—trips to Ireland and Chile are coming up soon—he could just as well be talking about his poetry: "Rooted is good," he says, "but we get around."

Joel Brouwer is the author of Exactly What Happened and Centuries . His poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry , and other magazines. He teaches at the University of Alabama.