No. 3

Fall 2002

Campbell McGrath is the author of five books, including Florida Poems, his most recent. His awards, in addition to a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, include the Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Cohen Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University and lives in Miami.

Miriam Greenberg is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's undergraduate writing program, and a long-time fan of Campbell McGrath's poetry.

So many of the poems in Florida Poems are very distinct and disparate in terms of form and voice. Did you deliberately set out to experiment with this? Or did it sort of evolve? Or what?

No, I started writing those poems when I moved [to Florida]. The book ended up with the two long poems as 'bookends' and then the middle section, and the middle poems just sort of came as they came -- a poem about a flower, or a prose poem -- there was no scheme or strategy that evolved there. And they were written over a long period of time, from about 1993 to 2000.

And 1993 is when American Noise came out . . .

All my books have had an overlap. Pieces of "The Bob Hope Poem" were written while I was writing Capitalism. . . . There are pieces of Capitalism that never saw the light of day, and it was those longer historical poems towards the end that later generated "The Bob Hope Poem" in a way. American Noise and "The Bob Hope Poem" overlapped very much. I had two-thirds of American Noise written, and then I started "The Bob Hope Poem," which I really liked, and which was hugely time consuming and was getting bigger and bigger. And at a certain point [my wife Elizabeth] got pregnant with our first child, [and I realized,] 'oh man, I have to get serious here. I don't think I can indulge in this Bob Hope epic because I could see it sucking my brain for the next five years. So I focused on finishing American Noise, which was a more logical decision.

Then we had a child, moved to Miami, I got a new teaching job. . . . For two years I didn't get anything done. . . . I remember there was a point when I was opening computer files in which parts of "The Bob Hope Poem" lay, which I hadn't opened in three years. It was frustrating because the poem was so "involving;" you had to have your entire mind concentrated on it, which was obviously impossible with a new baby and new life. So then, as time passed, and my kids got a little bigger, I was able to go back and finish it up. But during that time I'd already started to write Florida Poems, not knowing where it would go, and by the same token, [I was] also writing Road Atlas poems. So everything is being written all the time. I think right now I'm working on maybe three different books -- I think! But I don't know yet. I've got different poems going now, and I can see they wouldn't all go in the same book.

I notice a definite shift in tone from your early books to Florida Poems. Perhaps putting it too simply, you seem to be moving away from the youthful wonder at American culture and its associated kitsch, towards a more objective, less awe-filled perspective -- one which views the increasing corporatization of America as moving towards fulfilling its ultimate mythology. Would you speak to that?

It's just kind of age -- American Noise is still a young person's book. I'm still in my twenties during all of that, and as you say, I'm still wondering and amazed driving around the country. While I'm still fascinated by the American landscape, I'm not as "amazed" by it, since I've traveled through it now exhaustively, and it's more familiar. So part of that is a sort of inevitable biological change of perspective and focus. My wonder and amazement now is focused on children and on creating new people!

But each book has a different tone and intention -- American Noise is very overtly about America. Road Atlas is about travel beyond America, and fatherhood, and place, and even more than that it's about the form of the prose poem. "The Florida Poem" is really about Florida as a paradigm for America as a whole. When I'm criticizing Orlando, I'm criticizing all of America, because that culture is universalized. Why have all of us acquiesced to this horrible plastic culture being foisted upon us? That's the big question. It's more fun to pick on Orlando because it's kind of the epicenter of it in some ways. . . .

But my point is that "The Florida Poem" is really about wonder, not as overtly perhaps -- "looking up at the American stars in wonder" -- Capitalism ends with the word 'wonder,' now that you get me thinking about it. "The Florida Poem" begins cynically, but comes to find the act of diving into this spring in Florida as an act of wonder. And it's realizing that the fountain of youth is Florida's identifying myth. And that there is a fountain of youth, and in Florida it's the very youthfulness and newness of the culture. Human culture is potentially the fountain of youth.

The poem ends with the notion of the first day of our lives -- "today." So that's really the same movement towards wonder. Different in tone from my first books, because I'm a different person, I'm older and less ingenuous.

You've talked in previous interviews about the prose poem as an easily accessible sort of magical middle-world between poetry and prose. Do you think there's room for that sub-genre to emerge as something new and available, rather than just a subsection within an author's wider work?

Absolutely. Twenty years ago when I was a graduate student, prose poems were still far more of an anomaly. But you have to globalize your perspective, as it were, beyond the relatively rigid English tradition. The French invented the prose poem essentially, and in Europe and Latin America it's a perfectly acceptable way to write. You even have people like Saint-John Perse who won the Nobel Prize early in the 20^th century for writing prose poems. . . . To the degree that America recognized prose poems, it was mostly in a surrealist vein, which is not interesting to me. For me, James Wright's prose poems, which he wrote at the end of his career, are a really fantastically powerful body of work that open up prose poems in a different way -- they're really essayistic and personal. And then Robert Hass', which I think in a way, come out of James Wright. And Richard Hugo's letter-poems, which aren't quite prose poems, but kind of are.

Nowadays, it seems like everyone writes prose poems. For example, the last two winners of the Laughlin Prize, which is a prize for second books, were [books of prose poetry]. Last year's was a book called Miracles and Mortifications, by Peter Johnson. The whole book is a prose poem sequence, in a kind of crazy Nabokov-like voice. This year's winner was Karen Volkman -- her book Spar is largely prose poems. And they're completely different takes on the form: Johnson's are very funny, narrative, comedic, and Volkman's are spare, internal, linguistically driven. I've always thought that the Laughlin Prize was a good hallmark to assess the state of American poetry. . . .

But there's still this identity confusion problem that the prose poem has. It's not prose, it's not poetry, it's another thing! Why can't there be three slots instead of two? It's a kind of false binary; the prose poem is just its own separate creature . . . If it wasn't called a prose poem, if it was called Billy Bob, it would be clear that there would be Billy Bob writers. No one would say 'oh that's so weird, what is that?' The prose poem just has a bad title; it's never fully established its identity within our poetry, though again, that's changing. Within some other traditions there's no such confusion.

Your poetry, unlike a lot of contemporary poetry, seems to lack a central speaker as an essential character within the poem. Can you talk about that for a bit?

It depends on where you place the narrator in terms of the poem. Is the narrator within the poem or outside the poem? There's always a narrator, because there's always a human being writing the poem at some point, but whether that human origin is within the poem or outside the poem is another choice, a rhetorical stance. I usually place my narrator within the poem, but the narrator's personal identity is not necessarily part of the poem. That seems to me to be not only a poetic choice but also a moral stance, in that I don't want to claim for my poems some kind of absolute, objective knowledge. There are very few things I know; mostly what I know is how ambivalent I feel how and ambiguous everything seems. Even when I feel I know something, it's not 'written on the mountain top' kind of knowledge. So you're right that my work is often first person, but not in the confessional or even personal way, often. The 'I' is like the camera seeing the world, and for me it's important to acknowledge that there is a camera there, and that it happens to see things in a particular way that's different from how another camera might. But I'm more interested in what the camera sees, than in the camera itself. If I'd been a filmmaker I might well have been a documentary filmmaker.

So then . . . what's the metaphorical equivalent in poetry of a documentary filmmaker? There really isn't one. It's hard to get information into lyric poetry -- an information-based film is a documentary, but what's an information-based poem? I think it's an essay, or a book of nonfiction, rather than a poem at all. But I often write kind of essayistic or non-fictional poems, whether it's history or cultural landscape, and so I've had to invent a form, or find a form -- often I think prose poetry accommodates that urge but other things can too. Long line poems can accommodate it, like "Rock Falls, Illinois" from American Noise. That's a very documentary kind of poem -- it's really just looking closely at a landscape. It has a different rhythm and musicality because it's structured into lines.

What do you think about forms of poetry that aren't traditionally academic, like slam poetry, and hip-hop, and to some extent political poetry?

There's a kind of cycle here. There are two ways to work with models: to imitate them, or to react against them. . . . So for instance, the Beatniks said, "we don't like what the literary conventions are, so we're going to do the opposite." If the convention is to be really careful and precise and high-toned, we're going to be spontaneous and crazy and informal. But then of course, after a while the Beat thing becomes its own form after a while. The original notion may be revolutionary, but soon the revolution itself becomes codified, pro forma, and there needs to be an anti-Beatnik counter-revolution, and you have a counter revolution towards the neo-formalists or whatever. Of course, there's no one stream to American poetry, and at any given time you have a bunch of revolutions and counter-revolutions going on. Along with the beatniks you had Black Mountain experimental poetics going on, and the New York School, and the Fugitives. . . . And then you have something even more interesting -- people who're just unique. You have Elizabeth Bishop, who doesn't fall into any of those camps, and Berryman, and James Wright. And then the idea of calling Sylvia Plath a "confessional poet," as if confessionalism were some sort of dogma, is crazy. She's just a uniquely brilliant poet . . . . The point I'm trying to get to is that any kind of "school" or "movement" is probably not that interesting. Those tend to be critical labels and I wouldn't pay much attention to them.

What about more traditionally academic poetry?

When you say academic poetry, even that is misleading. I mean, I'm an academic. I'm a professor at a university, but I don't think the kinds of poems I write are what you mean when by "academic poetry." Even Allen Ginsberg was an academic by the end of his career, for goodness sakes! And he was the original poetic revolutionary of our times, so that's the cyclicality again.

In California, the academics are "Language" poets, in other places they're formalists, the middle of the country -- Pittsburgh and Chicago -- academic poetry implies a kind of lyric poetry with a certain emotional sensibility. In other words, there's not even an accord on what academic poetry is -- who the enemy is -- let alone which revolutionary tactic to take!

But it's kind of hard to discover even poetry as accessible as yours if you're not part of some sort of academic community . . .

I don't know that there are any poets really known to a mass audience. The idea of reading literature isn't really a public idea in America. It's not really a highly literate culture, so popular authors are at the Stephen King level. . . . The only chance of a poet actually selling books is when Jewel writes her book, or when Jimmy Carter wrote poems. Even Philip Levine by all rights could be a public poet, a poet who steelworkers and autoworkers all across America read, and say 'here's a guy who's speaking to our experience.' Or Gerald Stern. But they're not, because there is no such thing as a mass poetry readership. This is one of the perils of democracy: our country is a chaotic babble of voices in a thousand different media competing, and the poets are a very marginalized voice within that. In Ireland, poetry is very visible. But do I wish I were in Ireland? No; I prefer the chaos of America, even if it means each of our individual outcries will be muted in the general hubbub.

To get back to performance poetry: I like it in so far as its another tool to demystify poetry. Poetry is just another art form to entertain or enlighten, though poets tend to get too self-important and believe it's a mystical enterprise. I don't really think it is. So, on that I like the populist component of performance poetry.

But, having said that, I don't think it produces very good poetry. Most performance poetry panders horrifically to its audience, because it's a competitive enterprise -- in slam poetry, you win! So then you've obviously totally shifted the goalposts. So that, I hate. The slam poets who tend to do well [are performing pieces] about somebody's grandfather who got shot down in the street. It's the equivalent of putting the kitten on the train tracks in a movie -- the gross sentimental gestures designed to get your audience to boo and cheer and stampede you.

That's not what I take the poet's task to actually be. The poet's task is above all things, honesty to yourself and to the language. The good thing about poetry is that you can't win, that there's no competitive element. And the whole world of slam sells that out.

If it helps to broaden the vocabulary, and the audience, and what's accepted, then good. But to lose sight of the fact that the poem needs to be honest or true to an individual vision, not to what an audience might applaud to in a bar, that's a big mistake.

I know you've been asked about poetic influences, and about contemporaries you admire in other interviews. But what are your influences beyond the world of poetry? What do you read when you're not reading poetry? What movies do you like? What artists and photographers do you enjoy?

I would say all kinds, to be honest. I tend to be kind of an Americanist. American culture I absorb at every level -- I really like American popular culture, and high culture, to the degree that there's any distinction. I really like reading People magazine and watching Scooby Doo with my kids. I find it endlessly fascinating that Scooby Doo still exists. Honestly we'll be watching Scooby Doo on Mars someday! It seems to have some eternal force that I can't understand.

I love movies as an art form. Most of what Hollywood makes is not art, of course, because money has corrupted the artistic vision, but I like it anyway, because I like watching what Hollywood does. It's like . . . watching the political system, which also is weirdly flawed. Seeing what bizarre stuff emerges from Hollywood and Washington is interesting. And then there's occasionally the actual Hollywood artist, like Orson Welles or Francis Ford Coppola. He's someone who's really able to be an artist.

I love Vincent Van Gogh, to be honest. He's inspirational to me for his uncompromising vision.

Did he actually mail the ear to a girl?

That's a complex historical issue -- was he sick, what was Gauguin's role in that -- but, in essence, it seems that he did. But -- the myth of the insane artist is a terrible thing. It's very destructive because it teaches people that insanity is somehow an important part of the art, which isn't true. College kids tend to get attracted to the Jim Morrison drunken artist who dies when he's twenty seven, which is a very destructive model -- what kind of artist kills himself? If your art is more important to you than your self, you don't kill yourself! It's a very narcissistic gesture to kill yourself.

If you have a mental health problem, that's another issue. I'm talking about willfully suicidal craziness. I understand the appeal of it, because the whole Jack Kerouac model was very interesting to me as a young man, but Jack Kerouac would be alive today as a revered older figure, getting well-deserved attention and acclaim and money, and instead he's dead in a stupidly destructive way.

Flaubert is held up as the antithesis, who said 'lead an ordinary life, but preserve your craziness for your art.' I think that's more true.

I find music inspirational. I listen to a lot of rock & roll, and alternative music like Pavement. We listen to the Beatles around the house all the time now, because my kids got old enough to start identifying music they like, and it was the Beatles. Which is so funny, because I can remember listening to that music when I was a tiny kid, and now forty years later it speaks to people. At eight years old they hear it and say -- "What's that? I want to listen to that!" and "That's good!" So it's really neat to go out and get all the Beatles CDs that I haven't heard in twenty years.

"Strawberry Fields Forever" -- I think that's an extraordinarily brilliant piece of art. I could listen to it again and again and again. In fact, I do listen to it all the time, and I'm trying to write about it. I like seeing artistic process at work. You can get some of John Lennon's early demos of that song where he was kind of inventing the words and melody, and see it progressing to its final thing, and I think that's really fantastically interesting.

Woody Guthrie is a songwriter I've always loved, and is very influential. He's a figure in some of my first poems. It's hard to write about the American road and political culture without Woody Guthrie -- he's the bard of that. He may not be a poet, but the lyric poem starts with song, and that's the tradition that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are really part of. It's hard for me not to see Bob Dylan as an important cultural figure. Well, is that poetry or not? That's kind of barking up the wrong tree, to ask whether it's poetry or not. If you look at his lyrics on the page, they don't read as poetry to me. But he's not trying to write poems, he's trying to write songs. It's an allied art form, though not the same exactly. So, in the vein of Americana, whether it's artists like Bill Traylor [an African-American painter born in 1856], or Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan, or Orson Welles -- there are a lot of figures that speak to me.

But at a humanistic level it transcends culture. Basho and Van Gogh are not of my culture, but they speak to me through their work. There are as many different biographical histories as you want, from the Rimbaud 'do it all before you're nineteen' to those who don't discover their voices 'til they're fifty -- you can find a useful model to support any kind of vision; what matters is the work. I don't care about genre -- whether it's a painting or a film or a song or a poem. It happens that what I do is poetry. If I'd been born musical, I'd be happy to be a musician. But then I'd be stuck having to play an instrument! Language is purer, because it's bodiless -- it's in our brains, we're hard-wired with it. You have to learn how to write a poem, but the language itself -- you come equipped with language -- and it's the best instrument of all, as far as I'm concerned.

Copyright 2002, Miriam Greenberg

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.