McGrath combined a sacramental, pagan view of life with a radical prairie populism rooted in the diversity of the American people and the sweat of the land.
Using a controlled yet fluid six-beat line reminiscent of Whitman, McGrath translated personal myth and memory into a stirring account of history and politics as they were experienced on the farms of post-Depression America. In a voice at once public and remarkably private, in Letter [to an Imaginary Friend] he created a new form that might be called historical lyricism—and quite possibly the century’s most persuasive and entertaining poem about struggles for broad-based social change. . . The New York Times Book Review

1The interviews, critical essays, and personal memoirs in this collection are meant to stimulate a continued interest in a great American voice, that of Thomas McGrath, “still unsung in too many quarters,” as Studs Terkel reminds us. McGrath’s voice has been heard, not by masses, but by many—the common, the erudite, the literati, by those he befriended, by those he taught, by those whose lives would be so much less without his speech still ringing in their ears.

2This project was conceived, in part, in response to the editor’s belief that aspects of postmodernism—including the notion that words only appear to mean what authors intend—have eroded the sense of literature as a life-altering, consciousness-changing medium. As portrayed by many writers in this volume, McGrath’s aesthetic is a forceful counterpoint to this lingering poststructuralist view.

3According to McGrath scholar and protégé Dale Jacobson: “McGrath thought of poetry as a vehicle for the expansion of consciousness. He believed that the purpose of poetry is to serve society. McGrath saw the poet as one who walks into the unknown to discover or invent new possibilities, though not simply as an issue of invention alone, but as a necessary vision for the fulfillment of human needs.” This view is echoed often in these pages, putting McGrath’s humanist aesthetic in the foreground.

4The writings are offered up in sections that display the diversity of commendation that exists for McGrath. For example, tributes from three McGrath contemporaries, poet and American cultural critic Robert Bly, African-American poet Sterling Plumpp, and American fiction writer Larry Woiwode, sit alongside a poignant personal memoir by Rick Watson, a Lutheran minister whose life was irrevocably changed in a chance encounter with McGrath at a North Dakota abbey.

5Critical works by additional McGrath scholars stand next to candid accounts of literary and personal relationships. While it is fashionable in collections such as these to offer only critical analysis, the editor fuses genres, including the interview, the popular memoir style, and new biographical information from McGrath’s early years in order to present a full picture of the poet and his person.

6Internationally, interest in McGrath’s poetry was established early on, during his years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, at which time he developed a life-long friendship with contributor English poet Jack Beeching. Continued international notice of McGrath’s life and work is represented here by Claribel Alegria and Sergio Ramirez in their statements of praise for the poet; as well as in the scholarly work of Vincent Dussol, to my knowledge, the only French McGrath scholar. The reputation of major writers almost always crosses national boundaries and waterways, and Thomas McGrath is no exception.

7A sampling of the content in this compilation is in order. In a panel discussion, Studs Terkel puts his guests in a reminiscent mood as they discuss McGrath’s place in American Letters. Reginald Gibbons insists that McGrath is “as serious an artist as there has ever been among poets.” Michael Anania marvels at McGrath’s “relentless desire to keep the whole shape of his progressive politics and poetry alive richly together,” while claiming that McGrath’s major work, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, will “come to be read as the great long American poem of the [twentieth] century.” Adrienne Rich insists that without the voice of Thomas McGrath, a “non-ideological radical” of the “great Western spaces” there is no way to “understand [the American] poetic heritage.”

8Poets Robert Bly and Sterling Plumpp offer their insights in interviews with the editor. Bly challenges perceived notions regarding McGrath’s atheism and outlines problems with literary elitism in American Letters. In addition, he describes McGrath’s poetics as having an “eloquence that resembles that of T.S. Eliot’s.”

9Plumpp compares McGrath’s non-stereotypical depiction of Native Americans to Faulkner’s portrayal of African Americans. McGrath, he says, wrote his American odyssey: “so that we have a far more complex sense of what it means to be an American in the same way that [we find] a very complex understanding of what it meant to be a Greek through Homer.”

10Critical works include David Pink’s analysis of McGrath as a Romantic in the vein of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, and Whitman. McGrath, he submits, “shares the overarching Romantic concern with reincorporating the mystical presence of spirituality into the world.”

11French writer and McGrath scholar Vincent Dussol explores musical references and the overall musicality in McGrath’s poetry, including erudition on the influence of the Blues and folk music in McGrath’s aesthetic, with attention paid to Richard Wright’s assertion that the Blues are not essentially “pessimistic,” but that like McGrath’s overall vision, they are “an exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope.” Dussol has authored an eight-hundred page work on the poet, which was completed after his pilgrimage to McGrath’s childhood home in North Dakota.

12In “Invoking the Communal Ego,” Dale Jacobson argues that McGrath invokes the communal ego, in part, to “promote the full potential of society to free the individual from oppressive relations and emotions in favor of communal emotions.” According to Jacobson, “The poetry of today sees the isolated ego as something to preserve because it perceives the isolated ego as its identity.” McGrath’s poetics, in Jacobson’s view, “demolish that isolation so we began to experience the ego, in its true form, as a social entity.”

13Linda McCarriston insists that McGrath’s poetry must be read and taught in MFA writing programs. “The profound sense-making of McGrath’s mind,” she asserts, “is an antidote to the monologizing sensibility, values, and language that poetry programs—even as they encourage costume identity—demand.” Her ideas and use of language, both idiosyncratic, plus her focus on social ideals add complexity and zeal to the ongoing discussion of McGrath’s poetry and politics.

14Larry Woiwode uses a pastiche of anecdotes in his lively memoir. His observations include an endearing physical description of McGrath, whose “shaggily-browed eyes with the baleful glare of a hawk, a kestrel, kindled fire aflash” make him a “dear and memorable man.”

15Lewis Lubka and Mark Vinz befriended McGrath during his days teaching at what is now Minnesota State University Moorhead. They paint pictures of the poet as only those close to him could. Vinz portrays McGrath’s direct yet sensitive approach to mentoring. Lubka outlines Tom’s political ideas and affiliations and portrays him as a true revolutionary in the trenches.

16According to McGrath’s literary executor Sam Hamill, “Jack Beeching’s lovely memoir captures Tom McGrath’s passionate revolutionary spirit, the sweep of his intelligence and compassion, and his wise, shy, self-deprecatory sense of humor.” Beeching’s prose vividly describes major events in McGrath’s life, placing McGrath in the cultural milieu of each of four decades with astonishing specificity.

17Included, also, are elegiac poems by David Martinson and Jack Beeching, and a factual narrative entitled “Onamia,” which is an eye-witness account of a tragic incident in McGrath’s personal life.

18All contributing writers affirm the sustained influence of McGrath’s poetry and poetics in contemporary letters. With this collection, yet another generation of readers and writers will become acquainted with his work. As we have heard from our elders and others, to do justice to the whole body of American Literature we must keep the legacy of Thomas McGrath alive, and to that end: Let us now praise Thomas McGrath.

19Nota bene:

20The reader will probably notice some variation in regard to documentation style, punctuation, and other technical matters among the works in this book. This is unavoidable with texts coming from writers of diverse backgrounds. Rather than try to bend everything into the same shape, the editor has decided to leave this variation intact, at times, keeping in mind Thomas McGrath’s own great appreciation for individuality. Ed.