Tribute to Thomas McGrath

1Studs Terkel: At today’s gathering here, around this table, is the nature of a celebration of the life and the artistry of one of America’s great poets, unsung, unfortunately, in too many quarters, Thomas McGrath. This gathering involves his widow, an all-around activist in the best sense of the word, Alice McGrath. Along with her is Michael Anania, excellent author and essayist who teaches literature at the Circle campus, University of Illinois, and Reg Gibbons, who edits one of the best literary magazines in the country, the TriQuarterly of Northwestern University. [Gibbons was TriQuarterly editor from 1981 to 1998.] We’re talking about a man named Tom McGrath. Alice, you were his wife for a number of years—why is Tom so known among other poets and writers, by E. P. Thompson, the great British historian who recently died, for example, who thought of Tom McGrath as the American poet?

2Alice McGrath: Well, he’s known and loved among poets for his work, but when I think of Tom McGrath and other poets, I think of them in terms of their friendships. He had very, very close relationships and friendships among other poets. The poets who used to meet at our house at Marsh Street, which is the address at the beginning of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, were people who cared about each other’s work, who admired each other’s work, who encouraged each other. They were just a wonderful group. I want to mention that among his very close friends was Ed Rolfe, the wonderful poet who died very young, and Don Gordon, who died more recently. Of course there were many others who developed such close friendships with him as well.

3Studs Terkel: As you say that, and before I ask Mike Anania and Reg Gibbons about his poetry and before we read his poems, Adrienne Rich sent a note for this occasion, for this particular round table we’re having, Adrienne Rich who won the National Book Award for poetry. I will just read her statement:

Thomas McGrath’s name and work became known to me late through Terrence Des Pres’ study of him in Praises & Dispraises, Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century. I immediately began seeking out his books in the library. I understood that a major American voice, a voice that would have been vital to me in my earlier grapplings with history, memory, and politics [Terkel: think of that: history, memory, politics!] had been effectively erased from prevailing discussions of poetry. Part of this, I’m sure, had to do with the very politics: radical, Marxist, populist, that breathed through McGrath’s work. Part of it was the provincialism of the East Coast literary culture. Being blacklisted by HUAC1 didn’t help. I think of McGrath and of Muriel Rukeyser as poetic predecessors made practically unavailable by the politics of the poetry establishment and the politics of anti-Communism. Muriel Rukeyser, an urban, sexually independent woman, Jew, rooted in the concrete of New York City, and McGrath of the great Western spaces, Catholic, working class—both non-ideological radicals, visionaries, poetic explorers. How have we tried to understand our poetic heritage without them?

4Studs Terkel: Thoughts on that, Mike Anania?

5Anania: Well, one of the things that happens in McGrath, a bunch of things that happen that she mentions that are terribly important, include that sense of space, the place, the North Dakota empty place of Tom’s childhood; his connection with Native Americans; the proximity of his father’s life to Wounded Knee that’s mentioned in the poems; beyond that, also, a commitment to talking about subjects that don’t come up in much 20th century American poetry. And the first thing you think about is work, because Tom writes throughout all of his life about the nature, the rhythm, the physical stresses and exhilarations, the rhapsodies, and the hardships of work. And one of the things that gives him an audience way outside of poets and of literary circles is that commitment to work and politics. So I’ll tell quickly a story that I’ve told before. When I was the literary editor of the Swallow Press and we were about to republish the first volume of. . .

6Studs Terkel: Wait a minute, Swallow Press was a Midwestern press that published, to a great extent, poetry that. . .

7Anania: Yes, a publishing company in Chicago and I was the editor who did poetry, and we were publishing Tom’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, which has very long lines; so the publisher and I were in a taxi cab in Chicago. I was talking about the width of the lines and the need to make this book, which is in my hand at the moment, wider than usual, and there was a question of the cost of that, and the taxi driver pulled up to a stop sign and turned around and said, “Are you talking about Tom McGrath?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “He’s the only poet worth reading in America today. You should publish it however it requires to be published.” And the same thing happened to me in a bar once. I was talking to somebody about poetry and a Greek sailor turned to me and said, “There are only two poets worth reading in the world today: Nazim Hikmet and Tom McGrath.”

8Studs Terkel: You mean the Turkish poet?

9Anania: The Turkish poet, yes, and Tom McGrath. So Tom had a readership outside of poetry, and one of the limitations of the poetry empire is that Tom’s work, in some ways, was not to be a part of the world of East–coast poetry, certainly for a long time, but his attachment to a wider audience was not diminished by that, I think.

10Studs Terkel: Reg Gibbons, I’m hearing Mike and Alice, how about your thoughts?

11Gibbons: Well, I want to add, after what Michael has said, that the most extraordinary thing, perhaps, about Tom’s work in light of who reads it, was that he didn’t cut a single corner; he made no concessions to making poems simple, or simpleminded by any means. He had a fantastically rambunctious vocabulary, a wild range over all sorts of both angers and loves and was a great poet for praise as well as for satire—and was as serious an artist as there’s ever been among poets.

12Studs Terkel: You know what I thought: each of us is going to read a couple of his poems. Suppose we had Tom’s voice when he was a guest here in Chicago a couple of years before he died, and it opens with the blues because I’ve always associated McGrath with Nelson Algren, who admired McGrath very much as a kind of Jack Conroy figure, and McGrath’s stuff has such a bluesy quality at times, so we’ll open with Louis Armstrong, his “West End Blues” as Tom is reading a poem, and we’ll think of this poem in connection with what Mike said about work and daily life and ordinary people. . . (music)

13Recorded voice of Tom McGrath: This poem is called The Citizen Dreaming:2

In the blue hour
When the houses fall asleep in their shadows
(Before the impersonal light in the hungry streets
Glamors one more evening)
Then, in one of the mean rooms,
The Citizen makes soup.
On the forbidden hot-plate,
Or, on the forbidden electric fry-pan
(The gift of a grandchild)
Fabricates a sandwich from prefabricated
Processed cheese-type food-type—American type—cheese—
Or opens the innocent-looking can of beans.
The Citizen is dining at home alone in the blue hour.
And now as the darkness distributes crime
Unequally in the streets of the rich and the poor,
The Citizen reviews the day and the days:
The excitements and astonishments of the new age!
The excitement of another rent raise on the room!
The enlightening cut-back in social benefits
By the Presidential thief the Citizen elected!
And the one bar the Citizen could walk to:
closing;
The store that once gave credit:
Gone out of business;
The last movie house the Citizen could get to:
Bankrupt.
And everyone, it seems,
Disappearing:
The children gone impossible distances, the grandchildren
Unknown, unseen. . .
In the blue hour a little light
enters.
What was hidden becomes
almost
Visible
The opaque
Clears a little
Now that the Citizen has stopped voting for those frauds
(Great heroes once!)
Who have put the Citizen here—
(What was it that a father or mother said?)
Now that it is too late
And the Citizen is as abandoned
As those the Citizen abandoned
Once
Despised
For Class or color—
Now all can be seen at last clearly!
Now, in the blue hour the Citizen indulges
In criminal dreams:
A warm place, good food, sex, freedom—
Now that all desires could end only
In the choice of illegal means.
Something human is elected out of the light. . .
In the blue hour.
And the lucky dead on all the roads that led from home to here!

14Studs Terkel: I was thinking, hearing that, that what’s astonishing is: when did he write that Alice, way back?

15Alice McGrath: I don’t know for sure, but at least 20 years ago. Studs Terkel: You talk about a solar plexus of punches! It’s direct, isn’t it? Thoughts on hearing that?

16Gibbons: It has all of those parts of those individual poems of Tom: that sense of anger, the communal anger of a society that doesn’t hold together anymore and doesn’t take care of its own; and then that—always in the poem—that wisp of hope that revolution depends on; and how the community will refashion itself; and that sense in Tom that goes (and that’s why I think the blues accompaniment was a good one)—the sense that says that somehow it’s not far from criminality to change.

17Studs Terkel: And you start thinking of the looting of Los Angeles, of fantasies and dreams, of stuff you see and hear. . .

18Alice McGrath: And the sense of hope is also accompanied by the sense that we have to learn new ways to do things; otherwise, we’re just sunk, and that’s in this little poem called, “Advice for Those Facing the Coming Flood.”3

19Studs Terkel: Please read it.

20Alice McGrath:

Swimming won’t help.
Drown.
Or learn to walk on water.

21Studs Terkel: We’re talking about survival, aren’t we? I think we should continue to read the poetry of Tom McGrath and from the poetry will come more thoughts that we have—because it is the poetry that listeners should know more about. Before that, a couple of the books, Reg, that you mentioned. . .

22Gibbons: Well, a great place to start is Tom’s Selected Poems, 1938- 1988 which was published by Copper Canyon Press and with the book that contains the last poems that he wrote, also published by Copper Canyon, Death Song.

23Studs Terkel: And Letter to an Imaginary Friend, that tremendous ballad of America. Who wants to read? Reg, do you want to read something?

24Gibbons: I would like to read something called “The End of the World.” It’s in the Selected Poems:4

The end of the world: it was given to me to see it.
Came in the black dark, a bulb in the starless sky,
A trembling at the heart of the night, a twitching of the webby flesh
of the earth.
And out of the bowels of the street one beastly, ungovernable cry.
Came and I recognized it: the end of the world.
And waited for the lightless plunge, the fury splitting the rock.
And waited: a kissing of leaves: a whisper of man-killing ancestral night—
Then: a tinkle of music, laughter from the next block.
Yet waited still: for the awful traditional fire,
Hearing mute thunder, the long collapse of sky.
It falls forever. But no one noticed. The end of the world provoked
Out of the dark a single and melancholy sigh
From my neighbor who sat on his porch drinking beer in the dark.
No: I was not God’s prophet. Armageddon was never
And always: this night in a poor street where a careless irreverent laughter
Postpones the end of the world: in which we live forever.

25Studs Terkel: Thoughts on hearing that. . . what occurs to you?

26Gibbons: That sense that Tom always had of the general and the representative, and then the very specific moment. . .

27Anania: Particularly, that sense of the poet and the night that go together so well in Tom’s work. You have the sense in the Los Angeles poems, the sense he’s always there; you have the feeling for the night out there in the city. The poet is allied with the ecstasies and excesses of human kind, which is the thing that keeps the world from falling in on us.

28Studs Terkel: Funny you said he spoke of the night, because in the previous poem, in the poem we heard Tom himself read, in which he speaks of night, he’s talking about something underneath, isn’t he? He’s talking about something beyond words.

29Gibbons: As Michael says, he often wrote about the night and probably wrote in the night because it’s in the night, I guess, when one feels both completely alone and also most sensitive and aware of all the multitudinous lives around one that are going on. The late night hour is an odd hour of intimacy with unseen others.

30Studs Terkel: No wonder Nelson Algren loved Tom McGrath. You know there’s one poem, “A Real Gone Guy,” one of the earliest poems I ever knew outside of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater that dealt with drugs. Nelson Algren and Tom McGrath, at the same time as Man With The Golden Arm,5 they knew of one another, you know, so just a side item: so Win Stracke6 was singing it once and Nelson Algren was going to subsidize a session to record it and send a copy to Tom, his poem to the tune of “Cowboy’s Lament,” but he never got around to it. Alice, before I ask you about Tom’s background—Mike a poem of McGrath. . .

31Anania: Well, I’m going to read a piece of the long poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, which is in four sections; this is in Part II. This begins, to get a sense of it, with the problem he comes back to over and over again in the poems:

*

32Studs Terkel: Tom again, speaking about those alien to us, the others inside. . .

33Anania: Yes, and the others outside because what he gets to finally is communal labor, working together; the more positive part of this passage, the spring part, is working together, working alone, and working together.

34Studs Terkel: And one of the ideas Tom uses is Praise. Praise! He’s praising something over and beyond the condition. . . he knows and praises, one way or another, daily, the anonymous survivor. Later we’ll hear him do a praise poem, but Alice a word about Tom. Who is this guy? We know he’s from Dakota, the jobs he did, the times he lived in, the Depression. . .

35Alice McGrath: The various jobs he did, yes, but the family. . . the very first time I met his family I asked his mother if she had recognized any particular abilities or inclinations about Tom and she said, “Well, he always was a-one for reading.” The atmosphere in the home, Tom described it: his father was a storyteller and there were the Irish ballads and so on, but there weren’t any books around and none of the other kids seemed particularly interested. . .

36Studs Terkel: This was in Dakota. . .

37Alice McGrath: Yes, in North Dakota, about 40 miles southwest of Fargo. Tom had a very pious mother and sister, and brothers that he was very close to, who were not pious. But Tom was a sport. Tom came out of that ground, but he grew up to be so different from anyone else in his family.

38Studs Terkel: That’s a big question. How does a guy get that way? This is a question that comes up often. How does a certain creative spirit come out a place where you don’t expect it?

39Anania: Well, that was a question that he [Tom] puzzled over. And one of the things that Letter does—Letter is not an autobiographical poem in the sense that it’s a poem about what I did this day and what I did the next. But it examines over and over again certain kinds of things about his life. And one of the issues it takes up is where he began as a poet. In a famous occasion in the poem, a left wing organizer during the threshing on the farm gets beaten up, and Tom, who identifies with this guy, runs away from this occasion and ends up downhill by the stream in the dark by himself. And it is the first, I think, great moment of being alone and of also recognizing that greater community of mankind outside of the farm and outside of Dakota. And it proposed, I think, in his mind, the great scope of that poem and all of his poetry, between solitude and community, between Dakota and the rest of the world. I think he puzzled over that, too, because he ended up being so very close always to his family but so different from them.

40Alice McGrath: Very close!

41Gibbons: When I first met Martin McGrath, I was with Tom and Martin came in, and Tom’s introduction of him to me was, “Here’s Martin; he’s the one who should have been a poet; he’s the one for telling stories and singing songs.” He then said to Martin, “Sing us that song that you know a hundred verses of,” and Martin started singing more than I could imagine. Then he quit and said, “Of course, there’s a lot more. I taught them all to my daughter, and she knows them all.” So there was something in that family that was very helpful for a poet’s sense of language.

42Studs Terkel: He also worked on the East Coast on the very rough waterfront.

43Alice McGrath: Yes, he worked on the waterfront. He edited the newsletter for a wildcat strike, which is the basis for one of his novels.

44Studs Terkel: He was in danger, by the way. The hoods were in charge of the waterfront you know, and a couple of his friends were killed organizing. Organizing! As simple as that.

45Gibbons: Another anecdote about that, though, that speaks a lot to me about Tom’s nature. . . he told me that when he was in the midst of all of this, the fellow seaman would come up to the little office where he was working on the newsletter, and they would give him lectures. They would come in a delegation, and they would say to him, “Listen, you’re not writing poems that are useful to us. They’re not quite clear or simple enough, comrade. You’ve got to write for the working man.” And Tom said that he said, “Listen comrade, there’s a book; it’s called the dictionary; buy a copy and use it!”

46Alice McGrath: I have to add to that. When he was in California, he got the same kind of criticism from people who had absolutely no sense of his value as a poet and who thought he ought to be easier. And I said, “What do you mean? He has lots of poems that are so easy. You don’t have to know anything but your own experience to read them. Give me an example of what you want him to do.” And she said, “Well, like soap opera.” And I realized that it was not possible to talk to people like that about Tom’s work.

47Studs Terkel: What he does do, he captures people, not her, but others of the same stratum of that woman, who long for that something. There are those people who are hungry for that, and he has that conversational quality. Whose turn is it to read another poem? Here’s one! I was looking for “A Real Gone Guy,” but that would be too long, so here’s one called “In Praise of Necessity.” I just happened to see it; listen to this:

Nostalgia of old men,
That spends itself in the sun
Hunting the vanished Sioux
Or shooting the buffalo down,
Is ground-rent to the Past,
Shafts of whose vanquished years
Pierce all decadent men
To envenom new-born desires.
Thus the blind demands of the heart
Are thwarted by out-lived lives—
The Wise Man’s experience is
The wisdom of killing the tribes
How could it be otherwise?
All that’s alive in the Past
Fastens itself on death,8

48I’m astonished! As I’m reading this for the first time, how the guy captured all those phony Westerns, the white-guy hero, John Wayne and Randolph Scott, knockin’ off those damned, half-naked savages, even though they’re kind to them later on. And here it is!: “fastens itself on death, . . .” And you think of how necrophilic we’ve become. And McGrath calls a shot on it!

Since to live is to change. Turned ghost
It is clothed in the future and us—
Not bound, traditional men
Remembering ritual words
Learned when their meaning was gone.

49Think of those phony Westerns again!

Shamans around a fire
Where tired Ghost Dancers sway
Pray back the lost buffalo herds—
Words for a vanished age.
Then praise the hunters, who
Through yesterday’s cold camps
(Where banked-up spirit-fires,
Ice-flames, will warm no hand)
Advance to break new trail
Impatient of the meaningless dreams of legend herds,
Words of the old men;
And praise necessity
That frees the past of its snares,
Praising the killer heart
That makes dead meat of the years.

50Boy oh Boy. I just came across it, and that thing just jumps at you, doesn’t it.

51Anania: Wonderful! Wonderful. I was going to say one other thing based on what Alice was saying a moment ago that is related to that poem. One of the things that we owe Tom is his relentless desire to keep the whole shape of his progressive politics and poetry alive richly together, and to not give up one on account of the other. I think you get a tinge of that in the Adrienne Rich letter. There’s this sort of empty–headed truism in American literature that politics and poetry can’t go together. Well, the end of that, of course, is to make the subject matter of poetry a kind of specialized sentimentality of the self, and that’s a terrible indulgence. And what Tom does in all of these poems is to sustain the full sensitivity of the self and the person and the politics together.

52Studs Terkel: And the community.

53Anania: And the community, yes, and to refuse to be simplistic on either side.

54Studs Terkel: Reg Gibbons, more poetry. Reading the poetry, we get the guy.

55Gibbons: I’d like to read a poem from his last book, Death Song, called “Faithfully Yours.”9

I don’t know how’s by you but it seems to me
A long time I’ve been waiting here for the promised Space Lift—
That glorious transport—O’er prison walls I would fly—
Beyond the shadow of flags to distant and different stars.
I haven’t been titivating by that mountain pool nor ever
Been found genuflecting to my image in that sweet and sacred water.
The sound of gunfire unsilvers all mirrors. The pain of others
Is mirror enough. And the waiting. Solitude. Lonesome times.
It’s a lonesome old world as the old song says: waiting for transport.
But time and again a friend brightens a dark door:
Someone from back then or here now or never before
Enters and the heart of the heartless world stops in that instant.
Comrade, way-faring stranger, fellow traveler, companero I’m glad
To see you and if I were Japanese I would bow and make tea.
But I’m not and don’t have none and so we must take potluck.
Nothing bad about that. We’ve shared the same fire so long.
So the night moves and the stars grind in their courses.
We keep the home fires burning here in the vast republic
Of the wretched of the earth. We talk till the sky reddens with morning.
Impassioned talk. And the changeless stars may be changed. A little.

56Studs Terkel: Such conversational quality again, isn’t it? Community and commonality. In this case, he’s talking about the world community. Now, what in the world has kept him from being known? This possesses me! A guy like this, whose poetry is understandable by this guy who drove the cab, to this bartender, to the Greek sailor, immediately, and it’s not a question of simplistic stuff; it’s rich stuff. Remember what Adrienne Rich said about “the provincialism of East Coast literary culture. . .” Is that true, that this literary culture is provincial?

57Alice McGrath: I think that’s not as much true now as the general social fear of the ideas he’s talking about, the politics, even when it isn’t expressed in overtly political terms. He’s saying things that upset people; they don’t want to change; they’re terrified of change.

58Studs Terkel: A poem, Mike?

59Anania: This one’s called “The World; the Lovers; Falling Stars: ”10 for Alice

Peaked in an immortal flame
The mortal moth-like lovers burn.
The love that sets their limbs alight
(Searing the snow of breast and thigh)
Can have no history but to die,
Yet cannot change. Across the night
Radiance of falling stars is borne:
Impermanent. These are the same
Who burn in the contradictions of
The strict and sensual laws of love.
Passing a point of no return,
An age consumed in instant flame,
The lovers cannot save themselves.
Bound in a swift triumphant arc,
Like falling stars, they light the dark
And loveless world. From private hells
All common daily good is torn,
Without history or name
Almost: though brilliance in the air
Lingers when a star was there.

60Gibbons: That’s a lovely poem. That’s a poem for Alice.

61Studs Terkel: That’s a poem! Again, I think of Nelson Algren; I know they admired one another. . . private hells, the love, the tenderness. . . You think of Bruno and Steffi of Never Come Morning11 and Frankie Machine12. But more than that, these two guys had something in common; I see the direct connection here: this novelist who was lyrical and the poet who was a lyrical novelist, too. And this is the personal aspect in an impersonal world. You know what we should hear now. Here’s the greatest anti-war poem ever written, “Gone Away Blues.”13 (Terkel cuts to an earlier interview with Tom McGrath).

62Studs Terkel to Tom McGrath and his (Terkel’s) producer: “I would like to have a little Sydney Bechet in the background, playing his soprano sax, for the reading of Gone Away Blues. You do like. . . I take it you like the blues?

63Tom McGrath: Oh God, yes, I love Bechet. He is one of my favorites.

64Studs Terkel: Here is “Gone Away Blues.” (Terkel reads.)

Sirs, when you are in your last extremity,
When your admirals are drowning in the grass-green sea,
When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe—
I just want you to know you can not count on me.
I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral halls,
I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill,
I have fallen through the window of the highest room,
But don’t ask me to help you’ cause I never will.
Sirs, when you move that map-pin how many souls must dance?
I don’t think all those soldiers have died by happenstance.
The inscrutable look on your scrutable face I can read at a glance—
And I’m cutting out of here at the first chance.
I have been wounded climbing the second stair.
I have crossed the ocean in the hull of a live wire,
I have eaten the asphodel of the dark side of the moon,
But you can call me all day and I just won’t hear.
O patriotic mister with your big ear to the ground,
Sweet old curly scientist wiring the birds for sound,
O lady with the Steuben glass heart and your heels so rich and round—
I’ll send you a picture postcard from somewhere I can’t be found.
I have discovered the grammar of the Public Good,
I have invented a language that can be understood,
I have found the map of where the body is hid,
And I won’t be caught dead in your neighborhood.
O hygienic inventor of the bomb that’s so clean,
O lily white Senator from east Turnip Green,
O celestial mechanic of the money machine—
I’m going someplace where nobody makes your scene.
Good-by, good-by, good-by,
Adios, au’voir, so long,
Sayonara, dosvedanya, ciao,
By-by, by-by, by-by.
(Return to the round table discussion.)

65Studs Terkel: I love reading that poem! It’s the most powerful anti-war poem ever written. He hits it right on the button, doesn’t he!

66Anania: It’s a great one!

67Studs Terkel: We need to hear Tom read again. (Cuts back to the reading with Tom.)

68Tom McGrath: I’m going to read a poem called “The Bread of this World; Praises III.”14 I’ve written a lot of cursing poems, but I like writing praise poems when I can light on something. So this is “The Bread of this World. . .”

On the Christmaswhite plains of the floured and flowering kitchen table
The holy loaves of the bread are slowly being born:
Rising like low hills in the steepled pastures of light—
Lifting the prairie farmhouse afternoon on their arching backs.
It must be Friday; the bread tells us as it climbs
Out of itself like a poor man climbing up on a cross
Toward transfiguration.
And it is a Mystery, surely,
If we think that this bread rises only out of the enigma
That leavens the Apocalypse of yeast, or ascends on the beards and beads
Of a rosary and priesthood of barley those Friday heavens
Lofting. . .
But we who will eat the bread when we come in
Out of the cold and dark know it is a deeper mystery
That brings the bread to rise:
it is the love and faith
Of large and lonely women, moving like floury clouds
In farmhouse kitchens, that rounds the loaves and the lives
Of those around them. . .
just as we know it is hunger—
Our own and others’—that gives all salt and savor to bread.
But that is a workaday story and this is the end of the week.

69Studs Terkel to Tom McGrath: You know something, you said “the end of the week.” The week is the time in your novel,15 eight days, Saturday to Saturday, and it’s also a week to which you refer in the poem you just read.

70Tom McGrath: Yes, right. Yes, well, Friday was the bread baking day on the farms. . .

71Studs Terkel: It’s also how score is kept, the score of survival, a week. . .

72Tom McGrath: Yes. . . (Return to the round table discussion.)

73Studs Terkel: This is a poet many don’t know about but should. Perhaps Reg could tell us again about some of the available books.

74Gibbons: We mentioned earlier that his great long work is called Letter to an Imaginary Friend. Let me mention that the special issue that TriQuarterly did in honor of McGrath has a long interview with him and other interesting material and has been republished as a book by the University of Illinois Press; it’s called Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem; that should be available as well. I think as the years go by, despite the fact that so many of Tom’s good friends, writers of his generations, have died, still, as the years go by, I think there will be more and more interest and things like letters and memoirs will be unearthed and published.

75Anania: I think that Letter to an Imaginary Friend will more and more come to be read as the great long American poem of the century. Tom, when he started, was a huge admirer of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” but it’s a very different poem from that. He admired, though he had hesitations about, Williams’s Paterson, but Paterson makes its way in fragments. And Tom really set out to write a poem that is of a single piece and hold it together, linking the sections, and managing a lyric charge through the whole poem. I can’t help but thinking that the poem will make its way. And poems change literary history.

76Studs Terkel: As you say Hart Crane, I asked Tom when he was here, “who are the poets you admire?” And he said that among them were Hart Crane and Kenneth Fearing, a poet of the 30’s with his oratory style. In fact, what Mike pointed out is that Letter is a ballad of a century and we are near the end of a century, and it almost covers it, the century. Would you like to read something Alice?

77Alice McGrath: Yes, another anti-war poem. This poem started out as “Ode for the American Dead in Korea,” then it was changed to “Ode for the American Dead in Vietnam,” and then he changed it to “Ode for the American Dead in Asia.”16

1.
God love you now, if no one else will ever,
Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill
In the fine and ruinous summer of a war
You never wanted. All your false flags were
Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps:
Colors of countries you would never see—
Until that weekend in eternity
When laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill
The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent
You into your future. Oh, dead on a hill,
Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to
A tomb of footnotes. We mourn a changeling: you:
Handselled to poverty and drummed to war
By distinguished masters whom you never knew.
2.
The bee that spins his metal from the sun,
The shy mole drifting like a miner ghost
Through midnight earth—all happy creatures run
As strict as trains on rails the circuits of
Blind instinct. Happy in your summer follies,
You mined a culture that was mined for war:
The state to mold you, church to bless, and always
The elders to confirm you in your ignorance.
No scholar put your thinking cap on nor
Warned that in dead seas fishes died in schools
Before inventing legs to walk the land.
The rulers stuck a tennis racket in your hand,
An Ark against the flood. In time of change
Courage is not enough: the blind mole dies,
And you on your hill, who did not know the rules.
3.
Wet in the windy counties of the dawn
The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home:
And God (whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze,
Like grace or confetti) blinks and he is gone,
And you are gone. Your scarecrow valor grows
And rusts like early lilac while the rose
Blooms in Dakota and the stock exchange
Flowers. Roses, rents, all things conspire
To crown your death with wreaths of living fire.
And the public mourners come: the politic tear
Is cast in the Forum. But in another year,
We will mourn you, whose fossil courage fills
The limestone histories: brave: ignorant: amazed:
Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills.

78Studs Terkel: He doesn’t stop punching, this guy, wham! Reg, you and Mike, we have to get in.

79Gibbons: Here’s a little one I’m very fond of. I think it’s a good farewell for me today to Tom. “Beyond the Red River” :17

The birds have flown their summer skies to the south
And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass
Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion,
Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves.
A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea,
A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses
Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping
An aging whiskey of distances and departures.
Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.
My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave.
I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe,
Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.

80Studs Terkel: Remembering and beginnings. Roots. Dakota. Tom McGrath. Mike Anania, you end it.

81Anania: This is called “The Return.”18

82The trees are never the same

The little river lying on its back in the sun or the sun or
The varying moon changing over the changing hills
Constant.
It is this, still, that most I love about them.
I enter by dark or day:
that green noise, dying
Alive and living its death, that inhuman circular singing,
May call me stranger. . .
Or the little doors of the bark open
And I enter that other home outside the tent of my skin. . .
On such days, on such midnights, I have gone, I will go,
Past the human, past the animal, past the bird,
To the old mothers who stand with their feet in the loamy dark
And their green and gold praises playing into the sun. . .
For a little while, only. (It is a long way back.)
But at least, and if but for a moment, I have almost entered the stone.
Then fear and love call. I am cast out. Alien,
On the bridge of fur and of feather I go back to the world I have known.

83Studs Terkel: “I go back to the world I have known.” Tom McGrath. This has been a tribute—ours. Alice McGrath, so long, the friend and wife of Tom McGrath; Reg Gibbons, who’s an appreciator of McGrath as well as an excellent literary critic and editor; and Mike Anania, who has long known and teaches the work of McGrath and of others. Alice, any other word that you want to say?

84Alice McGrath: We have to do this again because until the time comes that Michael Anania talks about, the time when the poem will become part of our national history, we have to keep Tom’s name alive by saying his name and by reading his work.

85Studs Terkel: Green. We’ll keep it green.

86(Source of Tribute to Thomas McGrath: 1993 Studs Terkel Radio Program, WFMT radio, Chicago, Illinois—transcribed by Pamela Sund with permission of Studs Terkel.)