Sterling Plumpp Discusses Thomas McGrath: Not a Leftist Poet but a Poet Leftist
p. 41-51
Résumés
Through the interview process, Sterling Plumpp uncovers the largesse of McGrath’s humanist vision, contrasting his texturally complex use of language with the language idioms of the Beat poets of his generation, while further characterizing McGrath’s poetics as “outside orbits of dominant discourse.” Plumpp posits that within McGrath’s epic poem, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, the poet refuses the orthodox caricature of Native American identity and culture, just as Faulkner refused to stereotype African Americans. His analysis culminates in the claim that McGrath, through his American epic, his “odyssey,” with its multi-layered mythologies and realities describes what it means to be American, chronicling American mythologies “very much in the same way that Homer did in the Odyssey.”
Lors d’un entretien, Sterling Plumpp dévoile l’étendue de la vision humaniste de McGrath, en contrastant son usage de la langue marqué par la complexité structurelle avec les particularités idiomatiques des poètes Beat, tout en qualifiant en outre la poétique de McGrath “d’orbites extérieures du discours dominant.” Plumpp avance que dans le poème épique de McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, le poète refuse la caricature orthodoxe de l’identité et de la culture des Amérindiens, tout comme Faulkner refusait l’image stéréotypée des Afro-Américains. En conclusion de son analyse il affirme qu’à travers son épopée américaine, son “Odyssée” aux multiples strates de mythologies et de réalités, McGrath décrit ce que signifie le fait d’être américain, se faisant le chroniqueur des mythologies américaines “pratiquement de la même façon qu’Homère dans l’Odyssée.”
Texte intégral
1Sund: You once said that you thought McGrath was in exile in his own country.
2Plumpp: Yes, and I’ve put it into more of a statement. At a time when American Literature has achieved landmark distinction as a relic, McGrath’s poems dare breed democratic impulses of human potential. I quote1:

3Sund: Were you reading from Letter to an Imaginary Friend?
4Plumpp: Yes, from Letter, Part Four. McGrath affirms and responds to possibility not contained within the dominant societal canons and their concomitant rites and rituals. Thus, McGrath, like African-Americans and dispossessed and oppressed people generally, penned from the perspective of someone outside orbits of dominant discourse. He is in exile within his own land, a metaphysical miscast.
5Sund: You’ve also said that McGrath is so much more erudite than the Beats, even though he has, by some, been associated with the Beats.
6Plumpp: Well, yes, I think of his [McGrath’s] own language. In an interview with Studs Terkel he said, and I will read here:
I think of one in particular—of Hart Crane—who I think is the greatest of our poets of the century, though that’s not an opinion that will be shared by everybody. I love his use of language. It’s very powerful and has great range and I have always admired that in the work of certain writers. There is a counter movement which wants to simplify language and so on. But I have never been of that school. I think that what you can write depends on what language you have for writing, and if you willfully limit yourself to a certain level then you are limiting not only the materials you can use, but the way in which you can handle them. You limit the tone. And the possibility, even, of playing with language in a poem is limited that way. So in that sense I’m kind of an outlaw I suppose. . .
7McGrath, as opposed to the Beats. . . it seems to me that the Beats, in trying to forge a language out of contemporary vernacular, contemporary everyday speech, perhaps limited what they could do with language. You know, in the end, in going back to the masses, the people, in some way, it seems to me, they left their imagination about language behind. I mean, what’s puzzling about the Beats is, on the one hand, they see in the music of the beboppers, the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, the music that expresses the deconstruction of jazz from a Big Band phenomenon to that of the quartet, the quintet, the trio. They see that as a kind of model of what they have wanted to do, or they position themselves in society. . . or they see life from the vantage point of the bebopper. I maintain that the complexity of their use of language nowhere matches the complexity or virtuosity one finds in bebop or jazz phenomenon. Sund: Would you say that the complexity that McGrath. . .
8Plumpp: My sense of McGrath is that fundamentally McGrath is a poet who is committed to exploring the ranges of language that he both encounters and that he invents, that he wants a kind of world of language that stretches beyond earth, that stretches beyond the Milky Way and probably embraces the entire universe. He wants a conceptual language without boundaries. He has a view that would usher in a society where the people who do the work in the factories and the fields would be the inheritors of the rewards, but he does that with a complex sense of poetic language.
9Sund: This is a little off the subject, but would you see a parallel in nonrepresentational visual art and say, the Beats, who were also rejecting tradition? What is often called the “cult of the new” in visual art was taking place about the same time the Beats were. . .
10Plumpp: I think the Beats, linguistically, were iconoclasts, and I think that the same is true of the art of the “new.” But if you don’t have something fundamental to say about life and or human potential, the new in itself doesn’t mean anything. The problem I have with the “new” in art is that I don’t know what the artist is trying to tell me about the human condition. And if he isn’t trying to tell me anything, it seems to me that the terms he is using have been used by artists in the Renaissance much better. I want to see more of the artistic imagination as opposed to the mere symbols that he is using.
11Sund: Would you say that about many of the Beats too?
12Plumpp: Well, I would say it’s almost unfair to compare many of the Beats with Tom McGrath because these were writers who were writing very early in their careers. So at one level, none of them had mastered world literature or American literature. At least we’re not aware that they did. That’s number one. Number two: McGrath is not a typical kind of leftist. I mean he is not from New York. He’s not a longshoreman even though he did spend time on the waterfront. He comes from the small landowner who has to break his back to create enough wealth to keep body and soul together. He is not exploiting anyone. He also has a view of life that he can embrace: a dream, a mythic vision beyond the West, in looking at the Hopi Indian as he did. So McGrath, coming with a mythic vision of life beyond the West, and coming from a situation where you might have whites who are landed, but hell. . . that they have to work like hell to make a living is typical. So when you confront that with what you might call social realism, it seems to me, that for him to write according to that formula he would have to dumb down his language. But in fact he had worked very hard to become literate. And becoming literate in this context was not a sign that he was of a higher class. It was simply a sign that here was a peasant boy who had become literate.
13Sund: Exactly. Wonderfully said. Let me put this by you: I do think that it could be easy to imagine the reader of McGrath who encounters radical political rhetoric, and in encountering these terms puts the work down because he or she has accepted the argument that poetry and politics should be kept separate. One imagines the reader, in other words, that might think that McGrath is just another ideologue.
14Plumpp: Well, I make a distinction between McGrath’s political rhetoric and the brilliance of his poems. It seems to me that he writes from the grand poetic tradition that goes all the way back to Homer and probably down to Milton. There’s nothing in his construction of the poem that is ideological whether or not one agrees with the content. For example, his lines are long and his imagery is very concrete. I believe this is from the end of Letter, Part Four:2
These will endure
The scour of snow and the breakneck ice
Where the print-scar mousetracks blur in the evergreen light
And the night-hunting high birds whirl—
All engines of feather and fur:
These will endure.
But how shall our pride,
Manwoman’schild, in the bone-chilling black frost born,
Where host or hide
Who is bound in his orbit between iron and gold
Robbed of his starry fire with the cold
Sewed in his side—
How shall he abide?
Bear him his gift,
To bless his work,
Who, farming the dark on the love-worn stony plot,
The heaven-turning stormy rock of this sharecrop world
His only brother warms and harms;
Who, without feathers or fur,
Faces the gunfire cold of the old warring
new
year—
Bless! Grant him gift and gear
Against the night and riding of his need,
To seed the turning furrow of his light.
15Plumpp: You see, there’s nothing in McGrath to suggest that he’s anything other than a master of line and metaphor. Whether or not you like the content or his position, that’s a different issue, but his poetry is not sheer rhetoric. It is not sheer ideological statement.
16Sund: How beautifully you read that section from Letter. I’m thinking that, for you, since you came from Mississippi, the grandson of sharecroppers, McGrath’s own farm experience must strike some kind of personal note with you.
17Plumpp: Well, literally, almost the grandson of slaves, but yes, generations of sharecroppers. But I mean there’s a difference between a white plantation owner and a white man who owns a few acres of land and the family who has to work that land. You see, McGrath did not come from big landowners, and because he did not, and his family didn’t, the conquest of the land, of the Indians, doesn’t have the same meaning for him that it has for somebody else. But he also would live and work like they did. You know the Indians would have to work to make a living and so would McGrath. You see, he does not view the prairie landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as one of luxury. No. His family arrived there as hard workers. They didn’t own any gold in those Black Hills!
18Sund: That brings me to McGrath and the American “wounds” as he called them: the sin of rolling over the plains, of the killing of Native Americans in the name of God, the snatching of the land, the path of destruction left behind, the “. . . Negro sold again and again in slave trade Washington. . .”3 Who, other than McGrath, has so completely addressed these concerns in American Letters?
19Plumpp: I got a sense that Whitman was addressing these issues, in his focus on democracy and in his concern for life. I mean. . . I think that he was the great democratic poet of the 19th century. He was really writing where the boundaries of human potential were expanding.
20Sund: Would you say, as some have, that McGrath has continued that tradition?
21Plumpp: It seems to me that McGrath continues with a greater sense of world literature. I thought that the great contribution Whitman was making was in the American vernacular idiom, was finding a way of making that poetic. I thought that the great contribution of McGrath was looking at the canons of great American Literature and finding a great American voice.
22Sund: That brings me to the era during which Tom was at LSU,4 1939-1940. What influence do you think the South had on McGrath?
23Plumpp: Well I think he saw two things. The fact of the matter is that we talk about Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, but at one time they were probably all one Indian territory. You know the Trail of Tears is from Mississippi to Oklahoma, I believe. But the Natchez Indian. . . well, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase that territory was basically inhabited by Native Americans.
24Sund: And the French, and. . .
25Plumpp: Well, what I’m trying to say is that it was basically peopled with. . . that the dominant population would have been Native American and what this means, and you get a great deal of this in Faulkner. . . is that somewhere between 1800 and 1833 you get the theme of how to wrestle this land from the Native Americans. I think they are virtually crushed by 1833. But you still had wars to fight with Indians. That’s number one.
26Then number two: there was a different reason that the land on the plains was untamed, but a great deal of the land in Mississippi, particularly the Delta region, was land that was not tamed until after the Civil War. Some of the big plantations were not built until after the Civil War. The land was not domesticated. They didn’t have sophisticated ways of draining it. You get that kind of frontier with the Indian culture. I mean the white civilized existence runs into the frontier that is basically unknown and basically Indian in North Dakota; and in the South the white, civilized society runs into this border of black and behind the black you would have Native Americans.
27The place where McGrath comes up in is dominated by the myths of Native Americans; that’s what makes sense out of it, but in the South it’s the African American experience that provides a pattern out of the chaos, so that the African American replaces the Indian in the South.
28Sund: So McGrath would have become aware, very directly, of the African American experience while in the South and the contrast with his own experience on the land in North Dakota and the Southern plantation and sharecropping experience?
29Plumpp: I imagine he certainly would have. So instead of having the Hopi, in the South, you have the Blues, Jazz, and voodoo and a whole lot of other things.
30Sund: And of course McGrath did love Blues artists and Jazz and was affected by some of these things, but I guess I was thinking of his literary development and the South, but what you’ve said is terribly interesting.
31Plumpp: Well, I do think, to his credit that he saw what certain Southern writers saw. I think you could look at Faulkner and Mark Twain, who dedicate an awful lot of pages in their fine writing to the presence of African Americans. . . so there is an attempt to deal with the formulation of America that’s neither black nor white. In Faulkner, black people do exist! They exist! They have eyes. They have a presence in the way that they do not exist in the work or Hemingway or Saul Bellow.
32Sund: How about, in McGrath, how would you. . .
33Plumpp: Well, I think you have to look at McGrath in terms of the manscape. You see, in recognizing Native American culture, he would be analogous to Faulkner recognizing what happened to African Americans. In other words, African people were a subjugated people and all that, but by the time Faulkner comes along they also have lives and they have names. But what’s interesting about Faulkner is that there’s little difference in how his language treats African Americans. He treats them the same as he treats others, linguistically. Just look at his books. There is no linguistic writing down to black folks, no stereotyping of black people, no caricature of black people. McGrath, in kind, didn’t characterize Indians as, say, Hollywood or the authorities did. No, he presented Crazy Horse and the others as they really existed.
34Sund: In Faulkner’s letters on what he called the Negro problem in the South, Faulkner seems not to be at all a racist.
35Plumpp: I think he was too crazy to be any one thing. I’m serious! I think that he was Faulkner. He might have had some biases, but Faulkner was an individualist. Look at the body of work and look at the body of space that he contributed to the presence of African Americans. I mean that in a way, there is no. . . well, tell me about other writers who have done that. You have Bellows and all these people who grow up in New York, you know, Cheever and the rest, well, where are the black folks? Again, McGrath, as Faulkner, saw the manscape, that is, what was in front of his eyes, and as I’ve said that included Black people for Faulkner and Native Americans for McGrath.
36Sund: Let’s stay with Faulkner for a moment. In his Nobel address he said something that I believe McGrath deeply understood. He said that young writers must learn the “old universal truths. . . [of] love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” In a 1980’s presentation, McGrath extolled classical and “prairie” virtues, including the values of courage and compassion. Virtues seem to count for almost nothing in too many postmodern discussions of literature, but the world without virtue and the discussion of virtue is a dangerous place as both Faulkner and McGrath were aware.
37Plumpp: It’s very interesting. . . what’s happened the first four of five hundred years in the West. . . well, there was a certain period of time when the state and the church stood for one voice where the universal principles were to be seen in human beings. Now with the rise of science and the rise of capital over everything, obviously, the people who are exploiting human beings don’t want a morality, so they start. . . so they want some moral relativism. I mean this concept of moral relativism. . . I don’t want to demonize, but if you’re someone who thinks you need world conquest to maximize or solidify your ability to make profits, moral relativism might be an issue, but I don’t see how it could be an issue for a writer who is looking at the human experience. Tom McGrath understood this. There’s no need to demonize the Japanese for Pearl Harbor, for example. Their mistake was to strike first, but the whole issue was who was going to rule the Pacific. But to drop the atomic bomb! I mean there’s moral relativism there. There’s just no way you can justify that. That’s an unforgivable act.
38Sund: Tom addresses that atrocity in Letter. . .
39Plumpp: Well, what’s happening is that the philosophy that’s being used to dominate could very well be used to destroy the citizenship and the citizenry of the United States. Now, I’m more of a socialist, but a great deal of the rhetoric about the arms race, you know, that you have tax payers money and you try to tell them that we need to spend 50 billion dollars on planes, but that spending money on schools and health care is bad, that’s ridiculous. Well, the money of the taxpayer does not belong to either party, so I don’t think that rules should be set up to exclude people. And Tom, being an individualist, saw what was going on; he wasn’t part of this establishment in any way. He was also not one who was sponsored by some literary society either, I mean the question is: who in the hell is Helen Vendler? She’s not reading the damn poems. I mean the world will remember Tom McGrath long after they will imagine whatever she wrote.
40Sund: Indeed. . . As a teacher, and in other contexts, Tom often said that conformity is a monster. He thought we had to fight it at all costs.
41Plumpp: I think that he is an anomaly in the fact that he is a genuinely erudite, capable poet who is to the left. He is not someone who is leftist poet, he is someone who is poet leftist.
42Sund: McGrath served in World War II with three of his siblings, one of whom was killed, his brother Jimmy to whom he was very close. He lived through the Depression, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. . . I mean he was born in 1916, only about 50 years after the Civil War. The range of what he experienced in his lifetime was enormously complex. Robert Bly has said that “the only way McGrath could convey his complicated perception was to re-enter the long poem,” which he did. What successes do you think McGrath achieved in his lengthy work, Letter to an Imaginary Friend?
43Plumpp: I suppose I would have to come back to my original reading of the Odyssey. You know some forty to forty-five years ago, when you went to the university everybody had to read that. Rather than getting introduced to Greek society based upon political structure, you know, cosmologically, metaphysically, I got all of that in one swoop, the complex relationship between individuals and the Gods, and heroes, and what the Odyssey did was touch upon the high points of existence, the trials and tribulations.
44And I think that that’s what Letter does. This whole complex. . . this America that has never been defined. . . well, in McGrath, you have this situation where an individual makes his odyssey from a yeomen type, working class white family in North Dakota where everyone has to work hard simply to have a decent living. For most of these people there’s no accumulation of wealth. But at the same time, at least in Tom, he’s able to go to his room and rediscover the world through books, and then he confronts Native Americans whom he appreciated so much that when he began to write his American odyssey, it is their mythology that plays a prominent role in informing it; so that we have a far more complex sense of what it means to be an American; in the same way that I found a very complex understanding of what it meant to be a Greek through Homer. Unfortunately, when I came to the Romans I found no such complexity.
45Sund: That’s a very ennobling view of Letter.
46Plumpp: Again, within the various manscapes, within the boundaries of what it means to be an American, from hard working poor whites, to Indians who have almost been exterminated, to this vast struggle going on between labor and those who are stealing their labor, from these various landscapes, you get a fairly good panoramic view of humanity in America in McGrath’s major work.
47Sund: You have such a comprehensive understanding of Letter. How many times have you read this long poem?
48Plumpp: Three or four times, but sections I’ve read more than that. You see, McGrath’s language is the language you would expect from the upper-class, the erudite white class. But those that I consider erudite, upper-class whites are not as erudite as Tom. I mean Robert Frost is not. You don’t see the same complexity of language. Tom McGrath has the same cultural imperatives working for and against him in trying to find a voice to articulate his reality that I think African Americans had.
49You know that African Americans were placed in a predicament where they were prevented from being immersed in Western culture, and they were forbidden from practicing their own culture, so literally they had to forge a language for themselves out of the substances of both. For McGrath, coming from a working class environment, one would be tempted to think that he would write a home spun western humor kind of verse, but what he does is, he sees Western civilization and America through the prism of their place, so he becomes almost a person who chronicles their whole mythologies very much in the same way that Homer did in the Odyssey.
50Sund: I am sitting here in awe of your perceptions. Could you talk about McGrath’s work in relation to the work of W. H. Auden, a poet that McGrath admired and emulated early on?
51Plumpp: I will think about it.
52(Taped interviews with Sterling Plumpp took place via telephone in June of 2000.)
Notes de bas de page
1 Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 1997), 377.
2 Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 1997), 406–407.
3 Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 1997), 153.
4 Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.
Auteur
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Sterling Plumpp
University of Illinois, Chicago, Professor Emeritus
Sterling Plumpp, poet and educator. Born in Mississippi and reared by his sharecropper grandparents, he won the 1983 Carl Sandburg Literary Prize for The Mojo Hands Call, I Must Go. His numerous books of poetry include Ornate with Smoke and Blues Narrative. He is the editor of Somehow We Survive, an anthology of South African writing. He is a Professor Emeritus of English and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
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