POET

Campbell McGrath (1962 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Chicago to Irish-Catholic parents, McGrath received his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA from Columbia University. Influenced by Walt Whitman, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Rainer Maria Rilke, McGrath writes predominantly free-verse, long-lined, documentary poems deeply engaged with American popular culture and commerce. A master of the long poem, he has also written many prose poems as well as shorter lyrics.

McGrath has published numerous collections of poetry, including Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In awarding the prize, poet Garrett Hongo labeled McGrath’s unique tone “ironic romanticism.” The centerpiece of the collection, and McGrath’s most well-known poem, is “The Bob Hope Poem,” a 70-page opus modeled on Robert Pinsky’s “An Explanation of America” and James McMichael’s “Four Good Things.” In a 2005 interview McGrath explained that the poem’s shape “is not a narrative but a symphonic structure.”
 
McGrath is also the co-translator of Aristophanes’s The Wasps (1999). He has won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares literary journal, and a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999), The New American Poets (2000), and Great American Prose Poems (2003). McGrath has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Florida International University.