Seven Notebooks: Poems

by Campbell McGrath

An ant to the stars
or stars to the ant—which is
more irrelevant?

Weekend Jet Skiers—
rude to call them idiots,
yes, but facts are facts.

Clamor of seabirds
as the sun falls—I look up
and ten years have passed."
—from "Dawn Notebook"

Such is the expansive terrain of Seven Notebooks: the world as it is seen, known, imagined, and dreamed; our lives as they are felt, thought, desired, and lived. Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incanta­tory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2008

About the author

Campbell McGrath (born 1962) is a modern American poet. He is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry, including his most recent, Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2008), Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco Press, 2009), and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, forthcoming, 2012).
Contents

1 Life
2 Music
3 Awards
4 Works
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 External links

Life

McGrath was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School; among his classmates was the poet Elizabeth Alexander. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1984 and his MFA from Columbia University's creative writing program in 1988, where he was classmates with Rick Moody. He currently lives in Miami Beach, Florida, and teaches creative writing at Florida International University, where his students have included Richard Blanco, Susan Briante, Jay Snodgrass and Emma Trelles. He is married to Elizabeth Lichtenstein, whom he met while he was an undergraduate; they have two sons.[1]
Music

In the early 1980s, while a student at the University of Chicago, he was a member of the punk band Men From The Manly Planet.[2]
Awards

McGrath has been recognized by some of the most prestigious American poetry awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (for "The Bob Hope Poem" in Spring Comes to Chicago, his third book of poems), a Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." In 2011 he was named a Fellow of United States Artists.[3]
Works

While primarily known as a poet, McGrath has also written a play, "The Autobiography of Edvard Munch" (produced by Concrete Gothic Theater, Chicago, 1983); a libretto for Orlando Garcia's experimental video opera "Transcending Time" (premiered at the New Music Biennalle, Zagreb, Croatia, 2009); collaborated with the video artist John Stuart on the video/poetry piece "14 Views of Miami" (premiered at The Wolfsonian, Miami, 2008); and translated the Aristophanes play The Wasps for the Penn Greek Drama Series.
Bibliography

Dust (chapbook, Ohio Review Press, 1988)
Capitalism (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)
American Noise (Ecco Press, 1993)
Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco Press, 1996)
Road Atlas (Ecco Press, 1999)
Mangrovia (chapbook, Short Line Editions, 2001)
Florida Poems (Ecco Press, 2002)
Pax Atomica (Ecco Press, 2004)
Heart of Anthracite: New & Collected Prose Poems (Stride Press, UK)
Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2008)
Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco Press, 2009)
The Custodian & Other Poems (chapbook, Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011)
In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012)

References

Reviews

[Bowie Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading McGrath’s Seven Notebooks has been another reminder to me that you can write about anything and it can be interesting, evocative, beautiful, sad, or funny. He accomplishes this by looking deeply at his subject and showing us what he finds there or is at least trying to find there and what that means to him and why.

One of my favorite poems in the notebooks is a haiku. It is one of the simplest poems in the notebooks, yet I believe the most profound. It’s from the “Dawn Notebook” and it’s called “Consolation.” It consists of only thirteen words and two punctuation marks, but it’s moving because it evokes an image and applies meaning to it that we can all take something from. It goes: “Sadness, not sorrow – / like the blue beneath the black / of the mussel shell” (132).

There were moments like these throughout the notebooks that made me stop and catch my breath because I felt as though something had just happened to me. There was a moment of awe and appreciation. It was alarming because I didn’t quite know why this was happening to me most of the time, but it forced me to stop and feel what I was feeling when I read them. When I tried to push through those feelings to the next poem I felt overwhelmed and I couldn’t quite comprehend the next passage. I wasn’t ready yet because I hadn’t fully processed what I had just experienced. I think I stopped and thought more deeply about that thirteen word poem than I did about some of the longer entries that I thought were more prosaic and lacking images that spoke to me.

I’ve been trying to think of what could be limiting about McGrath’s type of writing, but I haven’t been able to think of anything. There seems to be a concerted effort throughout Seven Notebooks to be in tune with the present moment, constantly calling attention to the importance of fully seeing and feeling what you are experiencing in the now. Yet, as we can see, McGrath also continually calls attention to the past by being in conversation with dead poets like Rilke and Whitman who in some ways are eternal via their work and also seem to beckon us to fully experience our lives as we are living them rather than being stuck in the anxieties and sadnesses that our concepts of past and future create. I think McGrath articulates this best in the poem “Forms of Attention” when he says: “Often writing is a kind of listening, / a form of deep attention. / Tuning the stations, fingering the dial. / From whence does that voice arise, / a spring in which foothills? / What will it say next? / The feeling of exhaustion / as one falls back upon the bed, / the sensation of thirst as water passes the lips -- / are these forms of attention? / No. / These are harmonies of fulfillment” (86).

Writing is work. It is a concentrated effort to be in touch with one’s surroundings and an attempt to fully understand some aspect of our world. In a sense, it is a continual grasping for the present moment, a wish to be living completely attuned and aware of all the details and intricacies of our worlds. McGrath shows us how writing can lead us into these “harmonies of fulfillment” or the joy of fully experiencing the present moment by forcing us to stop, look, and appreciate the seemingly insignificant.

[Norma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This season by season sequence of poems in a variety of forms is part memoir, part homage to other poets, and overall in its loose narrative of a poet's vision unrolling over time utterly engaging and provocative in its language.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Campbell McGrath, Seven Notebooks (Ecco, 2008)

“If I were Virgil this would be an eclogue.”, Campbell McGrath tells us toward the end of Seven Notebooks. In many ways, that's exactly what this is. Wikipedia defines “Eclogue” as “a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject”. Almost one hundred fifty years after Whitman, it could be argued that his sort of thick, loose-limbed free verse has become something of a classical style, and there's no denying that McGrath's ponderings of nature, and man's relations to it, are pastoral subjects.

“Water choppy, strong current ripping
south along the beach. After a while
we see, approaching from the north,
dark patches in the swells, like cloud
shadows or seaweed but it is fish,
clumps and schools and swarms of them,
here come six at a time, then a dozen,
a hundred, a thousand thrashing
the surface as they approach,
surging and swirling around us—”
(“Jacks”)

I'm not usually a fan of McGrath's narrative approach to the world around him, and the fact that I liked this book as much as I did impresses me all the more. Sure, there are some places where McGrath veers back to the conventional (the longest piece in the book, as seems de rigeur these days, is a meditation on September 11, 2001), and some places where he heads much farther out into the experimental world (one early piece detailing a conversation reminds me of nothing so much as a poem from the New Yorker, which I believe was called “Mama”, that my 12th-grade English teacher was constantly pulling out to show us how far the boundaries of poetry could stretch), but I think Virgil would've been proud of most of this work. Campbell McGrath has created a small piece of wonder here; it's well worth checking out if you like poetry, and maybe even if you don't. It might get you to change your mind. ****

[Renée · Rating 4 out of 5]

McGrath's latest effort seems less like a book of peoms in a traditional sense and more like a lyric contemplation, fusing poetry and prose in interesting ways. In some ways, this fusion makes the book feel uneven, and in other ways, it opens up the idea of collected works to a broaded sense of meditation. One of the best compliments I can pay the book is that it often inspired me to write. Often called "Whitmanesque," McGrath's subjects range from the effects of capitalism, to quiet mediations on picking strawberries or watching his family at the seashore. Of particular interest is his poems and mediatations on other poets, particularly Neruda.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not one with much tolerance for rhapsodic articulations of the fine gradiations of color in the dawn sky, and even less for Whitman-esque free verse paens to everday mundanities, but by the seventh notebook I had been completely won over by McGrath's incisive depictions--sometimes in verse, sometimes in journal-like prose passages--of the introspective, nature-infused world he inhabits.

"So the arc of creativity is an ungrounded rainbow,
and cause for hope. Why distrust the universe?
We are engines burning violently toward the silence."

-"September 11"

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

McGrath has recovered from the horrible "important-ness" of Pax Atomica and delivered some of his best and unassuming poetry to date. These poems, collected into seven notebooks that offer a rough chronology, flit between the serious and the mundane, the formed and the unformed, the journal entry and the "poem." This collection is a tremendous achievement for McGrath. The book itself is quite beautiful too, measuring 7 inches by 5 with a stunning jacket.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like (some of) the journal-ish prose-ish poems best, the clear and solid images of them. Elsewhere, I feel like there's often this over-the-top-ness to McGrath's phrasing, something show-off-ish, a pulling back from the beautiful or "poetic" image: but I like the beauty more. Toward the end of the book, "Eclogue," which juxtaposes Hiroshige and Miami, is great, and so is "Hiroshige," a few pages later. (Read both here.)

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love, love, love Campbell McGrath's poetry. I really can't be effusive enough about it. Just go read it.

[Marcelle]

Another week should see the bloom-out
of purest, whisper-green shoots, darkening
all summer to fall...

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

long-form poetry is forever changed

[Lee Crase · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to him read at the final Poetry at Tech event of the season, and liked him well enough to buy a book.

[William Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice collection of bits and pieces, threaded together loosely. Reading them is like a stroll down unknown beach.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Campbell McGrath, AB'84
Author

From our pages (The Core, Winter/14):
http://thecore.uchicago.edu/Winter201...

[Monte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book of poems outside on a gorgeous spring day. But be warned, beauty overload can occur. I read it in our porch swing and was in awe. The way the words flow is dizzying. I will re read this book before the summer is over- increible.

[Hannah Notess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still fond of this book

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not too sure what to say about this collection in a lot of ways, so I will go about this one a little differently...

PROS:

- I agree with the messages presented throughout. That is most likely a shallow reason for liking, but we are who we are...
- I think a book of poetry this long and connected is an ambitious undertaking.
- some of the descriptive sections are beautiful. They don't seem to steal from what has come before, but are a true describing in an instant - that instant the poet's alone.
- I liked the haiku sprinkled throughout. Some were meaningful, some humorous. Almost all really worked for me.
- I felt the book gained a lot of strength toward the end and really found its way. Not that I felt many strands coming together that had been woven throughout the narrative, but that the poet finally realized where he wanted to take the story.

CONS:


- I believe McGrath relies on an esoteric vocabulary when he could use diction much more palatable to the common person. (See what I did there?) Poetry is about a love of language, to be sure, but with love, there comes a certain respect for the reader of that language.
- While I like confessional verse, you must make me care about your life and your loved ones. Just throwing names into a poem doesn't make me feel connected to your life.
-It felt too much like a series of seven notebooks. By that, I mean that there are sections that are extremely rough, where some revision really should have been done.
- Nature poetry from someone who owns beachfront property? Ummm.... Also, trying to identify with a universal struggle while writing about surfing lessons for your children and your months off from teaching. This all felt false to me.

And perhaps that is my greatest issue with this work. I have never read anything by McGrath before, but while I really liked sections of this collection, the voice just rang false to me. There seems to be a desire to be worldly (as in - of the world - natural) yet a clinging to the fact that the poet is above others. If this was an integral part of the work, a play on the american dream, I would really respect it. As is, I just can't fully feel it.

(p.s. If it matters, I somehow own an uncorrected proof from Ecco press. Things may have changed before publication of this volume.)

[Chang Garcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite dull.
2nd reading...still do not like