American Noise (American Poetry Series) - Hardcover

McGrath, Campbell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880013354 ISBN 13: 9780880013352

Publisher: Ecco, 1994

Synopsis

American Noise is a rapturous exploration of American culture and landscape. With compassionate wit and insight, Campbell McGrath transports us on a journey through contemporary society, transforming the commonplace into scenes of profound revelation. From late-night bars to early-morning diners, suburban malls to the Mojave Desert, McGrath's meticulously detailed vision defines singular moments of joy and melancholy in familiar local images: "Buick Electras rusting in the freight meadow;" "sprinklers whirling like tireless apostles;" "glaciers and missile silos,/grey whales and cheese dogs;" "autumn maples and distant music and smokestacks/wreathed in fog."
Reaching beyond the rhythms and texture of the "real" America, these poems discover the secret purgatory of the lost pop-culture icons of the post-Baby Boom generation - "an eternal Las Vegas of the soul." McGrath's elegiac vision encompasses Elvis and Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix, Sylvia Plath and Speed Racer. In a voice at once universal and distinctly of his generation, he memorializes the past even as he documents the present.
While the poems of American Noise delight in exuberant energy and action, they can also provide a place of repose where the "voice-storm" of particulars is quietly and tenderly transformed. Campbell McGrath sees and interprets the paradoxes and manic possibilities of American life with a unique combination of comic ebullience and sensitivity. He bears witness to the consuming fires of American culture, and to the "resin and ash of human loss" left in their wake. American Noise is a testament to the "journey toward purity of vision" McGrath imagines as the artist's goal, and as the deepest aspiration of the human spirit.

About this title

About the Author

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Wheatifield Under Clouded SkySuppose Gauguin had never seen Tahiti. Suppose the beche-de-mer and
sandalwood trade had not materialized
and the Polynesian gods held fast in the fruit of Nuku Hiva and the milk-
and-honey waters of Eiao.
Suppose that Europe during whichever century of its rise toward science
had not lost faith in the soul.
Suppose the need for conquest had turned inward, as a hunger after
clarity, a siege of the hidden fortress.
Suppose Gauguin had come instead to America. Suppose he left New
York and traveled west by train
to the silver fields around Carson City where the water-shaped, salt- and
heart-colored rocks
appeased the painter's sensibility and the ghost-veined filaments called
his banker's soul to roost.
Suppose he died there, in the collapse of his hand-tunneled mine shaft,
buried beneath the rubble of desire.
Suppose we take Van Gogh as our model. Suppose we imagine him alone
in the Dakotas,
subsisting on bulbs and tubers, sketching wildflowers and the sod huts of
immigrants as he wanders,
an itinerant prairie mystic, like Johnny Appleseed. Suppose what
consumes him is nothing so obvious as crows
or starlight, steeples, cypresses, pigment, absinthe, epilepsy, reapers or
sowers or gleaners,
but is, like color, as absolute and bodiless as the far horizon, the journey
toward purity of vision.
Suppose the pattern of wind in the grass could signify a deeper
restlessness or the cries of land-locked gulls bespoke the democratic
nature of our solitude.
Suppose the troubled clouds themselves were harbingers. Suppose the
veil could be lifted.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0880013354
• ISBN 13: 9780880013352
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 67