“As a poet, I spend a lot of time observing the world, and coming up with ideas on what it’s all about,” opines Campbell McGrath, 61, one of South Florida’s most celebrated poets and the author of 12 collections of poetry.
His most recent, “Fever of Unknown Origin: Poems” (published in May by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) is an observation of, among other things, a mysterious illness that afflicted him a few years back and the COVID-19 pandemic.
McGrath, a Miami Beach resident, teaches at Florida International University (FIU), where he’s currently the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and Distinguished University Professor of English. The recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for “XX,” a poetic reflection on the 20th century. A fixture on the South Florida literary scene, McGrath’s poems sing with compassion, humor and intellect, taking on history, nature, the American West, pop culture and whatever else sparks his interest.
Says McGrath, “One of the good things about being a poet in America is that since you can’t make a living from it, you can write about whatever you want. There’s freedom in not having to be dependent on the marketplace.”
Despite that claim, McGrath’s insightful, gorgeously phrased poems, which range from haiku to novella-length, attract an international audience. And he is proud to be part of South Florida’s poetry community’s impressive growth. As much a legacy as his poetry, McGrath points to the success of his former FIU students like Scott Cunningham, who runs O, Miami, the ambitious annual poetry festival; Richard Blanco, who read at Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration and Lisette Mendez, the director of programs for Miami Book Fair, one the most prestigious literary gatherings in the world.
He’s currently working on poems for his next collection which is centered on the ocean, what it gives and takes away and everything associated with it, from climate change to immigrant crossings.
McGrath is optimistic about the state of poetry in America. “There’s currently an abundance of great American poets,” he muses, “like (poet laureate) Ada Limon and Robert Reeves. And poetry readership is up among young people, which bodes well for the future of the arts in America.”