In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Campbell McGrath discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and here with me today is our Guest Editor for January, Campbell McGrath. Campbell is the author most recently of Fever of Unknown Origin and Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems. Campbell, welcome and thank you for joining me today.
Campbell McGrath: Thank you, Mary. Thank you to the Academy and I’m very happy to be here.
Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for January?
McGrath: Well, one of the first things I learned was that people can’t be chosen to be on Poem-a-Day, you know, more than once in any twelve-month period of time. So I said, “Oh, great, I better go figure out who has done that.” And I went into you guys’ archives, which are very abundant, and researched who was not eligible for having been in there. But then you had a bunch of years. So I actually went and looked at everybody who’d been published in Poem-a-Day or featured over the last five or seven years, whatever number you have, and I just noted that there were some people I was looking for like, “Oh, I don’t think they’ve been there at all or very infrequently.” So I focused, you know, right away on people that it seemed to me I hadn’t been on Poem-a-Day either recently or possibly ever, and I focused on people, poets, whose work I really liked that I noticed hadn’t been heard or seen by your audience.
Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem in our archive on poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
McGrath: Well, this was another fun project that sent me back to your archives looking up which poems … Again, the Academy has such an amazing, very long and detailed, set of records and archives and things that have been featured one way or another. Among many conceivable really excellent choices. I just happened to stumble on the Jerry Stern poem, “Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye,” a poem that has been an absolute favorite poem of mine since almost, I guess it was published in the early eighties, and I read it when I was a graduate student [at] Columbia in 1985 or ’86, and right away just loved the poem. I remember having a teacher around then who said, “Oh, everyone has to memorize a poem for class,” where everyone was aghast, like, “Memorizing poems. Who does that anymore?” And I chose this poem of Jerry Stern’s to memorize. I don’t still have it memorized forty years later, I’m sorry to say, but … So, anyway, it’s a great poem. It’s set in New York City. It’s about New York City, where I was living then. But it’s also a very characteristic Jerry Stern poem [in] that it’s kind of overflowing with joy and grief and madness and dreamlike imagery, and it’s about America and reading and love and loss and tunnels and bridges and art. It’s just a great poem.
Poets.org: And what are you reading now?
McGrath: Well, you know, one is always reading about a million different things, or maybe not everybody is. Maybe some people are still just reading one or two things. Goodness. I’m always reading. I have different piles of many things in that I’m reading for work; I’m reading to keep up with poetry; I’m reading novels that I enjoy; I’m reading history and kinds of nonfiction that really appeal to me.
But most recently when this question was posed to me, I’m preparing my syllabus for next semester, and I’ve been thinking for a while I wanted to teach contemporary longer poems to the grad students, which is something I really believe in and find very interesting and people don’t necessarily know how to go about doing. So I’ve been going through my bookshelves and finding some of my favorite, you know, reminding myself, in some cases, of what I’m going to teach.
“History” by Tracy K. Smith is one of my favorite poems by her. It’s an unusual poem for Tracy Smith, by the way. It’s not her typical style, but it’s a great poem. The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, a book by Tom Andrews back from the eighties or nineties, a book, I don’t know, people are reading anymore. It’s fantastically interesting, has two great long poems in it. Tommy Pico, I really have enjoyed Tommy Pico’s, watching his work emerge. So “Nature Poem,” one of his book-length poems, is going to be on the list. Cathy Bowman’s “1000 Lines,” that’s an amazing kind of architectural achievement, that poem. Li-Young Lee’s “The Cleaving,” which is, along with Jerry Stern, one of my very favorite poems, and I think really one of the great poems of our time. I left people out. I think Meghan O’Rourke will be on there and Ross Gay. But, I mean, there’s an abundance, so I’m kind of winnowing the list.
Poets.org: Well, I’ve been reading a lot of your work recently and enjoying that greatly, and I encourage everybody in our audience to read your work because I learn so much from reading your poems particularly—I mean, even about things that I already know about, like the ecology of our shared state, Florida. For those who don’t know, you are based in Florida and very much involved with the literary scene in Miami, both O, Miami, and, you know, we met recently at the Miami Book Fair; and we’re both transplants to Florida. You are from Chicago originally, right? And I’m from northern New Jersey, originally—was raised mostly in northern New Jersey. I’m curious, you know, what do you think people tend to misunderstand about Florida, and do you try to address some of these misunderstandings in your work?
McGrath: That’s very interesting. Yeah, you know, it used to be everyone was a transplant in Florida, but really we have a lot of real Floridians now. I mean, I’ve been teaching here at State University for over thirty years, and now more and more millions of people move to Florida, but we really have millions of Floridians growing up here. I hope that that might change our state a little bit as people feel like they’re from here and of here and take ownership as opposed to the notion, like you and I, being migrants here, who, even as much as we love it, we may have other allegiances.
But what people, despite everyone thinking Florida is the weirdest state in the country, don’t really understand how weird it actually is. And at the same time they misunderstand that its weirdness, it seems exceptional, but it’s very representative, I think, of American weirdness in general. I mean, I think Florida has been a little bit of a laboratory for where the whole country’s going. You could think about that politically, socially, culturally. I will say it’s a little bit of a less angry and happier state in its weirdness maybe than the national level of weirdness right now.
So it’s an amazing place. It has not yet become what it’s going to grow up to be one day. That to me is one of the most exciting things about Florida. If you’re from Chicago, New Jersey, I really mostly grew up in Washington, D.C., but if you’re from the Northeast, things are older, things are more set in stone: “Well, it's been like this for two or three hundred years and here’s how people think and do.” Very little in Florida is older than fifty years, you know. The vast majority of the state has emerged since the end of the Second World War. So it’s crazy, it’s beautiful, it’s diverse, it’s exciting, it’s weird. It’s also still kind of growing up.
Poets.org: Constantly growing up and constantly changing. And I think, to your point about everything being new here, it’s because of all the development, right? And so, whatever existed before is kind of flattened by developers and, you know, these subdivisions or whatever else are put up instead. There’s one poem that you’ve written about Sanibel Island or that alludes to Sanibel Island, and for those who don’t know, it is an island off the western coast of Florida that is covered in a plethora of broken shells. It’s sort of evidence of the state’s deep and long history in those sands.
McGrath: Yeah, the west coast of Florida is really built upon the old shell mounds of the Calusa Indians who identified where there was a little highland and then built it up with basically the detritus of thousands of years of their civilization. And now people, you know, dig them up and build golf courses upon them.
But I mean, yes, Florida does not believe in the past. Maybe because it’s still growing up, but even when there is a past in Florida, when Florida finds it, its first thought is, “Well, let’s tear that down because that’s old.” I mean even things in Miami, things that are ten years old, are considered too old. It’s time to tear that down and build a bigger one, a fancier one. And I sometimes even wonder, in the entire state of Florida, how many buildings are there that would not be for sale if you could come up with the right number. Maybe the state capital building in Tallahassee and maybe Disney World, but I imagine Disney would be open, you know, to sell for the right figure and start again somewhere else.
Poets.org: [laughs] So depressing, but I agree. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
McGrath: Well, actually, for the first time in a long time, I’ve been writing a lot of poems about Florida because I published a book called Florida Poems, but that’s now twenty years ago, because I’ve been really involved for a decade, basically, in a big book about the Atlantic Ocean as an ecological space, as a cultural, as a historical space, as a kind of artistic meditative space. And that’s because of sea level rise, because Miami Beach is a barrier island. I mean, all of Florida is going to be greatly at risk, but Miami Beach is a barrier island, and when I’m not here, I’m in New Jersey on another barrier island for my summer. So my whole life, again, is lived about five feet above sea level. So that’s not a very smart thing to be doing, and that’s something that you have to attend to.
So the reality, which I guess everyone’s coming to get their mind around, but in Florida on the coast, you realize, “Oh, no, this is not like something to think about later or in another generation. This is a problem right now, ecological change and sea level rise.” So anyway, that started me thinking down many, many pathways. My ancestors immigrated across the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland. I’m swimming in the Atlantic Ocean every day; the entire cultural historical translation back and forth across the Atlantic and everything that is meant. And I’ve been working on it forever and ever. And I’m finally getting near the finish line and there’s a whole big section, the final section of the book is all set in Florida. The last poem is a big long poem about Miami Beach called “At the Ruins of Miami Beach.”
Poets.org: Campbell, this has been such a great talk, and I’m so excited for everyone to read your curation in January. I think it’s a great way to start Poem-a-Day for 2025. Thank you so much.
McGrath: Thank you, Mary, and thanks everybody at the Academy.