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N Orth D Akota Q Uarterly M Cg Rath at 100 V Ol. 83 N O. 4 Fall 2016 North Dakota Quarterly Dakota North McGrath at 100 Vol. 83 No. 4 Fall 2016 4 Fall 83 No. Vol. at 100 McGrath —“From here it is necessary to ship all bodies east.” I am in Los Angeles, at 2714 Marsh Street, Writing, rolling east with the earth, drifting toward Scorpio, thinking NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY Many Tanks! Warm thanks to the following people who so generously donated to the Robert W. Lewis Endowment. We much appreciate the support. Michael C. Beard Donna K. Bott James D. Brosseau Madelyne E. Camrud Deloitte Foundation Sandra M. Donaldson Diane M. Drake Robert Fleming Eugene C. Frazer Lowell J. Gallagher Douglas C. Gronberg Gordon H. Henry Jay D. Klemetsrud Adele Kupchella Gretchen Lang Paula H. Lee Lisa Lewis John T. Martsolf Janet M. Moen Kathleen J. Norris Fred Whitehead Remington G. Zacher Christopher B. Zegers Kate Sweney Managing Editor Gilad Elbom Fiction Editor Heidi Czerwiec Poetry Editor Lucy Ganje Art Editor Sharon Carson Book Reviews Editor William Caraher Digital Editor Andrea Herbst Editorial Assistant Elizabeth Andrews Undergraduate Intern Faculty Editors Sharon Carson William Caraher Shawn Boyd Editorial Board Michael Beard Lucy Ganje Birgit Hans James Mochoruk Sheryl O’Donnell Michael Wittgraf Eric Wolfe Contributing Editors Tomas Van Nortwick, Oberlin College Fred Whitehead, University of Kansas 1 MEMBER Council of Editors of Learned Journals © 2016 by the University of North Dakota North Dakota Quarterly is published Winter, Spring/Summer, and Fall by the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of North Dakota. Subscription rates are $32.00/yr for indi- viduals, $37.00/yr for institutions, and $20.00/yr for students. Outside the U.S., rates are $57.00/yr for individuals and $62.00/yr for institutions. All correspondence concerning ed- itorial, business, change of address, subscription, and Form 3579 matters should be directed to the Editor, North Dakota Quarterly, Merrifeld Hall Rm 110, 276 Centennial Drive, Stop 7209, Grand Forks, North Dakota 58202-7209. North Dakota Quarterly strives for clarity and accuracy, but assumes no responsibility for statements of fact or opinion by its contributors. Manuscripts (with SASE) should follow the MLA Handbook style. email: [email protected] website: http://ndquarterly.org/ North Dakota Quarterly is indexed in Humanities International Complete, the annual MLA Bibliog- raphy I, among others, which may be found in many libraries throughout North America. ON THE COVERS Front: Tomas McGrath Back: Tomas McGrath, with the frst lines from Letter to an Imaginary Friend Photos: Front and back images, and images on pages . .. all courtesy of Elwyn B. Robinson Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota. 2 Volumes 83.4 Fall 2016 Contents Kate Sweney 5 Editor’s Notes Salvador Ayala, Amanda Kong, 7 Holy City Adrift: Tomas Gabriela Valenzuela, and McGrath’s Los Angeles Andrew Lyndon Knighton Sharon Carson 20 Politics as Performance Tomas McGrath 21 Statement to HUAC Shawn Boyd 23 A Pair of Difculties: McGrath in the Archives Mike Hazard 29 Praises for Tomas McGrath Fred Whitehead 32 Te Two Big Macs Joseph Hutchison 35 McGrath (poem) Dale Jacobson 37 Notes on Tomas McGrath’s Teory of Tactical and Strategic Poetry Dale Jacobson 46 Having a Beer with Tom McGrath (poem) Jared Carter 47 Distances, Heat Lighting, Last Call, Resistance, and Rosa Luxemburg (poems) Jim Burns 52 Tomas McGrath: Standing Fast 3 John Bradley 59 You Can Start the Praises Now: A Poem that Refuses to Forget Tomas McGrath Even as America is Busy Digitizing and Forgetting Almost Everything (prose poem) Tomas Caraway 63 Stories Best Told Over Drinks, Te Voice Tat Speaks, and Te Language of the Future (poems) Jim McKenzie 70 Poets in Funny Clothes: McGrath and the Beats Charlotte Mandel Te American Long Poem Goes West: Tomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend Sharon Doubiago Answer to an Imaginary Friend (Not a Legitimist) Elizabeth Hellstern Prairie Grass ballet: A Grassland Cento (poem) Louis Ryan Te Singing Head: Tomas McGrath’s Epic Journey “Eating the Pure Light” and Te Jamie Parsley Dream (poems) Rick Watson Tom McGrath: A Poem All His Own (poem) Doren Robbins Poet’s Consciousness, Political Consciousness 4 Book Reviews Richard Rothaus Refracted: Visions of Fracking in Prose and Poetry. Fracture Gayatri Devi “A Sentence within a Sentence”: Solitary Confnement as Torture. Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confnement Contributors Call for Submissions 5 6 Holy City Adrift: Tomas McGrath’s Los Angeles Salvador Ayala, Amanda Kong, Gabriela Valenzuela, and Andrew Lyndon Knighton In a 1965 letter, the Daily Worker editor and poet Walter Lowenfels recalled an unexpected exchange he had recently had with the poet Tomas McGrath. “I’d like to change my name,” McGrath is reported to have said, “go some- where that has no postal system, where I don’t understand the language, where there are no books—where the weather never changes—hell, I did live there, Los Angeles” (Lowenfels). Just a half-decade removed from a tumultuous and disorienting stint on the west coast, McGrath was apparently still riven by ambivalence about that city, which he repeatedly described as a shallow, alien world, a “sewer,” and a “hell”—but which nonetheless still retrospectively ex- erted some kind of pull on him. Living in the City of Angels for roughly a decade during the 1950s, McGrath experienced both the energy of his rising literary promise and the numbness of cultural marginality, the thrill of love and the anguish of divorce, the joys of collectivity and the pain of isolation. His accomplishment can hardly be comprehended outside of this milieu of tension and contradiction. McGrath’s ofcial line on Los Angeles took its most memorable shape in the second section of Letter to an Imaginary Friend, in passages bearing the wound left by his blacklisting and fring from Los Angeles State College (LASC) in 1953. Tough McGrath was hardly the frst to so excoriate the infernal city, his account, according to the poet Don Gordon, was the last word. “Te part about Los Angeles—no one ever needs to do it again,” Gor- don wrote to McGrath. “It is nailed down for sure in those lines” (Gordon). Most critics have afrmed this reading, taking McGrath at face value when he described his LA period as “years of wandering in the wilderness,” lost in an unfamiliar and hostile city (Gibbons and Des Pres 51). Even the FBI’s fles on McGrath reinforce this impression, painstakingly tracking the meander- ing course of his mailing addresses: Pacoima to Sherman Oaks to downtown LA to Hollywood, and on to Mohawk Street in Echo Park, Marsh Street in Elysian Valley, and Sergeant Place in Silver Lake. And yet there is a counter-narrative to this story of the persecuted poet adrift amidst the demonic city—another version of Los Angeles inhering be- tween “those lines” penned in some of McGrath’s darkest days. For Los An- geles also incubated some of McGrath’s most profound experiences in com- munity, and despite his professional difculties—or perhaps precisely because of them—the poet and his circle succeeded in developing some unusually productive collectivities.1 Among them were temporary cultural and political networks woven into the landscape of mid-century California, such as the group formally called the Marsh Street Irregulars (which convened at Mc- 7 Grath’s Elysian Valley home to discuss ideas and poetry) and the independent educational experiment called the Sequoia School. In these contexts, overlap- ping generations of LA poets, hinged together by McGrath, were enriched by each other’s work—alongside the intellectual impoverishment of Hollywood and against the rising stock of the Beats. Tere, they explored the potentials for reclaiming a liberatory “holy city” of shared work (as the poet called it in Letter), responding to and resisting the confning forces that shaped much of McGrath’s Los Angeles decade. Insisting upon restoring this dialectical quality to the narrative of Mc- Grath’s Los Angeles years, a group of students and faculty at California State University, Los Angeles (formerly LASC) began in late 2015 to collectively curate an exhibition at the very university that, in fring him, helped to tip his LA decade from potentiality into purgatory. Te McGrath Working Group (comprising Cal State LA students Salvador Ayala, Jorge Contreras, Francisco Gutierrez, Amanda Kong, Lorenzo Rams, and Gabriela Valenzuela, along with English faculty member Andrew Lyndon Knighton) conducted archival research, collected and purchased materials, contributed collectively to the show’s design and narrative, and installed the exhibition for its run in early 2016 (a concurrent virtual exhibition remains accessible on Facebook2). We seek here to give an account of the show’s creation—its title, Holy City Adrift, hopefully capturing some of the contradictory energies of McGrath’s 1950s— and to share its argument about not only the scars that Los Angeles left on McGrath, but also the legacy he left for the literary culture of Los Angeles. Te Redemption of a “Red-ucator” When McGrath arrived to teach at Los Angeles State College (now Cal State Los Angeles), he entered a crucible; not only was his time in Los Angeles formative for Letter to an Imaginary Friend, but he was also entering a high- ly pressurized political situation produced by the McCarthyist inquiries in Southern California. Accounts of McCarthyism generally focus on the Hol- lywood Ten and the blacklisting of many members of the flm industry, but concomitantly, between 1946 and 1954, an estimated 600 teachers from all levels were fred for various reasons relating to supposed Communist rad- icalism (Aby 122). Both politicians and educational organizations like the National Council for American Education (NCAE) viewed the classroom as a vulnerable site for insidious indoctrination.
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