I purchased the recent copy of the “North Dakota Quarterly,” a publication of the University of North Dakota, which features a number of articles about Tom McGrath, the poet from my hometown of Sheldon, North Dakota. Reading through it, I verified something that I thought I’d read once before. He once attended Louisiana State University and studied under the able guidance of Robert Penn Warren, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of ALL THE KING’S MEN, the story of the autocratic governor Huey Long of Louisiana. But more about that tomorrow.
While I don’t profess to be an able critic of poetry, it seems as if Warren’s influence on McGrath is obvious. Take for example a passage from McGrath’s “Letter to an Imaginary Friend” where he writes, “In the dusk the bats hustled./ The hawk wheeled and whirled on the tall perch of the air;/ Whirled, fell/ Down a long cliff of light, sliding from day into dusk.”
Compare Robert Penn Warren’s lines: “Night of the falling mercury, and ice glitter./ Drouth-light of August and the horned insect booming at the window screen.
