“To understand the average Chicago streetscape,” says poet Campbell McGrath, “you have to understand why Chicago is here. To understand why Chicago is here means you have to understand all of American history, but that’s not even enough because it’s the whole history of political capitalism that accounts for America and also the history of various ideas that made it to America, and what’s an idea, anyway?”
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McGrath, who’s in town teaching creative writing this spring at the University of Chicago, was born here in 1962, while his father, an air force officer, was studying at the university. The service soon sent the family to Washington, D.C., where McGrath spent his childhood, but he returned to Hyde Park for an undergraduate degree of his own and came back yet again, after getting his MFA from Columbia University in 1988, to take up the migratory life of an adjunct professor. And it was then, watching from a window of the Lakeview apartment he shared with his pregnant wife as two squirrels gathered food and nested in the snow, that he began spinning what would become the 70 pages of “The Bob Hope Poem,” which constitute the bulk of his 1996 collection, Spring Comes to Chicago.
“And now I’m watching the same planes drop their weapons in the same desert, and Bob Hope is still alive. Nothing changes. He’s supposed to have died every minute for the last ten years, and one of the premises of the Bob Hope poem is like, ‘Bob, you can’t buy immortality with your money.’ But apparently he has.”
“Not too many people I know go back and wistfully think, ‘Boy, I wish Chicago was still a piece of prairie.’ It was a marshy place by the lake and who needs it? And in fact the city they built instead is great. But in Florida you just have the sense of, ‘Wow, here it is, paradise being bulldozed, a beautiful physical landscape vanishing and being replaced, not by a fantastic human landscape, but by something tawdry and commercial.”
