These days, being a Floridian can be difficult. With no less than The New York Times Magazine anointing our homeland with fashion plaudits, longtime residents must be wondering what happened to our old, weird national joke, and do we want it back?
It may be that we can have it both ways, if Campbell McGrath is any indication. McGrath – poet, professor of creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, and recipient of fellowships from both the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations – will read from his new collection, Florida Poems, on May 23 at Inkwood Books in Tampa. The book is a cornucopia of Floridiana, veering from intimate lyrics of daily life in the sun to a kind of epic dream-history of the state and its people, their aspirations and lifestyle, enlivened with a wit both sardonic and lighthearted.
McGrath is very responsive to his location, he says: "Sometimes I write with a belief in my authority to speak for a place," as in the 10-part "City in the Clouds" or his Dante-esque take on Florida exurbs in "Benediction for the Savior of Orlando," which sees Chuck E. Cheese become "the diabolical vampire of our transcendent ideals." At other times his descriptions shake whimsical fruit: a Key Lime becomes a "Curiously yellow hand-grenade/ of flavor."
"After a decade in Florida, and a lot of research, and travel," McGrath said via e-mail, he felt he had the range necessary for the interconnected poems of the new collection. For him, "the notion of being a "documentarian' is important … the idea of bearing witness to the world as I experienced it."
This record-keeping impulse is clear not only in the "catalogue of myth, history and social ethos" which comprises "The Florida Poem," but in his portraits of notable tourists through the ages. Hemingway's tongue-in-cheek appearance as a force of nature – "the original two-hearted brawler" – appears alongside more intimate sketches of Thomas Edison in retirement, Elizabeth Bishop in repose and a stunning found poem narrated by that original crocodile hunter William Bartram.
McGrath's preoccupation with Florida's imaginary past has prompted some very real conclusions about the place that has proven so fertile for him. "I'm not a person who automatically promotes natural splendor over human endeavor," he says, adding that "cities are capable of great spontaneous beauty" so long as their development does not come as shrine to corporate interest.
Miami, he says, is chaotic enough to be great, while Orlando falls far short. McGrath apparently sees those two places as opposite poles of Florida's development, which as a basic paradigm "has been erasure." That erasure has vanquished people, buildings, towns and communities, "and points up the fact that Florida was essentially founded by real estate developers," McGrath says, "… and over-built by folks whose only interest is in raking in money, and who make it a point not to be around when the chickens come home to roost."
That said, he is hardly a grub-chewing revolutionary hiding in the swamp. The point of his poems, he reminds himself and his readers, "was to buy into Florida, not sell it again." And his roving eyes keep busy seeing both the egregious and the sweet that dwell together here in the Cockroach State.
McGrath's version of Florida is ultimately more forgiving, compassionate and warm than that of the state's most prominent literary ambassadors. That's not to say that his writing lacks the satirical bite of, say, Carl Hiaasen. In fact, his suggestion for a new state motto ("Florida: Fuckin' Fantastic!") and his apocalyptic despair over Chuck E. Cheese would fit neatly into any mayhem-crazed shrimp-boiler Tim Dorsey could cook up.
McGrath also understands, though, that the place and all its weirdness is made possible only by its people, to whom he is enormously sympathetic and loving, whether they hear doughnuts speak or worship at the altar of orange. In the end, McGrath celebrates the very chaotic rapacity that has made Florida both the Eat Shit and Die state and the tropical paradise of travel brochures and retirement pitches. "Because this is Florida," he writes, "we can be who we choose to be." And that, he seems to say, makes all the difference.
This article appears in May 22-28, 2002.
