Poetry Dispatch No. 244 | June 24 2008
Thomas McGrath
I have been a long time in this emptiness
Most of it wasted…
Out here it is so easy for the fool,
Mad in his isolation,
To mistake the solitude of his own poor soul for a diamond
I’ve mentioned my old bookseller-friend from Chicago, Paul Romaine on other occasions (profiled in CHI TOWN), a mentor of sorts, who put the books of numerous socially conscious writers into my hands, suggesting: to be a real writer in America you must engage yourself with larger issues…matters of injustice…racial intolerance, “big business” (as it was called then), war, labor, the plight of the working class.
One of these writers was the poet Tom McGrath and his bookLETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND. I remember buying the paperback when it first came out in 1962 (Swallow Press), and finding it tough…
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Aithne 