Michael McGriff
Michael McGriff will return to Austin this Thursday to read from his first book of poetry, Dismantling the Hills.
Listing McGriff’s impressive awards and accomplishments—a Michener Center Fellowship at UT, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, winner of the 2008 Balcones Poetry Prize and an NEA grant—belies the fact that McGriff is a working class poet, his poems rooted in the Coos Bay, Oregon of his childhood.
Watching Mike read his poetry is a joy precisely because he’s a man as comfortable with a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear and a tool belt around his waist as behind a podium. His quick humor and easy nature come through; and his readings are anything but stuffy. A few months ago, at BookPeople with identical twin poets Matthew and Michael Dickman, McGriff read after one twin and before the other, prompting him to make a joke about being the “white meat in the Dickman sandwich.”
And, at least to a gaggle of Northwestern teenagers, Mike McGriff is more than a poet, more than a working man’s working man. He actually transcends to the level of superhero.
Let me explain.
McGriff and I both make an annual summer trek up to the Idaho panhandle to spend a week with our mentor and friend Denis Johnson (2007 National Book Award Winner, Tree of Smoke) and his wife Cindy. The couple’s gaggle of teenage nieces also arrives every year, along with several of the nieces’ friends. No one makes much of a point of distinguishing which of the teenage girls are actually related to Denis and Cindy. The whole clan of giggling, fighting, dancing gals is generally referred to as “The Nieces.”
After winning the National Book Award, Denis invested his newfound wealth in a trampoline that floats in the middle of his pond on a giant inflatable inner tube. The trampoline made for new levels of summer fun, including a form of baseball in which the batter stood on the trampoline, the pitcher on the pond’s shore, and the outfielder paddled around the pond in the canoe.
So, The Nieces decided that it would be fun to canoe to the trampoline with sleeping bags and spend the night out in the middle of the pond, together, under the stars, instead of in the Kids’ Cabin where they usually spent half the night fighting and playing, crying and laughing, and beating each other with pillows.
The night of The Nieces pond-sleeping adventure, I slept soundly in the Writer’s Cabin on the edge of the pond. Mike McGriff slept on the other side of the pond in an idyllic shed with his lovely fiancé, the poet Britta Ameel.
All six or seven of The Nieces lay on the trampoline together, cocooned in their sleeping bags against the chill of nighttime in the Northern Idaho mountains.
But in the middle of the night, it began to rain, a hard cold downpour. The sides of the giant inner tube holding the trampoline were too slick with rainwater to allow The Nieces to try to climb into the canoe, so they were trapped, freezing and drenched, in the middle of the pond.
Up in the main house, the rain woke Cindy with a start. “Denis!” she cried. “Are the girls on the trampoline?” It took a little prodding, but Denis climbed out of bed and the two raced the pickup down to the pond, the downpour and darkness obscuring their ability to see past the headlights.
They leapt out of the truck to find The Nieces huddled and drenched, flashlights flailing, in the center of the floating trampoline in the middle of the huge pond.
Uncle Denis decided to do what needed to be done. He began to take off his Hawaiian shirt as a first step to initiating a rescue.
The Nieces began to scream, alarmed and concerned for their dear Uncle. “No, Uncle Denis! No!”
Their shrieks didn’t wake me from my slumber, but they did wake up Michael McGriff–the athlete, the working class poet, the fearless–who threw on his swim trunks and rushed from the shed at the edge of the pond, followed by the sleep-tussled poetess Britta Ameel.
Mike McGriff didn’t think, he merely acted, with a superhero’s confidence and quickness. He sprinted to where Denis and Cindy stood, diving headfirst into the freezing pond and swimming swiftly to the floating trampoline. The Nieces quieted and calmed. They weren’t sure what he would do, but they felt with the teenager’s intuition that their McGriff would save the day. Sure enough, Mike dove to the bottom of the pond, pulling up the 20 lbs. weight anchoring the giant floating trampoline to the bottom of the pond.
Then he swam across the water, carrying the heavy iron weight and dragging the giant floating trampoline and all of the nieces and their drenched sleeping bags and flashlights behind him to the safety of the shore.
And so it has been established that Michael McGriff is a hero, generous and warm and without the trepidation of normal men. But what, you may ask, of his poetry? I’ll let the reknowned Irish poet Eaven Boland answer that. Writing of McGriff’s Dismantling the Hills, Boland says:
“These are poems of place and generation, lyrically intense and intensely crafted. But the force of this work lies not just in narrative and memory, but in the refusal at every point to allow locale to become mere landscape. The rivers, fields, and ridges of these poems are not decorative. They are alive with work-with chainsaws, tractors, work crews, and wood chip piles. Most of all, they are vivid with hurt and loved human beings, fiercely imagined and named. This, above all, is what makes this such a powerful and persuasive first volume of poems.”
Michael McGriff will read Thursday, November 5 at 7pm at the Austin Community College Rio Grande Campus Gallery Theater.
To listen to Michael McGriff read his poem Year of the Rat, click here.
