Life & Work with Kevin McGrath

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin McGrath.

Hi Kevin, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
I began in Southern China during the Cold War years and then, moved toward Britain where I soon found myself in Scotland living and pursuing an undergraduate life. Then, I moved to Paris for a while before I went eastwards again and settled in Greece for many years, especially on the island of Hydra.

From there, journeys took me to India, to Egypt, and southwards into Africa, across the Atlantic a couple of times under sail, before – like Odysseus – I found my Penelope at the University of John Harvard. It is there, within that great Library that I have spent many, many years, in the intellectual pursuit of Homeric Greece and the Sanskrit world of heroic poetry. Poetry has been my compass needle and with that in mind my aim, in a sense, has always been true. Poetry has been both my medium and my vision, it is the conceptual terrain where I walk and where I sometimes sleep out beneath that tall gleaming heaven.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The great struggle in being human lies in being able to give more than one receives, to always attempt to apprehend what one is not and to know that love is not merely a condition that is personal but one that also concerns both place and the situation of having no object. Kindness is a terrific means that leads one to understand the world.

For me, marriage and family are the two fundamental grounds for all of our existence here and upon those two bases, all of our experience and knowledge is to be composed. The challenge is, I suppose, in trusting in one’s vision, in the fact that one’s aim is true, and not to live a life of mere imitation and emulation, of repetition and compulsion.

The key, for me, has always been in the comprehension of metaphor, how all of our perceptions are formulated and active within that mode and that certainly is always fungible.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I work on three activities in this life. One is that I teach poetry, that is, the world of Homeric literature and culture, a world of heroes and feminine heroes. Then, I practice a life of research in which I pursue an understanding of the late Bronze Age universe of Sanskrit heroic songs, specifically a poem called the Mahabharata, or Great Bharata.

Thirdly, as a practitioner of poetry, I have been writing in this vein for more than fifty years and have published widely in that domain. I applied to be President Biden’s Inaugural Poet when he was installed at the White House, but they selected Amanda Gorman, who is great, and whom I encountered when she was an undergraduate. So, I am recognized and distinguished for these three fields: pedagogy, learning, and of poetic literacy.

When I was young and still unattached to anything, I realized that poetry would be my life and that all I wanted to do was to write a single and most beautiful book. That I have just accomplished, and this is called ‘Fame’ and is now ready for the press. That is what I am proud of, for it has been a terrific effort and a gigantic amount of labor and discipline in which everything, even grief, and despair, have been immensely fruitful sources of psychic energy and vision. What sets me apart from others… well, I suppose it is that I am apart from others, for if one pursues an idea or a vision and that is a terminus, not an origin, then the road is as broad as it as long and residence, temporal, emotional, intellectual, even terrestrial, is always just an ideal.

Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
I am happy swimming, sailing, and rowing. I was conceived on a ship in the Red Sea in the middle of the Twentieth Century and I seem to have sustained that sound of water and of marine air in my thoughts since then, and always return to that fertile situation. I have sailed all over the oceans of the Northern hemisphere, beginning as a boy in the South China Sea, and I have swum in so many kinds of water, including lakes and rivers. I suppose my best swim was across the Hellespont, the channel that separates Asia from Europe, which I accomplished when I was Fifty.

Now, I row competitively – although sadly, less and less – in a single scull which is a daily source of much joy for me: being out there on the river alone and moving upstream away from human life, among the birds and trees and the current and air. I am also a most committed pedestrian and have walked all over the world and have written about the philosophy and mental transport of these walks, all of which have been published here and there. My best walk continued for more than forty days, long ago in Southern Greece, where I kept to solitary paths among the hills and along the coast and slept out in the groves and on the shores. That was a truly transcendental and visionary time for me. Finally, a life that is both marital and familial has brought me so much happiness and understanding and I hope that my children realize that these are the only true conditions of mortal life.

Contact Info:

• Facebook: Kevin McGrath Poetry and Kevin McGrath
• Youtube: McGrath Kosmos Society Odyssey