McGrath expresses some opinions on American poetry. First, a general statement from a Wall Street Journal Q & A:

WSJ: What is the state of poetry in our culture today?

Mr. McGrath: Many other cultures value poetry more than we do. In Ireland, poetry is a top cultural pursuit, the art to end all arts. Poetry resonates differently in each culture; it doesn't in America. People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school. People who publish poetry today do it from a sense that poetry needs to be published, not because they think they are going to make money.

When I first started reading McGrath's poems, I thought the subject matter was a bit trite, the syntax to comfortable, until I realized the artistic intent behind his writing. And this inevitably carries over into McGrath's views on poetry. From the poem, Ode to Blueberries:

All the new poems are about blackberries.

But to praise the blueberry
is to praise the ordinary and easily obtained
pleasures of this world,
spartan gems
in green plastic baskets,
summer's caviar...

...in their early winter rambles,
they were to happen upon that
brittle, fine-branched, pale-leaved bush,
they might mistake it for
forsythia,
more likely they would not
pay it any mind
at all, those
eager American poets
traveling ever deeper into the forest
in pursuit of the legendary,
labyrinthine,
bramble-tangled temple
of the blackberry.

Tell me, which is it,
they have come to adore,
the fruit
or the thorns?

And then from the poem, April 20:

Talking in class about rhetorical posture...

Where is the speaker situated in this poem?
Not the speaker but the voice. Not the voice
but the self. Not the self but the locus of issuance.
How can I convince them that poems if texts
are human texts, that texts if artifacts
are artifacts forged in the furnace
of the heart, the soul, the psyche, however
you imagine or care to name that machine
we hear idling in the engine room at night.
Springlike today, near seventy, sunny and blue.
Budding trees no longer skeletal as logic.....