PRIZES, PRAISES & PLACES
Birmingham International Film Festival, First Prize
National telecast on PBS
"Thomas Matthew McGrath is North Dakota's gift to the millennia." - Everett Albers,
Director, North Dakota Humanities Council
"To McGrath, 'the end of the world' seems a multiple ironic pun on the remoteness
of North Dakota, the ultimate end or purpose of human existence, the fact that
each passing moment is the end of one world and beginning of a new one, and the
perilous state we're in that could make the phrase a literal one. Here is a man
most of us are long overdue to meet." - Don Morrison, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"I loved the bastard." - Meridel LeSueur, author
"'The Movie at the End of the World' is the title of a movie about McGrath. It is
also the title of a book of collected poems by McGrath. Or perhaps 'The Movie at
the End of the World' is a video poem that is both by and about McGrath, since
the video production is made up largely of images inspired by McGrath's poems,
and many of the images are of McGrath reading or talking about the material in
those poems." - Will Jones, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Here are several links to McGrath's work as well as works about his work:
For Selected Poems and Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Copper Canyon Press.
http://www.coppercanyonpress.org
Out of print, The Revolutionary Poet in the United States: The Poetry of Thomas McGrath, edited by Frederick C. Stern (University of Missouri Press, 1988) is
a sharp collection of essays. Try here for used copies.
http://www.powells.com/
Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem, edited by Reginald Gibbons and Terrence
Des Pres, is a big picture.
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/pre95/0-252-06177-2.html
For the collected poems, The Movie at the End of the World
http://www.ohiou.edu/oupress/
To read McGrath's Statement to the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, among other lively works.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mcgrath/mcgrath.htm
North Dakota Quarterly published a special issue in Fall 1982, edited by
Fred Whitehead. It includes an essay called Movie Moonlighting by
Mike Hazard.
http://www.und.edu/org/ndq/
For a madcap medley of meditations on McGrath, try Everett Albers' weblog.
http://www.nd-humanities.org/mcgrath/
There are two major collections of Tom's papers. The University of
North Dakota (http://www.und.edu/dept/library/Collections/og308.html) and North
Dakota State University. The original video field recordings made for
"The Movie at the End of the World" are archived at the latter with the
Institute for Regional Studies (http://www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/ndirs/collections/manuscripts/lit&music/McGrath/)
in Fargo, North Dakota. Anyone may use them to create new media.
Feel free!
