Wesley McNair – Maine's new poet laureate

We just featured Wesley McNair on the blog last Friday but we had to share this good news as well. McNair was just appointed Maine's new poet laureate on March 11th.

Here's his feature in The Morning Sentinel:

Wesley McNair doesn’t need a formal title to remind him that it’s important to bring poetry to the people.

But McNair, appointed by the governor to the position of Maine poet laureate Friday at a ceremony at the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston, plans to wear the title with honor and keep doing what he’s always done.

“I’ve bringing poetry to the people from the start,” said McNair, 69, who lives in Mercer. “My goal is to continue making poets in Maine more visible to their communities and to their regions.”

McNair’s appointment came at the beginning of the Maine State Poetry Out Loud finals. Poetry Out Loud is a national competition for high school students, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Lauren LePage, daughter of Gov. Paul LePage and a member of his administrative team, introduced McNair. There is some irony there, because McNair spoke out for Maine poets when the governor opted to leave poetry off his inauguration program in January, interrupting a Maine tradition.

McNair said he viewed his appointment as a positive sign. “I look forward to this level of support continuing as I carry the banner for the literary arts up ahead. It’s an opportunity,” he said.

McNair has received many awards and grants, and has read his poems at the Library of Congress. His latest book is Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems.

Wesley McNair

Godine published Wesley McNair's latest book, Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems in 2010 and today he's the featured poet on Brian Brodeur's site How a Poem Happens: Contemporary Poets Discuss the Making of Poems.

McNair's poem "Her Secret" from Lovers of the Lost is included (just an excerpt for you here):

Why he must cover every counter top, table
and chair with his things, she no longer asks,
knowing he will only answer as if speaking
to someone in his head who’s keeping track
of all the ways she misunderstands him

and wants to hear over and over that he’s sick
and tired, though that’s just what he is,
and how can she resent him for that? – so sick
he has pills for his bad circulation, bad heart,
and nerve disorder scattered around

the kitchen sink, so tired after staying up
all night at his computer feeding medication
to the stinging in his legs, he crashes
for one whole day into the next. "Thurman?"
she asks, coming home from work to find him

lying on their bed in his underpants, still
as the dead, his radio on to tape the talk shows
he’s missing, and then the old thought
that he really is dead comes into her mind
all over again, so strong this time she can’t

The full poem.

Brian also includes a great interview with McNair regarding "Her Secret." Favorite questions/answers:

Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was “received” and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

My poems always begin with a feeling I want to explore. They don't begin from "out there," which is what I think of when I hear your words inspiration and received, but from inside myself, as I follow the implications of that feeling in my own emotional experience. My allies in this exploration are wonder and curiosity, the why and the how of my story. In this case, for instance, I asked myself why the wife might be having such a crisis having stayed in her marriage for forty years, and exactly how she might deal with the crisis. There were tears, yes, tears for this woman. What drove me was my compassion for her, the need I felt to give her a voice.

How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

I wanted long sentences that jumped across stanza divisions as if disregarding the form of the poem itself – a wildness that suggested the wife’s state of mind as well as her process of thought. The poem has twenty stanzas but only six sentences, each with a range of twists and turns. Another thing the long sentences do is to gather up the detail of the poem as it goes, throwing meaning ahead of themselves, to paraphrase Frost, so you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop, even when the sentences end. This preserves the immediacy of the poem despite its length, or so I hope, as if it were spoken or thought in one intensified moment.

Wesley McNair: Process and Poetry

At the Colby College Special Collections, which houses Wesley McNair's papers, a new website has been launched that offers some amazing insight into the process of poetry. You can read and listen to the poem in its final version, and browse pages of manuscript. Look at these notebook pages for the poem “How I Became a Poet” (from Lovers of the Lost)

The site includes dozens of poems in this form, as well as biographical and critical resources for teachers and poetry lovers alike. Congratulations to Colby on this wonderful project!

Wesley McNair: Writer's Almanac

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac today features a poem by Godine author Wesley McNair, whose new volume, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems is available through our website or anywhere fine books are sold.

McNair will be appearing this evening (Monday, April 5) at Colby Sawyer College in New London, Connecticut, to discuss his work and the process of writing poetry. In an article at NewHampshire.com, Melanie Plenda reports:

“Through photographs, report cards, early works, letters and notebook drafts, he will give an audience insight into what it takes to live as a poet.

McNair, 69, lists himself among the broken. His father left the family early on. By his mid-teens he worked the last of the farms in the Connecticut River Valley in New Hampshire and came of age in a 1960s America battered by social strife.

‘In trying to mend these broken things I am trying to mend myself, and as far as I know I’ve reached that goal,’ said McNair, who now lives in Mercer, Maine. ‘We’re all broken, of course. We all have something we didn’t manage to do, always aspiring to something higher, something more, to achieve that wholeness.’

His presentation also will include themes of balancing work with family and how he was helped through to the other side of the discouragement that comes along with being a poet.”

Two Godine Poets at the University of the South

by Wesley McNair ~ February 18, 2010 ~

Today, my friend Donald Hall is to read his poems as the recipient of The Sewanee Review’s Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, and I’ve flown down with my wife Diane to introduce him. But just after our arrival, we get some bad news. Don’s friend Linda tells us he’s been sick all night with the grippe. Now everyone is worried he won’t be able to give his reading after all, particularly George Core, the editor of The Sewanee Review, who has invited us all to the University of the South for the event. George asks me to arrange a fall-back group reading of Don’s poems in case he isn’t available.

But never mind. As I unlock my door at the Inn, a bedraggled Don comes out of his room wearing dress pants and a freshly laundered shirt. Could I button the top button of his shirt? he wants to know. “Linda can’t do it,“ he says. “Now she’s feeling sick.”

They both manage to appear at Convocation Hall an hour later, and after a large crowd fills the auditorium, George starts the show, introducing the University president, Joel Cunningham, who gives Don his check. Then George calls me up to introduce Don.

What could I say about him that hasn’t already been said in a thousand introductions? I choose to tell the audience about Don’s help to me as a mentor, quoting his letters from the late 70s and early 80s about the poems I sent him.

One of the letters I quote questions my use in a poem of the word “yearning.” “Can’t you hear Bing Crosby sing it?” Don asks. “It’s Tin Pan Alley. And the word reminds me of the most prosperous poet ever to emerge from Tin Pan Alley . . . I mean Rod McKuen.” In another letter, he recommends the poetic practice of waiting: “hold poems back for a long time before sending them to a friend, because a poem “has a way of changing on its own, before anybody else’s words get into it.” Later, after seeing an extensive and self-adoring biographical note I had sent to Poetry Magazine to accompany two poems I published there, Don writes: “I think it is wise not to load on the fellowships and academic appointments. Try something that is quite reticent, non-academic and non-‘successful,’ like, ‘Wesley McNair lives in New Hampshire, where he raises goats with eyes in the middle of their foreheads.’ ”

Throughout the period, I tell my listeners, Don encouraged me about my first book of poems in progress. “Keep getting better, and improve the manuscript every time it comes back, and you will win through,” one letter remarks. Another adds, “Continue to change it. Make it the best book possible.” I explain that when my collection was at last accepted by the University of Missouri Press for its Devins Award, Don was as excited as I was. “Wes,” he said, “I could kiss you.”

I conclude my introduction by saying that today, on the occasion of Donald Hall’s prestigious award, I could kiss him. As our paths cross, he walking to the table where he is to read, I on my way back to my seat, I do kiss him.

Then Don begins, the old lion roaring a loud roar despite the residue of illness he still carries. As he reads to the rapt crowd, a table lamp illuminates his face as well as the books he holds in his hand. His first poem is a new pantoum about the horrors of 9/11. He goes on to a mixture of earlier pieces, one an elegy for farm horses, another about the suicide wish of a respected and apparently wholesome town elder, others about the long illness and death of Jane Kenyon. Above him hover portraits of Episcopal clergy from the early history of the university, wearing their vestments and expressions of devotion. At his table below the poet Donald Hall continues on, his illuminated face ragged with beard, bringing news from the broken world.

[Wesley McNair’s brand-new volume of poems, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems, is very nearly available from Godine.]

Poetry Month Series: Wes McNair

[In honor of National Poetry Month, Godine and Black Sparrow poets will be periodically commenting upon their work, their writing process, and the art of poetry.]

"After My Stepfather's Death"
Again it is the moment when I left home
for good, and my mother is sitting quietly
in the front seat while my stepfather pulls me
and my suitcase out of the car and begins
hurling my clothes, though now
I notice for the first time how the wind
unfolds my white shirt and puts its slow
arm in the sleeve of my blue shirt and lifts them
all into the air above our heads so beautifully
I want to shout at him to stop and look up
at what he has made, but of course when I turn
to him, a small man, bitter even this young
that the world will not go his way, my stepfather
still moves in his terrible anger, closing the trunk,
and closing himself into the car as hard as he can,
and speeding away into the last years of his life.

(from The Town of No & My Brother Running,
and the forthcoming Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems)

Note from the Poet
This poem is based on a traumatic event I experienced as a teenager when my stepfather became violent, as he sometimes did, and I had a hard time writing the piece because the facts of what actually happened kept getting in my way. Looking back I remembered how the shirts my stepfather threw landed on the hay stubble alongside the road, and I was drawn to how the stubble poking up through the shirts imitated the hurt I felt. Only when I changed my description and showed him throwing the shirts into the air did the poem begin to feel right, and after the revision came to me, I saw why. Through my stepfather’s gesture of releasing the shirts and creating something beautiful by accident, I had suggested his submerged creative life and a connection between him and me that the son misses and the older narrator observes. In my mind as I rewrote my poem was my stepfather’s artistic self: the soap carvings he saved from his childhood and the awkward drawings he hung in the family house. By making him, to my own surprise, a sympathetic figure whose anger separates him from that self, I reshaped my trauma into a kind of forgiveness.