Wesley McNair is a New England poet whose poems portray his home region, the influences of American mythology on popular culture, and the life of family. Although he had previously contributed many poems to periodicals, McNair's first collected volume of poetry was The Faces of Americans in 1853: Poems. McNair once shared his views on this collection with CA, commenting: "This was an important book for me because it charted my direction as a poet. It contains my first poems about northern New England, the beginnings, that is, of my imaginative map of that region. It also contains poems about myths and mythmakers in nineteenth-century American culture, derived from the interdisciplinary work I'd been doing as a graduate student. These poems were my first attempt to deal with American myths and their influences. They showed the way to other poems about American popular culture in The Town of No: Poems and finally to 'My Brother Running,' my long narrative elegy that tells the story of a brother's desperate daily running in mid-life, relating his struggle to the events leading to the Challenger explosion."

In his review of The Faces of Americans in 1853, Stephen C. Berendt commented in Prairie Schooner: "The generally short, lean lines of McNair's poetry reveal humanity glimpsed from and projected into a variety of unexpected perspectives and organized generally around the principles of recollection and recreation." Calling McNair a poet of "wit and skill" and observing that The Faces of Americans in 1853 showed "considerable promise," Ray Olson of Booklist noted McNair's use of humor. In the Virginia Quarterly, a reviewer remarked on the "elegiac" tone and prose that "floats like his leaves and clouds—it does not strike sparks." Yet while the Virginia Quarterly critic described McNair's works as "modest, undemanding poems," Behrendt compared McNair's poetry to that of William Wordsworth, writing: "I'm reminded somewhat of Wordsworth here, and the interlocking, interrelated structure of McNair's volume recalls for me that earlier Romantic's suggestion that we regard his entire canon as a single structure, a cathedral in which each poem stands as a separate but connected part of the whole structure. It seems to me McNair has undertaken something of the sort in this volume, and the result is a subtly shaded, powerful view of a modern Romantic imagination at work saving the past. These are good poems by a talented poet, well worth the reading." A reviewer for the Harvard Advocate was also enthusiastic about The Faces of Americans in 1853, maintaining that in the volume McNair "sets ambitious goals and successfully works to realize them." The critic added that the collection "is a tribute to McNair's poetic versatility as he writes in a variety of tones and explores one of poetry's grandest themes, the nature of poetic vision and inspiration." The Harvard Advocate contributor concluded: "As a result of this most ambitious project, McNair has written several poems which will be remembered long after one sets the book down."

In the collection The Town of No: Poems, McNair brings to life an array of characters from a New England that is "unlimited," in the words of Donald Hall in the Boston Review. McNair once told CA that in this collection he "was seeking to place characters and events in the context of a dissolving rural culture, where order is difficult to find." "By his art, Wesley McNair gives us the strangeness of the ordinary," Hall noted. "Both the poems and the lives they describe proceed by omission and absence, which is precisely where their frequent beauty—one could almost say grandeur—comes from," commented John Repp in the American Book Review. "Wesley McNair knows that human beings living through the day sometimes possess all the courage and grace necessary to pierce the heart of the most hardened skeptic." McNair's poems are "simple and direct in technique yet profound and riveting in impact," observed Booklist reviewer Jim Elledge, who called the book one of the best poetry collections of 1989. Other critics, including Hall, also praised McNair's ear for rhythm and mouth sounds, noting that the poet preserved the language of New Englanders. In another review of the volume for the Harvard Book Review, Donald Hall commented: "The first thing to notice, reading Wesley McNair, is the noise he makes, or the noises. He has a gorgeous ear for the rubbing-together of adjacent words, as well as the distances between them. ... This language is our speech observed-preserved in poetry." Hall concluded: "By the faculty of his attention—to people, to their talk—McNair's compassion turns itself into art." New Letters Review of Books contributor Jana Harris offered praise for the volume, stating that "with a well-tuned ear and the ability to mine narrative from what might seem mundane and unworthy subjects for literature, Wesley McNair has created one of the most memorable mythical places of the decade, The Town of No. " Repp commented: " The Town of No is a beautiful book, full of poems to savor for their deceptively quiet anger, their musical shapeliness, their unapologetic portrayals of honor, courage, embittered failure, physical labor. Wesley McNair tells good stories."

McNair's chapbook Twelve Journeys in Maine, which was published in two editions—a deluxe edition hardbound in leather with silkscreen prints and a trade paperback edition—includes illustrations by artist Marjorie Moore, who collaborated with McNair to produce the volume of twelve poems set in the rural country of West Central Maine. In an interview with Linda Davies in Green Mountains Review McNair remarked that Twelve Journeys in Maine "begins in darkness and ends in darkness ... but by the time you get the second darkness, I hope there's more of a feeling of belonging than there was at the beginning—that is, the whole book should take the reader on a journey toward an identity in rural Maine. In any case, when I wrote these poems, I'd just moved to Maine myself, so I was trying to find my own home here. If there are windows that reveal the inner life of the place as the reader goes along, so much the better." Maine Sunday Telegram contributor Philip Isaacson cited the chapbook for the combined beauty of the poetry, illustrations, printing, and binding, and claimed that "it expresses the deeper culture of our state." In Maine Book Reviews, critic Kate Barnes called it "a book with a serious excellence which underlies the wit and narrative grace with which these twelve poems greet the reader." Barnes concluded: "Although the poems have great depth, and work on many levels, they have a most limpid and inviting surface. ... The book has a truth of feeling in it as shapely and solid and surprising as a piece of meteorite."

My Brother Running: Poems contains fifteen short poems about the lives of rural New Englanders, including an old man in a nursing home, a young man who rescues a wounded bird, and a teenage girl who protects visitors from the family dog. A Publishers Weekly critic assessed the poems as "moving" and "honest," and suggested that McNair "touches the human, and the contact is memorable." In Poetry, David Wojahn asserted that McNair's regionalist perspective results in poems that are "usually impressive." "McNair is not afraid to risk the sentimental, and can usually skirt it through a lively way with imagery," added Wojahn. "He chooses earnestness where other poets would opt for irony. ... McNair has a Wordsworthian faith in the local, and enough range and prosodic skill to prevent himself from seeming merely naive." Ray Olson writing inBooklist, commented on the directness and unsentimental nature of McNair's poems, characterized the collection as "[f]ine, thoughtful, emotion-rousing work."

The title poem of My Brother Running is a long poem that derives from the death of McNair's forty-three-year-old brother, who suffered a heart attack that was related to his compulsive running. This poem was also published in a 1995 edition titled The Dissonant Heart, which accompanied a well-received exhibit that combined McNair's text with photographic collages by Dozier Bell. Wojahn called the poem more "urgent than anything in McNair's snapshots from rural life, and the poem is without question his best." In this forty-page narrative, the speaker relates his relationship with his brother. Despite some reservations regarding the length and structure of the poem, Wojahn considered it a noteworthy achievement. "Clearly My Brother Running is a breakthrough for McNair, a promise of interesting things to come," predicted Wojahn. American Book Review contributor Al Maginnes reviewed "My Brother Running" in an assessment of both The Town of No and My Brother Running. Although he faulted some aspects of the shorter works in the collections, Maginnes observed of "My Brother Running" that "this volume saves the best for last." Maginnes concluded: "The accomplishment of this loping, sprawling poem makes me eager to see where McNair's poetry will run in the future."

McNair has offered considerable commentary on "My Brother Running," including his remarks to Linda Davies, to whom he remarked that adding fictional details to his brother's true story was one of the most difficult aspects of writing the poem. He told Davies: "There were other things I added as I went along—putting it in the context of Reagan's America, for instance, and paralleling the story with the career of Christa McAuliffe, so the poem would be American in its themes, as well as regional. Most of all, I wanted to link my brother's running with a certain kind of American motion and with an American desperation. In the end, there were two understandings of truth I had to come to: the actual truth, and the truth of poetry. If I wanted to tell my story in the fullest way, making a metaphor out of it, I found I had to give myself over to the truth of art and trust in it totally. So writing 'My Brother Running' did a lot for me as a poet." In an interview with River Review contributor Patricia Lewis, McNair commented: "There have been two people in my life who've died of heart attacks—people I've been very close with—and they've made me feel that heart attacks and heart damage are not only physiological things, but psychological and emotional ones. The heart is, after all, the center of the feeling life. So when we want to talk about what most moves us, we use the word 'heart': heart-felt, heart-warming, heart of my heart, and the like. For me, the heart is the most important metaphor in 'My Brother Running,' and its damage and sickness are a sign that something is very wrong for Bob and the culture that helped to create him."

McNair once described his collection Talking in the Dark for CA: "There are two kinds of poems in this book which is concerned, as the title says, with talk. In the first, I try to speak for certain people who confront their personal darknesses and have no voice. In the second, a species of meditation, I talk directly to the reader about life's darknesses and affirmations. The second kind of poem is in long lines, suitable for rumination and a conversational openness with the reader. The subjects of the meditations are common experiences such as shaking hands and waving goodbye—things everyone has experienced hundreds and even thousands of times. I said to myself when I was working on these poems, 'I have done my research—that is, I have lived my life. What have I learned about these common things that I've been doing all this time? What do I know that I didn't know I knew?' I was also trying to use poetry as a means of imparting whatever wisdom experience may have taught me. We have an aesthetic today that argues against imparting, insisting that poets show and don't tell, avoiding above all the didactic. Yet people go to poetry in search of the knowledge of the heart, and we have the great work of Whitman and the Psalms to prove that poems may declare and instruct. Underlying this book and its talking is my feeling that poets should find ways to pass their vision on to their fellow humans, lest the prevailing aesthetic take our voices away and reduce our poetry to fragments."

Reviewers were enthusiastic about Talking in the Dark. Minneapolis Star Tribune contributor Thomas R. Smith, who called the collection "one of the past year's most significant poetic achievements," remarked that McNair "has produced a book with appeal for an audience broader than the literary." Carl Little, reviewing Talking in the Dark for the Bangor Daily News, wrote that the volume contains "the well-wrought short lyrics, the vignettes and friendly ruminations that are this poet's forte," and concluded by characterizing the collection as "a memorable volume by one of our finest." Maine Sunday Telegram contributor Jack Barnes commented: "Not since Robert Frost have northern New England and its people been more authentically represented in poetry. ... Like Frost's, McNair's poetry reaches out to the masses but at the same time remains challenging to the professional literati."

In his introduction to The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader, for which he served as editor, McNair explained: "The tradition of journeying into the unknowns of Maine continues in this reader. In poems, short stories, and essays, authors or their characters travel on foot, by car, on skis, in boats or canoes, making their discoveries about the territory and sometimes the self as they undertake or recall their hikes, drives and voyages. ... [J]ourneys of one kind or another take place throughout The Quotable Moose. There is no more characteristic theme in the contemporary literature of Maine than the theme of the journey." Reviews of the volume were positive, including the assessment by Booklist contributor John Mort, who characterized The Quotable Moose as "well-edited." A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the "rich diversity" of the works in the collection, and commented that from this volume readers can gain an authentic sense of life in the state of Maine. McNair commented in his introduction: "However the characters we find in this volume may be carrying on, whether their stories are comic, sorrowful, or uplifting, what most typifies them is that they appear to us in the context of knowable communities or families, and place. Is this why they seem in general so sympathetic, eccentric, and vivid? In any case, they have an authority that distinguishes them from their counterparts in much postmodernist literature. ... [T]he units of The Quotable Moose underscore themes that the Maine map has helped to create. So sections of the reader relate to journeys, community life, and nature visions. But the sections have also been chosen and arranged to lead the reader step-by-step into the realities of Maine." Library Journal reviewer Jo-Anne Mary Benson remarked that the volume's "value" is that each work can be read individually or it can be read in its entirety.

In response to the question of why and how he began his writing career, McNair once told CA: "I think I must have always felt a special power in words that have been carefully chosen for listeners or readers. Books were magical things for me from the beginning. Later on, as a teenager, reading poems by cummings, Williams, Moore, Ferlinghetti, and others, I discovered the ultimate magic: words whose meanings would multiply on rereading, opening the poem, the mind, and the feeling all at the same time. This was a magic I loved so much, I wanted to make it happen myself. It took a while to make it happen. Marrying and starting a family before I obtained my professional degrees, I spent most of my time teaching and studying, with little time to develop my craft. I published my first poem at age twenty-eight, after a brief detour as a short story writer. In many ways this poem, which is called 'Leaving the Country House to the Landlord,' established my direction as a poet, dealing with the themes of place and family trauma that still appear in my work, and striving for a combination of accessibility and complexity I continue to value. I wrote the poem the summer after my family was evicted from a rental house we loved, so the landlord's family, a dubious group, could move in. I've never forgotten the moment when I learned Poetry Northwest was going to publish it. Too broke even to fix the alignment on my car, I drove from my summer job to the local post office on badly scalloped tires to pick up my acceptance, then drove to my new provisional home, the steering wheel shaking in my hands as I wept and shouted 'I've found a form!' Though I now find a certain awkwardness in the poem, I recognize it as the beginning of my writing career, and the liberation from my formless life.

McNair, describing what he hopes to achieve through the books he writes, once told CA: "The ultimate aim of poetry is to connect us to our feeling self, which is the deepest self we have. The feeling self can be dangerous to us, because it insists that we live real lives. So people will do almost anything to kill it—drugs, alcohol, overwork, excessive church-going, there are lots of ways to do the job. What I most want to do as a poet is to remind readers of how important their intuitive, feeling self is. I have other concerns, too, as a writer, some of which I've discovered as I've written. I want to inspire compassion for those living at the periphery of our vision—the poor, the crazy, misfits, the underclass. And when I write about my homeplace of New England, as I often do, I don't want to portray a nostalgic world elsewhere, but the place as I know it, with its dislocated culture, its poverty, its eccentrics, its broken dreams, and its hopefulness. In my regional work, moreover, I always want to find what's universal in the local, so I'm not just writing about one place, but in some way about all places.

Describing his writing process for CA, McNair once commented: "I always want to be careful not to let the left brain know too early what the right brain is doing. So I usually do a lot of 'listing' before I start a poem. My lists include images, lines, feelings about the poem, warnings to myself, and so on. Next day, I'll go back through the list to find out which items seem hot and which seem cold, finding out in that way how the poem should go. The point is to make sure I know everything the poem needs before I freeze it into syntax. So even after I choose from my list, I spend a great deal of time thinking about how I can reveal the idea and action of the poem by its shape as it moves down the page, and how I can make the space around the poem, by my handling of line-length and stanza division, part of the poem's expression. Of course, I'm thinking about these things as I'm making my sentences, too. And I'm working at the same time on the interplay of the sentence and the line, which is the heart of free verse, trying to make the poem unfold as every poem must, but also trying to give the poem a tone of voice, since line-breaks in my usage have to do with vocal tone. At any time in the process, when the syntax seems to be closing out possibilities I sense the poem needs, I might open up another list."

McNair once listed for CA the writers who have influenced his work: "When I was in college and beginning to think of myself as a poet, I memorized sonnets by John Keats, with their unfolding sentences and dramatic turns and closings. Those sonnets had a great influence on my syntax and the shaping of my poems. Dickinson and Frost helped provide me with a New England map, along with other things. I learned from Dickinson, whose poems lodge meaning deep inside the page, the power of compression, and in Frost's blank verse, I discovered the power of the looser line—how it could be tuned to the accents of conversational speech. As a youth writing my first free verse, I read cummings and Ferlinghetti, and they showed me that poetry could be playful. Shortly afterward, Eliot taught me ways of modernism, and how to fracture point of view and narration. From W. C. Williams I learned that you could have a modern awareness of the world without becoming an aesthete or sacrificing accessibility. Theodore Roethke's sensuous music and imagery had a strong effect on me as a young poet, and much later, Walt Whitman showed me the value of the long line in opening the heart. Both he and Robinson Jeffers illustrated in their work that poetry could be used to impart one's understanding of experience, rather than simply to describe it, and this lesson was particularly useful in writing the poems of my book Talking in the Dark. "

McNair once related to CA the following recommendations for younger poets, declaring that they "are a few short pieces of advice my work as a poet has taught me": "In spite of the illusion creative writing workshops give that poetry is a social activity, it is, as always, a solitary one. Be alone as much as you can, and learn to keep your own counsel. In your solitude read poems from past to present, and write them.

"As the poem begins to take shape, there is always a moment when it becomes smarter than you are, and you must be just smart enough to ask it what it wants to do.

"The capacity to revise determines the true writer. Suspect the finished poem. Your evil twin wants your poem to be finished.

"Every day life will whisper into your ear some little or large thing that must be done before turning to your poem. Yet next week when your poem is still unwritten, you will not remember why these things were so important, or even what they were. Write your poem.

"The poet's difficult contract: To have heartbreaking powers, the world must first break your heart. No poet ever said, 'You may enter my heart, but first wipe your feet and agree to behave.'"

More recently, McNair added: "On a walk I took one winter, I passed an old farmhouse that was connected to a shed and barn. Counting the doors on the barn, shed, and house, I discovered that there were eleven in all, any one of which led to the house. Snow had drifted over the step of the front door; typical of the front doors on country houses in northern New England, it was never used. The house was a perfect illustration of the poem, which has no direct entry, but only side-doors of imagery, voice, and music. Indirect entry applies not only to the reader of the poem, but to the poem's maker, who enters a poem in progress through the same side-doors, learning by writing how to find his or her way around.

"As you write your initial drafts of the poem, think of your pen or pencil as a dousing stick with which you wander the page in search of the poem's spring underground. Or think of your early draft as a crude map of the territory you wish to explore. As you reread the draft, try to glimpse in a line or image the true geography of your poem.

"Contrary to the notion of the schoolroom, your slow-witted self is your smart self, because true intelligence is not in quickness. Work slowly as you make your poem so as not to give in to the quick self. Yet quickness is important to making poems, and it results from chance leaps that ignite the intuition. Your slow process of making a poem should invite this quickness.

"The voice of the poem that moves us most says: 'Brother or sister, we have limited time together on this planet. Let me tell you about this thing that has mattered to me.'

"Most advice for developing poets today is given in the writing workshop, yet the majority of poets we remember did not learn how to make poems in a classroom and probably would have found the idea strange. Your first obligation as a poet, now as always, is to be alone with your poem and know as much as you can about it before presenting it to others for their judgments. No good poem was ever written by a committee."

February 1983

From this Issue

p1History of My Heart

p1From Cahoots

p1A Chaplet for Judith Landry

Table of Contents

History of My Heart

From Cahoots

A Chaplet for Judith Landry