McNair, Wesley C.
McNAIR, Wesley C.
Nationality: American. Born: Newport, New Hampshire, 19 June 1941. Education: Keene State College, New Hampshire, 1959–63,B.A. in English 1963; Middlebury College, Vermont, 1964–68, 1970–75, M.A. in English 1968, M.Litt. in American literature 1975; Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1970–71. Family: Married Diane Reed in 1962; three sons and one daughter. Career: Associate professor of English, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, New Hampshire, 1968–87. Since 1987 associate professor, professor of English, and director of creative writing, University of Maine, Farmington. Visiting associate professor, Dartmouth English, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1984; visiting professor, Colby College, Waterville, Maine, 2000–01. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts poet-in-residence at Marietta College, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, 1980, 1990; Dennis award, University of Missouri Press, 1984; Eunice Tietjens prize, Poetry, 1984; Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, 1986; Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence, Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts, Ireland, 1987; Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 1993; Theodore Roethke prize, Poetry Northwest, 1993; first prize for best poem published in Yankee, 1994; Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist fellowship, 1996; Sarah Josepha Hale medal, 1997. Address: RFD 2, Box 790, Norridgewock, Maine, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
The Faces of Americans in 1853. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1983.
The Town of No. Boston, Godine, 1989; reprinted, with My Brother Running, 1997.
12 Journeys in Maine. Portland, Maine, Romulus Editions, 1992.
My Brother Running. Boston, Godine, 1993; reprinted, with The Town of No, 1997.
The Dissonant Heart. Portland, Maine, Romulus Editions, 1995.
The Town of No & My Brother Running. Boston, Godine, 1997.
Talking in the Dark. Boston, Godine, 1998.
Fire. Boston, Godine, 2001.
Other
Mapping the Heart: Reflections on Place and Poetry. Boston, Godine, 2000.
Editor, The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader. Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1994.
*Critical Studies: "Giving Voice to Community" by John Repp, in American Book Review, 12(6), January 1991; in Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 29(4), fall 1993.
Wesley C. McNair comments:
The ultimate 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 have discovered as I have 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 home place of New England, as I often do, I do not 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 is universal in the local, so I am not just writing about one place but in some way about all places.
* * *Wesley C. McNair is a New England poet. As the poet Donald Hall has observed, McNair preserves "the speech and character of a region intimately known. Because he is a true poet, his New England is unlimited." McNair's somewhat autobiographical poems describe the environs of New Hampshire and the people he was familiar with while growing up there. His two best-known works are The Town of No and My Brother Running. In the early 1990s, as the poet Maxine Kumin has noted, McNair did not have the recognition he deserved, but after he published 12 Journeys in Maine in 1992, his work began to become better known and his popularity to spread outside New England.
McNair's poems reflect the lives of ordinary people in rural areas, particularly those who have lived without the basic prerequisites of a comfortable life. McNair's descriptions of their lives are realistic and truly evocative. The poet's own childhood was lived in poverty. His father abandoned the family when the boy was very young, and the family experienced a great deal of financial hardship. McNair explained to Jack Barnes of Maine Books Online, "One of my earliest memories is my mother begging coal from the town manager."
McNair's poems depicting rural life tell seemingly simple stories while revealing a situation that is both dismal and complicated. Thus, in the poem "Mina Bell's Cows" a widow whose cows have died experiences more than merely a loss:
O where are Mina Bell's cows who gave no milk
and grazed on her dead husband's farm?
Each day she walked with them into the field,
loving their swayback dreaminess more
than the quickness of any dog or chicken...
O when the lightning struck Daisy and Bets,
her son dug such great hole in the yard
she could not bear to watch him...
"The Last Time Shorty Towers Fetched the Cows" concerns a smallish man who, inebriated, walked off the edge of a roof he was working on when it was time to call in the cows. In "The Bird Man" McNair uses bird metaphors to describe the meeting between a hired hand and an old and sick woman:
...she takes her curls away so I can see her small, shaved
head: where they opened the skull's bone to stop her
trembling. Here, she says, and Here, guiding my hand
so earnestly, so eager to help me find the pitiable, gray
skin that suddenly I am holding the poor, cracked egg
of her head in my arms and singing a song I do not
know...
McNair's largely autobiographical volume My Brother Running is replete with powerful metaphors. The poet uses his brother, a compulsive jogger who dropped dead of a heart attack while running, as a symbol of the ominous trend constantly to be in forward motion, to work harder and faster, no matter what the result or the cost. It is like a contemporary New England Modern Times.
In an essay written for Ploughshares, McNair discusses poets, poetry, and teaching poetry. He asserts that poetry is a difficult and subversive art. In comparing poetry to other literary forms, McNair states that, while an essay seeks to tell, a poem, as Robert Frost remarked, seeks to "tell how it can." The essay is a statement; the poem is a riddle. McNair describes the novelist as a carpenter, while the poet is a jeweler. In describing the process of writing poetry, McNair notes, "The process of poems is braille-like, allowing the reader entry by touch, so that what forms in the mind and heart forms first in the hand. In writing a poem, we must find the right thing—familiar and yet mysterious to the touch—to place in the reader's hand."
McNair remembers that his fifth and sixth grade teachers described him as "unconscious" while his mother called him "stub-born." He states, "Yet it was only by being both of these things that I became a poet."
—Christine Miner Minderovic