McNAMARA, Robert (James) 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born March 28, 1950, in New York, NY; son of James and Doris (a homemaker; maiden name, Maier) McNamara; married Judith Lightfoot (a writer), September 21, 1993; children: Caitlin C. Education: Amherst College, B.A., 1971; Colorado State University, M.A., 1975; University of Washington, Ph.D. (English), 1985.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Box 354330, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-4330. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Washington, Seattle, senior lecturer, 1988.

MEMBER:

Academy of American Poetry.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Endowment for the Arts creative-writing fellowship, 1987; Fulbright fellowship, 1993.

WRITINGS:

Second Messengers, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1990.

(Translator from the Bengali) Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Birajmohan and Other Poems, Cambridge India (India), 1998.

Poetry published in periodicals, including Agni Review, Antioch Review, Field, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Notre Dame Review, Northwest Review, Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and Seattle Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert McNamara told CA: "When I ask myself why I write poetry, the answer that comes to me is, 'Because it's what I do.' It's a way of getting on in the world—not of getting ahead, but getting from one day to the next by making things. Some of what I make is very satisfying, and some of it is just part of the job. Being a writer means I write.

"Over my thirty years of writing poetry, I've acquired the habit, anyway. For several hours a day I want to be in the kind of space—emotional, intellectual, physical—from which I can produce poems, or writing that will grow into poems. Spending the hours in that space is sometimes more important than the actual pages I get out of them. The time has a certain meditative quality, and I feel deprived if I have to do without it.

"Over time I've gotten used to working from small project to small project and not insisting on having a sense of how they may add up. They get inspired by different things. A couple of years ago I did a lot of reading in American history and philosophy and ended up writing many poems on American themes the following year. Then I stopped that and did something else. Recently I was thinking about sacred places and wrote four or five poems that started from places that feel sacred to me in some way. A series of poems I call 'Inlets' came from a conscious decision to write a poem every day while staying on a friend's boat. Somewhere behind it all there's a kind of coherence. I've gotten used to not being hugely surprised when I attempt to put together a book manuscript and find a kind of unity. Maybe some coherence comes from the voice I try to create. I try to speak with a voice I would want to listen to. This means resisting the temptation to create a lyrically seductive voice or to let sound run away with sense into mere oratory.

"Lately what's helped in this discipline is a renewed attraction to form. Free verse (of which I've written a lot) can be too easy, and poems stop being interesting to me when they lack inner resistance. So I seek out material and language that will push back. I try to choose something to write about that will be difficult, and say something through the form that can't be said in any other way."