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Contemporary Authors Biography

—Used by permission from Volume 175, fall, 2000.

McNair, Wesley C. 1941—

Personal: Born june 19, 1941 in Newport, NH: son of Wilbur Frank and Eileen (an owner and operator of a plant nursery; maiden name, Willard Joly) McNair: married Diane Reed, December 24, 1962: children: David, Joel, Sean, Shanna.

Education: Keene State College. B.A. (English), 1963: Middlebury College, Bread Loaf School of English, M.A., 1968 M. Litt., 1975.

Politics: Democrat.

Addresses: Office: Director of Creative Writing/ Roberts Learning Center/ University of Maine, Main St./ Farmington, ME 04938; and RR #2, Box 790/ Norridgewock, ME 04957.

Career: Writer, Hillsboro-Deering School, Hillsboro, NH, teacher of English for grades 11 and 12, 1963-64; New London Central School, New London, NH, teacher of English for grades 10 and 11, 1964-68 Marietta College, Marietta, OH, National Endowment for the Arts Poet-in-Residence, 1977; Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, senior Fulbright professor of American literature and civilization, 1977-78; Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, visiting associate professor of English in the creative writing program 1984; Colby-Sawyer College New London, began as instructor of English became assistant professor of English then associate professor of English, 1968-87 University of Maine, Farmington, began as associate professor of English, then professor of English, 1987—, director of B.F.A. program in creative writing, Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts, Ireland, Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence, 1987; New Hampshire Commission for the Arts, Literature Panel appointee, 1990, Travelling Arts Program Panel appointee, 1991; Maine Arts Committee, Literature Panel appointee, 1991-92; appointed to the Discovery Awards panel of the New Hampshire Council on the Arts, 1993; appointed member of the Maine Arts Commission Advisory Roster, 1993-98; member of board, Maine Humanities Council "Center for the Book," 1998—; member of steering committee for Maine Reads, a Maine Public Radio program modeled after National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, 1998—; consulting humanist, Baxter Society library reading programs series, sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council, 1998-99. The Dissonant Heart accompanied a collaborative exhibition of the same name which opened at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, October, 1992, and featured the text of McNair's poem, "My Brother Running" and 12 photocollages by Dozier Bell.

Member: Associated Writing Programs.

Awards, Honors: National Endowment for the Humanities, fellow in literature,1971-72: U.S.I.S. American Specialist in American Literature and Civilization, 1979, for establishing and lecturing in American studies programs at universities in Chile; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grant in poetry, 1980; Devins Award for Poetry, University of Missouri Press, 1984, for The Faces of Americans in 1953; Eunice Tietjens Prize, Poetry,1984; Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 1986; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial fellow in poetry, Guggenheim Foundation, 1986; second prize, Yankee poetry competition, 1989; National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry, 1990; three Emmy Awards (with others), New England Association of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1990, and finalist in cultural programming International Film and Television Festival of New York City, 1990 and 1991, all for The Works of Robert Frost; Ohio State Award in the Performing Arts and Humanities (with others), 1991, and First Prize for Best Cultural Affairs Program from the Eastern Educational Network of the Public Broadcasting System, both for "Robert Frost: Versed in Country Things"; Emmy Award (with others), New England Association of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1991, for "The Tufts of Flowers"; Distinguished Faculty Award, University of Maine, 1991; Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio Center, Bellagio, Italy, 1992; Theodore Roethke Prize, Poetry Northwest, 1993; Alumni Achievement Award, Keene State College, 1994: first prize, Yankee poetry competition, 1994; Libra Professorship(endowed chair), University of Maine, 1995; Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for "distinguished contribution to the world of letters," 1997.

Writings:The Faces of Americans in 1853: Poems, University of Missouri Press (Columbia), 1984; The Town of No: Poems, D. R. Godine (Boston MA), 1989, published with My Brother Running, 1997; The Works of Robert Frost (television series consisting of 1-2 short subjects and 2 half-hour specials, including "Robert Frost: Versed in Country Things" and "The Tufts of Flowers"), Public Broadcasting System, 1990-91; Twelve Journeys in Maine (chapbook), includes prints by Marjorie Moore, Romulus (Portland,ME)1992; My Brother Running: Poems, D. R. Godine,1993, published with The Town of No, 1997; (Editor) The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader (anthology), University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1994; The Dissonant Heart (contains the poem "My Brother Running"), photocollages by Dozier Bell, Romulus,1995; Talking in the Dark (poetry), D.R.Godine, 1998; (Contributing editor), Pushcart Prize Anthology: Best of the Small Presses, 1986—; poetry editor, Maine Times, 1998—.

Contributor of poetry and prose to numerous anthologies, including: Northern Lights, Granite Press (Hanover), 1972; Flowering after Frost, edited by Michael McMahon, Brandon Press (Boston), 1975; Discover America, edited by Nils Peterson, John Galvin, and Naomi Clark, San Jose State University, 1976; The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, edited by Alan F. Pater, Monitor (Beverly Hills, CA), 1981, 1984, and 1985; American Classic, edited by Walter Kerr and Mary Swope, Scop Publications, 1986; Pushcart Prize X: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Stanley Plumley and William Stafford (with Bill Henderson), Pushcart Press, 1986; Poetry: The 75th Anniversary 1912-1987, edited by Joseph Parisi, Modern Poetry Association (Chicago), 1987; To Read Literature: Poetry, Fiction, Drama, 3rd edition, edited by Donald Hall, Holt (New York City) 1992; To Read a Poem, edited by Donald Hall, Holt, 1992; The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry, edited by Gerald Constanzo and Jim Daniels, Carnegie Mellon University Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1993; The McGraw Hill Book of Poetry; edited by Robert Diyanni and Kraft Rompf, McGraw-Hill, 1993; The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish-American Poetry, edited by Patricia Monaghan, New Rivers Press (St. Paul, MN), 1993; Speaking of New England, edited by Richard Aldridge, North Country Press, 1993; After Frost: Readings in Twentieth-Century New England Poetry, New England Foundation for the Arts, 1995; Bite to Eat Place, edited by Andrea Adolph, Redwood Coast Press (Oakland), 1995; Wherever Home Begins: 100 Contemporary Poems, edited by Richard W. Jackson, Orchard Books (New York City), 1995; Transformations, edited by Mary Rose MacLachlan Harcourt (Toronto), 1996; Eating between the Lines:A Maine Writers Cookbook, edited by Paul Doiron, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (Brunswick), 1997; Telling the Barnswallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, edited by Emily Grosholtz, University Press of New England (Hanover), 1997; The Devins Award Anthology: Poems, 1965-1994, edited by Gerald Costanzo, University of Missouri Press (Columbia), 1998; Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams, edited by Roderick Townley, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998; The Best American Poetry: 1999, edited by David Lehman and Robert Bly, MacMillan/Collier, in press; Full Circle, The Charlotte Poetry Project (Charlottesville), in press.

Contributor of poetry and prose to numerous periodicals, including: Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlantic Monthly Black Fly Review, Boston Monthly, Boston Review, Continuum Review, Cream City Review, Gettysburg Review, Green House, Green Mountains Review, Hanging Loose, Harvard Magazine, Harvard Review, Hearse, Ironwood, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Maine in Print, Maine Scholar, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, New Criterion, New England Review, New Hampshire College Journal, Vew Virginia Review, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Now, Prairie Schooner, Reaper, River Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Sport Literate, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Victory Park, Witness Willow Springs, and Yankee.

Adaptations: Four Journeys in Maine, a musical interpretation of four poems McNair wrote about Maine, was composed by Philip Carlsen and first presented over Maine Public Radio, 1989; Night Thoughts, a musical interpretation of McNair's poems "Driving to Dark Country" and "When the Trees Caine for Her," was composed by Philip Carlsen and first performed at the University of Maine at Farmington 1996; A Dark Pine's Hand, a musical interpretation of Maine using a line and subtitle from McNair's poems, was composed by Philip Carlsen and first performed by the Portland Symphony. Portland, ME. 1997.

Work in progress: Fire:Poems, publication by D. R. Godine expected in 2001; Mapping the Heart, a collection of essays previously published in periodicals and anthologies, publication by D. R. Godine expected in 2001.

Sidelights: Wesley McNair is a New England poet whose poems often portray the interior lives of his home region. His poetry collections include the 1984 volume The Faces of Americans in 1853, 1989's The Town of No, My Brother Running, which was published in 1993, and 1998's Talking in the Dark. McNair is also the editor of The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader, a 1994 anthology of poetry, short fiction, and essays by forty well-known Maine writers.Although he had previously contributed many poems to periodicals, McNair's first collected volume of poetry was The Faces Of Americans in 1853, a volume which was well received and garnered the author the 1984 Devins Award. McNair shared his views on The Faces of Americans in 1853 with Contemporary Authors, 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 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, Prairie Schooner's Stephen C. Behrendt commented: "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." Critics praised the collection, calling McNair a poet of "wit and skill" and asserting that The Faces of Americans in 1853 showed "considerable promise," 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 judged McNair's ,vorks to be "modest, undemanding poems," Behrendt compared McNair's poetry to that of William Wordsworth, declaring "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 in praising 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 w rites 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 ambitions project, McNair has written several poems which will be remembered long after one sets the book down."

In the collection The Town of No, NcNair brought to life an array of characters from a New England that is "unlimited," in the words of Donald Hall in the Boston Review. McNair 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 asserted. "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," asserted 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, asserting that the poet preserved the language of New Englanders. In another review of the volume for Harvard Book Review, Donald Hall declared: "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, maintaining that . . . "[w]ith 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 opined: "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 1992 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 Green Mountains Review's Linda Davies, 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 lauded the chapbook for the combined beauty of the poetry, illustrations, printing, and binding. and asserted that "it expresses the deeper culture of our state." In Maine Book Reviews, critic Kate Barnes applauded the chapbook, calling 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 contains fifteen short poems of 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. Washington Times contributor Henry Taylor declared that "the regional cast the poems have is much less noticeable than the powerful moments of realization and description that make these poems live." Likewise, a Publisher's Weekly critic assessed the poems as "moving" and "honest," and maintained that McNair "touches the human, and the contact is memorable." Small Press reviewer Laurel Blossom noted that "[t]he quality that most shines out of [My Brother Running] is compassion. In the opening section he gently and skillfully draws portraits of the peculiar, interesting, ordinary people with whom he lives in the remote country of central Maine." 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 imager 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 of Booklist, remarking on the directness and unsentimental nature of McNair's poems, characterized the collection as "[f]ine, thoughtful, emotion rousing work."

My Brother Running's title poem 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 has alsobeen published in a 1995 edition titled The Dissonant Heart, which accompanied a well received exhibit that combined McNair's text with photocollages by Dozier Bell: "My Brother Running" also appeared in the 1997 volume The Town of No and My Brother Running, which was a reissue edition that combined both The Town of No and My Brother Running. 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 reserverations regarding the length and structure of the poem, Wojahn considered it a noteworthy achievement. "Clearly My Brother Runnning 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 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." In an article published in 1997, when McNair was about to be awarded the prestigious Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, in the Maine Times, editor Douglas Rooks declared that "'My Brother Running' stands apart in [McNair's] work as a long poem—819 lines of sustained brilliance and intensity. It is the poetic equivalent of a page-turning novel; once the reader ventures in, she is carried along by a sense of urgency which makes the writing appear seamless, even though it represents years of labor."

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 feelings 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 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 in their praise of 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, asserted 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 applauded Talking in the Dark and maintained: "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 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, told CA: "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've discovered as I've written. I want 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 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 recounted 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 last book, Talking in the Dark.

McNair 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.'"

Biographical, Critical Sources:

Books:McNair, Wesley, editor, The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH). 1994.

Periodicals: American Book Review, January-March, 1991, p. 18 and July-August, 1998, p.20; Bangor Daily News, April 19, 1999, pp. C7, C9; Bloomsbury Review, July August, 1994. p. 23; Booklist, June 1, 1984, p. 1374 and October 15, 1989, p. 421, and December 1, 1993, pp. 671-72 and June 19, 1994; Boston Review, June, 1989. p. 11; Down East, June, 1989, p. 22; Green Mountains Review, fall/winter, 1995-96, pp. 15-27; Harvard Advocate, spring, 1984; Harvard Book Review, summer and fall, 1989, pp. 20-21; Library Journal, June 1, 1994, p. 140; Maine Book Reviews, February, 1993, p. 5; Maine Sunday Telegram May 2, 1993, pp. 1E, 5E and March 14, 1999; New Letters Review of Books, autumn, 1990, p. 13. Poetry, January, 1995, pp. 219 224; Prairie Schooner, winter, 1984, pp. 100 104; Publishers Weekly, November 8, 1993, p. 59 and April 4. 1994, p. 70; River Review, number 4. 1998, pp. 51 67; Star Tribune (Minneapolis), January 17, 1999; Virginia Quarterly Review, fall, 1984, pp. 137 138.

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