Wesley McNair (born 1941) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored eleven volumes of poetry, most recently, Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems (Godine, 2022) and Dwellers in the House of the Lord (Godine, 2019). He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.
A New Hampshire native who has lived for many years in Mercer, Maine, McNair received his undergraduate degree from Keene State College and has earned two degrees from Middlebury College, an MA in English, and an M.Litt. in American literature. He has also studied American literature, art, and history at Dartmouth College, sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. As of 2018, McNair is professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.[1]
Work
According to United States Artists, Wesley McNair's poetry often deals with "the struggles of the economic misfits of his native New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details."[2] In his memoir The Words I Chose, McNair refers to the region of his poetry as "a place of farmers under threat, ethnic shop workers, traders, and misfits at the margins" and his exploration of "their American dreams, failures, self-doubts, and restlessness."[3] He adds to these themes, love and its absence, loss and disability, and the precarious bonds of family and community.
At the center of McNair's poems and his memoir is his family and extended family, whose conflicts recur throughout his several collections, forming a narrative of their own. His literary family, underprivileged and post-industrial, is at odds with those of earlier New England poets. He explains in his essay "Placing Myself" that whereas "a poet like Robert Lowell features a New England family of pedigree connected to the history of high culture...my own poetry family is lower class, consisting of mongrels whose history is largely unknown." He continues: "Where Donald Hall skips a generation to write about his grandfather and the agrarian tradition he represents, I write about a broken family with no real patriarch and no clear tradition."[4]
The struggles of his family poems and others often link with national themes, as in his long narrative poem "My Brother Running," in which he links his younger brother's fatal heart attack, following months of desperate running, with the tragic explosion of NASA's Challenger shuttle. In his recent collection, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems (Godine, 2014), he moves from New England to the Ozarks of southern Missouri, where his mother grew up, though he does not leave behind his earlier concerns about family, community, and America. The core characters of the book, derived from his mother and her siblings, are part of a forgotten American generation who grew up in the poverty and hardship of the Dust Bowl period.
“As I continued with the book, I felt I was in the belly of the American beast, because my materials allowed me to explore American themes I’d been denied as a poet of New England,” McNair says in a 2023 interview published in Rustica. “Maine, after all, is located at the edge of the American map. If you hate your president, you can tell yourself you might move to Canada or Europe. But my Ozark relatives were in the heartland of the country simply making America happen. And there I was alongside, watching them do it.”[5]
In Dwellers in the House of the Lord (Godine, 2020), he writes about rural Virginia, where his sister Aimee struggles with a failing marriage to Mike, the owner of an off-the-grid gun shop. The book-length narrative poem explores his family's immigrant origins and links Aimee's story with the ugly politics of the Trump era.
Late Wonders: New & SelectedPoems—McNair's eleventh poetry collection—includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” The nearly 300-page collection was critically acclaimed. “Throughout the trilogy is a growing apprehension that something has gone deeply wrong with the nation’s sense of itself over the past 40 years,” McNair remarks in his Rustica interview. [6] The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote: “At 81, Wesley McNair is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”[7] Writing in The National Review, Nick Ripatrazone concluded: “McNair’s poems are just sharp enough to open our eyes anew—and just smooth enough for us to think such wisdom arrived by grace alone. His work is melodic without being singsong; it is both sanguine and realistic.”[8]Foreword Reviews wrote: “Not all poets are storytellers, not even close, but all of them wish they were, wish they had a better understanding of how words and images bind spells.”[9]
McNair's eleven volumes of poetry, inspired by region, American popular culture, and the broad human experience, include a wide range of meditations, lyrics and narratives. As critics and interviewers have remarked, his poems are attuned to the cadences and suggestions of American speech.
Honors and awards
McNair has received two Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his other honors are the Theodore Roethke Prize, The Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, the Devins Award for Poetry, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal[10] for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters." McNair has served five times on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
From 2011 to 2016 McNair served as the Poet Laureate of Maine,[11][12] sponsoring five statewide poetry initiatives. According to Meg Haskell in the Bangor Daily News on September 30, 2017, his goal was "to demystify poetry and make it more accessible to all Maine people." Quoting McNair, Haskell continues: "The best poems are after insights into the shared human life. They tell us what life is about. What's in it," and "What matters in it." McNair adds that poetry's insights come from intuition, the "truest part of you. The smartest part."[13]
A selection of twenty- of his poems are featured on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
Critical praise
In an extensive review of McNair's new and selected poems, Lovers of the Lost, in The Harvard Review Kevin T. O'Connor said the book demonstrated "a defining imagination," comparing his poems favorably to the poetry of Robert Lowell, James Wright, Robert Frost, and Seamus Heaney. Robin Becker, writing the judge's citation for McNair's 2015 collection, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, which won the PEN New England Award for poetry, said: "Wesley McNair harnesses the timeless power of the epic poem to tell the necessary stories of our human tribe...The colloquial music in these poems will move readers to laughter and tears."
Writing on McNair's collection The Ghosts of You and Me for the literary journal Ploughshares in the winter of 2009–2007, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine called McNair "one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry." In the same journal in the fall of 2002, Maxine Kumin, the United States Poet Laureate from 1981 to 1982, called McNair "a master craftsman, with a remarkable ear." In a 1989 review that appeared in the Harvard Review, Donald Hall, who served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2007, remarked, "Because he is a true poet, his New England is unlimited. Whole lives fill small lines, real to this poet, therefore to us." In the summer of 2002, the Ruminator Review wrote of McNair's book Fire that the poet has created "one of the most individual and original bodies of work by a poet of his generation."
Collected papers
McNair's extensive papers were purchased by Colby College in 2006. Taking up approximately 100 linear feet in the college library's Special Collections, the Wesley McNair Papers include:
Scrapbooks, photographs, family letters, clippings and ephemera
Early writings (elementary through high school)
Notebooks with graduate school writings, teaching notes and poem drafts
Manuscript drafts, first appearances and audio/visual recordings
Extensive correspondence (Maine Times colleagues, Donald Hall, literary peers)
A video of McNair giving a slide presentation and talk about his papers, entitled My Life as a Poet.
In 2010, Colby College's Special Collections Librarian Patricia Burdick launched an innovative new Web site that utilizes McNair's poetry to increase understanding of and appreciation for the making of poetry. The interactive site includes audio recordings and manuscript samples to show the development of selected poems. The site is accompanied by teaching and learning tools. In 2014, McNair's site at Colby launched Letters Between Poets, featuring his correspondence with a mentor, Donald Hall, during his early struggles as a poet. The online correspondence may be accessed by chapters, themes, poems in progress, and a keyword search.
A Place Called Maine: 24 Authors on the Maine Experience (Down East Books, 2008)
Contemporary Maine Fiction (Down East Books, 2005)
The Maine Poets: A Verse Anthology (Down East Books, 2003)
The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader (University Press of New England, 1994)
Related Research Articles
Marvin Hartley Bell was an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Leo Connellan was an American poet of the Beat Generation born in Portland, Maine, who served as Connecticut's Poet Laureate from 1996 until his death in 2001.
Gillian Conoley is an American poet. Conoley serves as a professor and poet-in-residence at Sonoma State University.
Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.
Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.
Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, novelist, academic, editor, and essayist. He is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Elizabeth "Betsy" Sholl is an American poet who was poet laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011 and has authored nine collections of poetry. Sholl has received several poetry awards, including the 1991 AWP Award, and the 2015 Maine Literary Award, as well as receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.
Tim Seibles is an American poet, professor and the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems. His honors include an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In 2012 he was nominated for a National Book Award, for Fast Animal.
Arthur Edwin Smith was an American poet whose work appeared in The New Yorker, "The Georgia Review," "Northwest Review," "Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts," "Crazyhorse," "Southern Poetry Review," Hunger Mountain, and The Nation. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee and lived in Knoxville, Tennessee with his three Keeshonden. He died on November 9, 2018, at the age of 70.
James Reiss was an American poet and novelist.
David Clewell was an American poet and creative writing instructor at Webster University. From 2010–2012, he served as the Poet Laureate of Missouri.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She was born in Cambridge, Ohio and received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone (2013) for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Those Absences Now Closest, was published in October, 2024.
Jack Elliott Myers, was an American poet and educator. He was Texas Poet Laureate in 2003, and served on the faculty of Southern Methodist University in Dallas for more than 30 years. He was director of creative writing at SMU from 2001 through 2009. Myers co-founded The Writer's Garret, a nonprofit literary center in Dallas, with his wife, Thea Temple. He published numerous books of and about poetry, and served as a mentor for aspiring writers at SMU and as part of the writers' community and mentoring project of The Writer's Garret.
Jay Meek was an American poet, and director of the Creative Writing program at the University of North Dakota. He was the poetry editor of the North Dakota Quarterly for many years.
Richard Katrovas is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program for Writers and the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, two collections of stories and three memoirs.
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist and academic. She is a professor of creative writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her areas of focus include contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.
The Poet Laureate of Maine is the poet laureate for the U.S. state of Maine. The Maine State Poet Laureate is appointed by the governor for a 5 year term, and the program is managed by the Maine Arts Commission. The program was established in 1995 via Maine Public Law 1995, Chapter 264 and codified via Maine Revised Statutes, Title 27, Chapter 15, Subchapter 2.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
