| My Life as a Poet by Wesley McNair |  |
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MY LIFE AS A POET: A MULTIMEDIA MEMOIR Presented by Wesley McNair at the celebration of the acquisition of his personal papers.
Robinson Room, Colby College Special Collections 12 April 2006
Note: Within each section, the numbers in parentheses identify accompanying images in the original PowerPoint presentation. Click on the number to see the image and use the Back button to return to the text.
Introduction
Well, I want to thank Pat Burdick, Head of Special Collections at Colby, for her tireless efforts in making this acquisition possible, and thank you Doug and Peter for your comments today, which have been so moving to me. And of course I want to thank you all for coming. It’s a pleasure for me to look out upon so many old friends and new faces too, so thank you for the pleasure. You know, when Pat asked me to speak about my collection today, I was reluctant, to tell you the truth, because I thought it would be a little presumptuous of me to do that. But then I thought, what if I went through this disparate stuff – Pat calls it “rich and eclectic,” I call it disparate – what if I went through this disparate collection and tried to find the pattern of my life as a poet in it, past to present, for myself as well as for you? So that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I will now undertake to do, with slides from the collection, if Powerpoint does not fail me, showing you what’s in my archive along the way.
Sections CHILDHOOD
(2) I begin at the beginning – back in the 1940s, with some photographs from this album that was put together over the course of my childhood and youth by my mother. She made three of these albums, by the way, this one for me, and the other two – same design on the cover, in different colors – for my two brothers. The album’s cover, as you see, features Uncle Sam at the helm of the ship of state during World War II, with cannons there in the lower right, a war plane at the upper left, and at the upper right, an outraged eagle. Well, imagine for a minute that this ship of state represents not only a troubled nation, but a troubled family, and that Uncle Sam is a woman, my mother, who as it happened, had her own troubles at the helm of my family in the 1940s. (3) Here she is, in a snapshot that was taken with a pre-digital camera, so forgive the imperfect resolution. The three kids are my two brothers and me, and we’re having a picnic in the backyard of our apartment building in a project called “Southview,” located in Springfield, Vermont, where we lived then. Significantly, my father isn’t pictured. He was a union organizer and was absent from the family for long periods in the 1940s, eventually leaving my mother for another woman. There was no child support, and no way for her to make money except through seamstress work. So my father’s long absences and his eventual disappearance were a disaster for our family, and when he was gone, my mother was often angry at us and used her switch. (4) But looking at snapshots like this one of my two brothers and me, you’d never know there was any disharmony, because again and again, the photographs she took present us dressed alike, in clothes she sewed for us, as characters in the unfolding narrative of a happy family. I’m the kid in the middle, by the way, the second born, with more of Southview in the background, as you see, together with its period cars. (5) In this somewhat fuzzy snapshot we’re wearing the Sunday suits my mother sewed, and she’s arranged us in her typical one-two-three order up the stone steps of our backyard. It’s not the greatest photograph, as I say, but I thought you might enjoy my little brother’s forced smile, which is turning into a grimace because of the cold. (6) This picture shows the three of us a year later, on Christmas Eve, dressed in bathrobes and holding presents with our usual happy smiles. The actual event that inspired the photograph you see now was not happy at all, but heartbreaking, because this was the Christmas Eve that my father promised, after a very long absence, to join the family with gifts -- and never showed up. The bathrobes we’re wearing were Christmas gifts my mother gave us early, just for the occasion, and when she saw my father wasn’t coming after all, she snapped this photo, as if to transform the heartbreak into continuity and contentment. (7) Here we are again on that Christmas Eve, posing for my mother, with our very few presents. Family photo albums are common, of course, but my mother’s three albums have a special meaning, I think because, creating them in her limited spare time as a single and working mother, she was able to deny the emotional wreckage my father left behind with an alternative story of family togetherness. (8) But as I look closely at this still later photograph -- taken by a neighbor and lacking my mother’s framing mythology – I find clues to the underside of that story. In this snapshot, all the neighborhood children wear jackets to protect them from the cold, except for my brother John and me in the back row, who wear only t-shirts, my own t-shirt torn at the collar. In fact, I not only lived in a broken family, but an underclass one -- our poverty growing desperate after my father left in the 1940s -- and that experience gave me my first awareness as a poet of life outside of the social mainstream. (9) My mother was deeply sympathetic toward blacks, and when I was in second grade or thereabouts, she read to me the episodic stories of a black boy named Little Brown Koko. One reason I identified with Koko, no doubt, was that he lived with his mother, who was called “Mama,” the name I used for my mother, and the father of the family in the stories was absent and never mentioned. But I also liked the Koko stories because of the food. (10) The meals were always sumptuous and fully described, including food we seldom saw in our nearly bare cupboards. I’ll read this excerpt for illustration: “Then such eating you never saw before in all your born days. The long tables were loaded with more peach cobblers and chocolate pies and angel-food cakes and platters of fried chicken and pans of hot rolls and dishes of fresh-churned butter and jars of strawberry preserves than you could shake a stick at.” (11) Speaking of food, here’s Little Brown Koko from another episode, finishing off his mother’s batter for pralines. And there’s his mother’s name, Mama, you see, scattered through the text at the right. (12) Of course, African Americans were stereotyped in the Little Brown Koko episodes, yet I see looking back that despite the stereotyping, the stories increased my sympathy for people who lived outside of social privilege. Each month, as they were published in a magazine my mother bought at the local A&P market, I cut them out, and together they became my first book, a special statement about their importance to me. (13) This is that book, part of my collection.... (14) When my family was flush, in the days before my father left, my mother even bought black dolls for us, as this photo from my album shows. I’m in the middle again, the kid with the black doll. In my own mind there’s a straight line that leads from the socially rejected New Englanders who sometimes appear in my poems back to early materials like these. (15) My mother not only took photographs of me as I was growing up; she kept in this scrapbook a number of things from my childhood, (16) including report cards. Here’s one from first grade. What I remember most from first grade is that I had an old teacher we called Miss Dorcas (as you see from the card, her name was Dorcas Judkins), who for punishment once dragged me down the hall by the hair. So imagine my surprise in reviewing these materials (17) to find this description of myself from the final quarter, in perfectly controlled and sedate handwriting: “Wesley completes this year’s work with an excellent record. Has read 19 books.” (18) Here’s another report card, from fourth grade... (19) and another quarterly report, once again in gigantic mode: “Wesley day-dreams!” – exclamation point. My grade-school teachers were upset with me as a daydreamer, and my mother, in exasperation, often called me “stubborn.” Yet I want to say, in my defense, it’s by these very two characteristics – my daydreaming and my stubbornness – that I became, in the end, a poet. (20) As a matter of fact, I was known as the class poet of my fourth grade. Here’s the official fourth-grade portrait. I’m kneeling in the front row at the left – (21) the third one in, wearing a checked shirt and that day-dreamy expression. (22) At Way School Elementary, in grade six, I took on my first editing job, for the record – and so this rather dim slide of the cover of the so-called Way School Journal, a magazine of sorts I started up to publicize life at the school. A year before, my mother had married my stepfather, and the family moved to Claremont, New Hampshire, the home of Way School Elementary. As for the image of this freckle-faced boy I drew on the cover of the Way School Journal, if you can make him out, he was derived from my favorite book at the time, Toby Tyler Joins the Circus. (23) Of course the journal had to include a poem, this one, as you see, a comic version of Way School, with harried teachers and wayward students. There’s nothing here that’s going to make John Keats roll over, so if you don’t mind, I won’t read it aloud, but just – move on. (24) And anyway – these four books from the period, the very first ones I ever wrote, seem a little more interesting, at least to me looking back... I rediscovered them in my attic recently, more than fifty years old, and called “Tot Books,” because they told stories intended for young children. (25) Three of them comprised “The Sky Series,” as you see, and each one features a character who longs for a better life and journeys through an alternative world to find it. I completed these books at the age of twelve, after living for several years in that broken home I described, with too much of the switch, and then getting a stepfather who had his own dangerous temper. So it’s no accident – I realize this after rereading them – that the better life my characters long for always involves a new and more sympathetic home. (26) In the Tot Book called The Adventures of a Balloon, for instance, a helium balloon that is accidentally set adrift finds its way back to the child who lost it, (27) and through the child, to the home of a loving mother and father. (28) The character who longs for a perfect home in The Adventures of a Wrist Watch is a watch, and it actually has my own name of Wesley, in case there is any doubt of who this book is really about. Wesley is owned by an angry boy named Jimmy (29), who is upset that Wesley is only a toy watch and can’t tell time, so he taunts him, using words my stepfather sometimes used for me. (30) In the book, though, if not quite in my life, things work out all right for Wesley, as the text of this last page explains. It begins with the arch-nemesis Jimmy throwing Wesley into a trash can: “‘I’m throwing you out of the window!’ and out Wesley went. He landed in a trash pail.” But then a boy happens by to search the trash can: “‘Why it’s a watch!’ exclaimed the boy. ‘A watch!’ and he took it home. His father liked it, his mother liked it, and he loved it, so Wesley had a good home and he lived happily ever after.” (31) ...Looking again into The Adventures of a Wrist Watch and the other books of the Sky Series all these years later, I have to say I’m surprised to see that even back then, I was using imaginative writing to deal with my life experience – that unbeknownst to me, my curse had already begun. [top] YOUTH
(32) My parents may have had their failures. But then I’ve had my own failures as a parent, and one of their great successes – or so I feel looking back – was to introduce me in my youth to the New England and America of my poetry. The New England I mean was the Connecticut River Valley in West Claremont, New Hampshire, where this photograph was taken of my brothers and me by my mother in the 1950s. As you see, we’re still the central figures of a happy family with no apparent sorrows. But now we’re a little older, and we’re showing the vegetables we’ve raised on my stepfather’s land along the Connecticut, and taken to town for sale. (33) And here we hold up prize-winning vegetables at the county fair.... (34) In this new life of mine I learned about feeding chickens and guinea hens.... (35) and gathering hay for a flock of goats....(36) and I discovered the range of country people in the Connecticut River Valley who also raised goats.... (37) My brother John and I appear in the background of this photograph, if you can make us out, behind the main group at the right in dark shirts – me with my head down.... (38) Continuing with black and white for a minute, this is a snapshot from my mother’s album of the house all five of us and my stepsister lived in from the time I was in seventh grade until I was a senior in high school. I call it a house – actually, it was a garage built by my stepfather for an attached house he planned to erect later on. (39) And just behind it – a little blurry in this detail – is the cab of an old truck, the first of a series of backyard vehicles my stepfather bought cheap and tried to fix for farm work with makeshift parts. My stepfather was a child of the Depression who grew up on the other side of the tracks, (40) and everything he made or tinkered with, from that garage to his backyard vehicles, had the feeling of a jerry-built project improvised out of nothing. (41) That includes our ranch-style house itself, which he built in bursts of activity while working in a machine shop over a period of five years, and which was unfinished even after we moved into it. Here he is behind the garage pouring his first cement for that house, my brothers and I behind him.... (42) But through him and through the marginalized farmers of the area I worked for as a teenager, I learned about the hardscrabble, make-do life of rural New England right on the ground, after industrialization and cultural change had come to the region, breaking up the big farms into small parcels of land like my stepfather’s. (43) I also learned about what is now called ethnicity, since my stepfather belonged to a large family of French Canadians – shown here in this low-resolution snapshot – and his father, that white-haired man in black pants at the center of the photo with his wife, was drawn from Canada to Claremont for work in the factories there. My mother, at the left of center in the red shorts, and my brothers and I, in red T-shirts, are the new additions to this French-Canadian family. I’m the kid at the far right, standing slightly apart from the group once again, apparently trying to make up my mind about it. There’s no question that the on-the-ground New England, so to speak, of this photograph and the others I’ve shown you have little to do with the loftier region of poets like Donald Hall or Maxine Kumin or Richard Wilbur, but nonetheless, it became, as I say, the New England and the America of my poetry. (44) While I’m on the subject of my poetry, my archive includes my first poems in free verse. I was seventeen when I wrote them, and they certainly have their limitations, as you’ll see, but here they are, in their stack of mismatched pages, the handwritten originals for a book manuscript typed up for me during my senior year in high school, and I want to linger a bit longer with these than I did with the photos because I think they show what was going on in my head when I made my start in poetry – also what poets I was reading then.(45) This is one example from the group, with instructions for typing at the top – a little faded, so I hope it doesn’t make you squint too much. If this poem recalls the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti with its incantation and its lack of punctuation, that’s because the year was 1959, and I had just read Ferlinghetti’s brand new book, A Coney Island of the Mind. Time you peaceful quiet lull of the virgin countryside that we try to pierce stomp kill with concrete and car horns
Time you careful beautiful building schizophrenic [whoops – misspelled] who is ruthlessly raping wrecking ripping down.
Time you are the murderer at night on tiptoe -- i hear and lie still and hope you will not notice....
and so on. So Ferlinghetti has influenced this early poem, but in its anxiety about the urbanization of the countryside, I find myself very much in evidence as well, the 17-year-old kid who saw the pastures of old farms in the Connecticut River Valley under threat, and worried about this. (46) Here’s another verse about the forces of urbanization that the poems of the Beats and the prose of John Dos Passos helped me to express, so this poem does away once more with punctuation and uses run-on lines to convey a mindless sort of action in the city. Sun beating concrete and steel with hot fierce fists sun stinging many moving motor buses cars trucks squawking horns bawling quarrelling horns red
light-yellow light-red light-yellow light. hurly- burly voices jumbly mumbly voices loud shouting voices...
...and on to a multiplicity of faces, and then to more traffic lights.... (47) I was reading E. E. Cummings at 17, too, so this excerpt, in a very different mood, describes a northern New England snowfall in the Cummings topography that I’m sure you’ll recognize.
white earth lay dreaming of soft somethings asking something (but it was impossible to know what)
perhaps asking the trees
too
dreaming of soft somethings looking in the window of an old brook nobody home
(47a) The erotic poetry of E. E. Cummings provided the perfect conduit for my teenage libido in passages like this one about a shared sexual encounter:
How can we be this (turned inside out) fiercely a soft somehow bubble
(48) Another change of tone. I was a child of World War II and the Korean War, so casualties in the battlefield were very much on my mind, as you see in the opening of this somewhat melodramatic poem about a war-damaged beggar.
Man that nobody dares to look at Sitting on the curb, ashamed, With one leg resting on the hard, cold cement, The other resting on a battlefield somewhere, rotting....
(49) But if you check this note at the bottom of the page, addressed to an English teacher I first showed this poem to, you can see that there was one more literary influence, namely Bertolt Brecht, in his play Threepenny Opera. Which is to say, I was doing in these poems what young writers do – that is, trying out a variety of writing styles, not yet ready to assimilate them into a style of my own. (50) And trying out people as subjects, too -- the farm woman in this excerpt, for instance, who has, to quote the first long line, a “time-welted face bandaged by a dirty handkerchief....” (51) Or the rejected black man in this next poem, which explores still another style -- that is a spoken, vernacular language, maybe derived from Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, two favorite poets then – and now, actually.
There’s a guy that sells sweet cider in there, a nice old guy – he used to play his guitar when it was summer...
–and skipping a couple of lines:
he told us stories and winked and laughed teeth across his wrinkly black face when we wanted to hear another one.
–down to the last two lines set apart:
I used to like him when I was little, but then Paw told me to stay away from that place.
I must have been very proud of that concluding twist when I was seventeen. By the way, the sympathy toward that black man has nothing to do with the Civil Rights movement, since this was the 1950s, several years earlier than the advent of Martin Luther King. So – and this is a discovery I made rereading the poem for this presentation -- it probably dates back to my childhood with those black dolls I mentioned, and Little Brown Koko. (52) OK, just one more from the manuscript, in one more poetic style. It’s a poem about darkness coming on and departing the next day. I’ll read the whole thing for a change:
Tall clumsy dark, stumbling over the buildings and falling into the road and getting up, brushing off his big black coat. Arguing with the street lamps he cursing in hard syllables of black and shouting night
He walking along the street and forgetting evening in the alleys....... And remembering it, coming back for it in the morning
I distinctly remember thinking about nightfall in the nearby town of Claremont, New Hampshire, when I wrote this poem, but there’s surely a touch of T.S. Eliot in it, too – I’m thinking of that passage you might recall from the opening of Eliot’s well-known poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a particular favorite of mine then, about the yellow fog that comes at evening and slides along the streets and alleyways. ` But you might be wondering at this point, how did a seventeen-year-old kid in the sticks of West Claremont, New Hampshire, manage to be so well-read in the modernist literature (53) being written by T.S. Eliot and the rest? The answer to that question is that I met a literature student from Columbia University named John Huot when I was working at a summer job at Lost River Gorge, a tourist location in the White Mountains, and after John got back to Columbia, he sent to my mailbox in the rural boondocks a wonderful box of books – I think of it as my vocation in a box – containing all the authors I’ve mentioned and more, and giving me a sense of the modernist tradition that I might otherwise have taken years to acquire. And to top it off, he included a copy of the Columbia literary magazine with one of his poems in it, giving me the idea that I might one day be able to publish my own poems, too. So wherever you may be today, John Huot, thank you, for this little Cinderella episode in my formative life as a writer. [top] ATTEMPTS TO BE A POET
But I want to leave T.S. Eliot on the screen for a little longer because in the end, he turned out to be my great roadblock in my early attempts to be a poet. (54) As you know, he wrote a poetry of surface difficulty that borrowed from Classical mythology and literary history, and when I got to college, and then went on for my master’s degree, I discovered that he and his New Critic followers dominated the literary scene – all my professors talked about was these poets, and this was very discouraging to me, because I couldn’t find my avenue as a poet through T.S. Eliot. I didn’t really know what kind of poetry I wanted to write. All I knew was that I didn’t want to write like Eliot, and I didn’t want to go on imitating the other poets I’d been reading, either. (55) What I decided to do in the end was to quit poetry entirely and become a short story writer. That’s why there are so many short story manuscripts in my archive, all written in the period right after college. These are a few of them.... (56) Believe it or not, I also wanted to become a cartoonist. Some of my single-panel cartoons had no captions, like this one. I’ll give you a minute with it... (It will help if you’ve ever played Monopoly.) (57) And now I’ll go to a short series of cartoons with captions, which are a little hard to read in the original versions, but then the captions are more than four decades old. So I’ll read them for you. The politician at the lectern is saying to the crowd, “What is needed is a candidate who is free of special interest politics and party manipulation,” and then you notice there is a very large hand coming up from behind the lectern, into the speaker’s jacket. I see now I should have drawn the head of George W. Bush on this guy. (58) Some cartoons were about art, a natural theme, I suppose, for a person who wanted to be an artist, and so this drawing of two women examining a canvas that has nothing at all on it, with the caption, “He seems to have a way of letting you know what he means without really telling you.” (59) Or this cartoon of an artist at a cocktail party. “Tell me, Mr. Joffscovitz, to what do we owe so unique a vision of man as we find on your canvases?” (60) Here’s a different subject, from a series I did about cave men and cave women. “Maybe you should ask yourself whether it is making you grow as a person.” There has to be some autobiography in this cartoon, because when I drew it I was a twenty-two year old man between jobs with a family of two step-children, and one child on the way. So there’s my wife Diane in the cave with the newborn. (61) And here I am, about to meet the world with my spear. (62) Another cartoon from the period shows Superman at a bar: “Truth, justice and the American way seemed so right for awhile, and then I began to ask myself was I really happy.” Probably this cartoon, too, came out of the conflict I was starting to feel between the great dreams I had for myself, and my life in the real world. To put it another way, Superman’s secret identity in this cartoon was – me! (63) Like my short stories, my cartoons never got published in the major magazines I sent them to, as these rejection slips from the period show, some for my stories, some for the cartoons. But one time I did get a personal response for a submission of cartoons to The New Yorker. (64) There it is, in ball point ink, written by a human hand, “Sorry.” But I see now that I had some success even without publication (65) because it turned out that in these stories of mine, I was teaching myself what I needed to know for the poems I would eventually write. The stories, similar to my later poems, were lyrical or meditative narratives about the people I found around me, exploring their New England, and American, dimensions. (66) And in my cartoons, I think I was trying out something like the lyrical narratives of my later verse, too. Going back to this example, creating a cartoon was a matter of bringing characters together, and finding the exact words and tone of language in a brief caption that would – poof! -- bring their story to life. Besides, the cartoon gave me a way to explore two things that became important to my poems, namely, humor and the popular culture. Then a traumatic event happened to me and my family, and as a result of that event, I wrote a poem that made me put aside cartoons and short stories and return to poetry once and for all.(67) This is the poem I mean, called “Leaving the Country House to the Landlord, Five Years Later.” I don’t intend to examine it in detail, so no need to squint at the words here. I’ll just say the event that inspired the poem – the traumatic event – was being forced out of a beloved rental house by a thoughtless landlord who wanted to move into it, and gave us a notice of something like a month. Worse still, Diane was pregnant with our fourth child at the time, and neither she nor I had a clue about where we’d go next. “Leaving the Country House to the Landlord” appeared (68) in Poetry Northwest – this copy from my collection -- and it was the first poem I ever published. And as I’m trying to relate the story of a poet’s life here, let me hold the slides for a minute and tell you what it was like to publish my first poem. This is a short passage from my prose book Mapping the Heart: “People who lived through the assassination of President Kennedy remember where they were when they got the news. I recall exactly where I was when I learned that my first poem had been accepted for publication. [I was] standing outside the post office [in August, 1968, outside my in-law’s camp in Enfield, New Hampshire, the only place my family and I could find to live that summer, my life in tatters]. Too broke even to have my car aligned, I’d driven for weeks to a summer job on badly scalloped front tires. In short, things couldn’t have been worse – until I opened my letter of acceptance from Poetry Northwest. The steering wheel shaking in my hands, I drove all the way [home] weeping and shouting, ‘I’ve found a form!’ Though I now find a certain awkwardness in the poem that once rescued me from my formless life, the moment I arrived [in the doorway] to share my good fortune with my wife Diane is still vivid and perfect in my mind. [top] LETTERS
(69) Eventually, I published not only a first poem, but a first book, and this is the galley copy of that book from my collection, titled The Faces of Americans in 1853, published in 1984 by the University of Missouri Press as the Devins Award- winner in that year. That’s the good news. The bad news is that publishing this book took many years, and it took many years more to finish it. In fact, how I even completed this book, I do not know, because while I wrote it, I was also teaching, raising four kids with Diane, and piecing together graduate degrees. (70) So it helped enormously in this period to have the encouraging letters of the poet Donald Hall, who, as luck would have it, just happened to live in my neighborhood.... (71) Here’s his letterhead again, which is often repeated in my papers of the late 70s and 80s, and in fact turns up regularly in all the years since. I was introduced to Don and his wife, Jane Kenyon, in the early months of 1976 by two former students at his farmhouse, which was located ten miles away from my own house, in North Sutton, New Hampshire – hence the address below that letterhead – and at the end of my visit, I sheepishly drew a chapbook of poems out of my coat, put it on the kitchen table, and scrammed. But it turned out Don liked the poems, and we began to visit each other and write back and forth about each other’s work. I got the best of the correspondence, though, because in the end, his advice helped shape me into a poet. (72) I soon learned I could trust Don to say exactly what he meant, as here, in this letter from the 21st of September, 1979, where he flays me about a particular word in a draft I’ve sent him. (That’s not the original letter, by the way; I’ve photocopied it, so I could circle the relevant passage in red ink.) (73) Here now, a detail from the letter: “Can’t you hear Bing Crosby singing this word of yours ‘yearning’? It’s Tin Pan Alley. And the word reminds me of the most prosperous poet ever to emerge from Tin Pan Alley: Rod McKuen.” (74) Once, Don read an extensive and self-adoring biography I sent as a contributor’s note to Poetry magazine, and he wrote this: “I think that the most effective kind of biographical note is something that is quite reticent, non-academic, and non- ‘successful,’ like: ‘Wesley McNair lives in New Hampshire where he raises goats with eyes in the middle of their foreheads.”(75) Because I kept trying and failing to publish my first book year after year during this period, many of Don’s letters had words of support for my struggle, like this one. “The writing – I don’t need to tell you – is what matters. Keep getting better, and improve the manuscript every time it comes back, and you will win through.” Yet his most moving counsel was not an upbeat call to work, but the bittersweet commiseration (76) in this letter, dated July 8, 1980, which mixes advice to me in my disappointment about not publishing a book with the disappointment he himself had begun to feel after publishing several. So I’d like to read with you the opening section of this letter. “...Believe me I am sympathetic with your feelings, but let me tell you that when you have published a book – which you will – nothing will happen; or at least it will seem that nothing has happened. And this would be true whether it were published by New Rivers or by Atheneum. Even if something happens, then you realize that the ‘something’ is truly nothing. And after you have published eight books of poems, you are still convinced that no one has read you, and that probably you are no good anyway. Or at least you are convinced of that frequently. I have been going through quite a bad patch, in my feelings about my own ability, my past work, and certainly my present work.
There is only one place, or one moment, in which one finds happiness, and it is always momentary – because that is the moment of actual writing, and of course that is not always true.
So I do two things: I assure you that you will publish; and I tell you that it will not make any difference! But I have a third thing to say: it makes a difference to me!”
That letter, I don’t need to tell you, is remarkably honest, true and generous, and in just these ways, it’s characteristic of the whole series of Hall letters I’ve tucked away, from those early years to present. (77) My collection also contains notes and letters from Jane Kenyon, who supported me during this period by publishing my poems in a new journal of hers, called Green House. “...it’s good, and I want to put it in the winter issue. How many more do you have in your drawer?” (78) And speaking of notes of support, I want to show you now the strangest note of that kind I ever got. It came to me in this envelope seven years after I’d arrived in Maine (so the postmark tells me), with that odd return address: “NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME COLUMN (Q.E.D.) [shades of Wallace Stevens, you see], From a Peninsula Correspondent.” I eventually gathered from the town name of “Castine” on the postmark that the Peninsula correspondent was the Maine poet Philip Booth. (79) Inside the envelope, enclosed in green paper, was this little card with a collage of quotations on it -- (80) short, cryptic phrases arranged on a page, very like the arrangement of a Philip Booth poem. And when I looked closely at the phrases, I found that he was responding to individual poems in my book, My Brother Running, which had just been published. Beginning at the upper right: “The imagination of ‘The Bird Man’...The compassion of ‘Mother’s Place’...The Passion (in all senses of that word) of ‘Coming for Brad Newcomb’...” And what looked like a strange series of lines and arrows was actually a diagram of the book’s thematic structure, with a fragmentary compliment at the very bottom about my title poem “My Brother Running,” [quote] “...a masterpiece of both pacing [the word pacing underlined to emphasize the pun] and intensity.” So what was the origin of this strange and flattering document, which for a long time I was baffled by? (81) Well, the key is right here in a red circle, not my red circle, but Philip’s: “Jack Barnes, 625-4776, send me clipping.” Jack Barnes, some of you may recall, had a literary column in the Maine Sunday Telegram, and he’d called Philip to arrange an interview about my book of poems, then just out. So these were the generous notes the ever-cryptic Philip wrote for his interview, then simply sealed up and mailed to me. (82) I make a little detour to mention that by the time I got Philip Booth’s note, I had written several poems about Maine, teaching at the University of Maine at Farmington and falling in love with our own territory of this state, where I discovered Grange meetings, as this title shows, and makeshift farms, (83) and country characters like the farmer and orchardist portrayed in this poem (I won’t stop for the text)... (84) and the people of my little town of Mercer -- including, as you see here, “the couple with the sign that says Cosmetics and Landfill.” In other words, I found in West Central Maine the sense of a benign pause in a quickly changing New England -- a place where the organic life of New England could still be found, though it had all but disappeared from southern New Hampshire, where I had lived, (85) and I wrote to my friends about my discovery in words I later borrowed for this passage in an essay. So let me read with you my description of this Maine location many of us share, and see if you recognize it. One more benefit of the email for an archive is that unlike the conventional letter, it often gives you two sides of a exchange, the message and the response, so anybody who might be curious can follow both sides of a conversation without having to go to different archives to reconstruct it. So just below Cathie’s message here is the one she got from me that inspired it. (88) While I’m on the subject, Emails allow something else that’s impossible with letters – a conversation in print involving more than two people. Here’s an example, my part of a three-way conversation that I had with two others, Wendy Lesser and Donald Justice, when I was helping to judge a national literary prize in poetry not long ago. I picked this sample out because it comes from late in the jurying process, when we were all a little tired of our reading, and were speaking more directly than we did earlier on about what we felt. (89) Here’s the second paragraph: “I certainly share Donald’s weariness with the reading. Really, the weariness comes from reading too much of the same thing – on the one hand, a conventionalized, literary language and syntax; on the other, a language that is so everyday and common, there is no poetry in it. Then, of course, the ubiquitous blurbs, and the disparity between them and what one finds between the covers. If few readers are paying attention to what we poets do, it can’t only be the readers’ fault.” The Wise Man, as you see, has spoken – or maybe I should say, ranted. But here again, the point that if you scrolled down, you’d discover earlier entries -- in fact, a chain of previous exchanges among the three of us, so anybody interested in the conversation could find this three-way thinking, which is unique to email, all in one place, and not split up into different archives. [top] WRITING NOTEBOOKS
(90) At the very core of my collection, though, as I see it anyway, are the scores of composition notebooks that contain all the thinking about and the revisions of my poems, so I conclude my presentation with a sample of my writing notebooks. It might surprise you – and it surprises me a little, to tell you the truth, when I look back on it -- that some of the first things I wrote in were examination books – blue books -- as here. (91) And here, a blue book including my notes for a poem called “The Last Peaceable Kingdom.” But then I was a teacher when I began publishing my poems. (92) In fact, my composition notebooks often include notes about teaching activities, too – like this one, which contains work on a poem, but also, notes about the visiting writers series at UMF, and a slide list for an American literature course in which I often showed slides of American art. The writing and the teaching are in the same notebook not only because I was working on writing and teaching projects at the same time, along with some letters, but because I never felt the teaching process was a threat to poetry that had to be separated from it. Teaching was simply another kind of creative thinking. (93) So what’s inside the tablets and notebooks? Here’s an example, taken from one of the many that led to the completion of that long narrative poem I talked about earlier, “My Brother Running.” This is a beginning draft for one of the later sections of the poem, and what it shows is the reckless, no-holds barred method I generally use to explore a poetic subject. I should tell you that “My Brother Running” was a hard poem for me to write, because its subject was my younger brother’s compulsive jogging or running, which finally led to his fatal heart attack, and I was trying to determine in the poem what he thought he was running from and running to, sometimes nine and ten miles a day, in a period of great trouble for him. But I was also trying to link his running to the childhood conflict in our family that I began with in my presentation today – and link it also to the accelerating pace of life in America, and the politics of Ronald Reagan, and the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, and even to the destructive power of American myths. In other words, I wanted to work on a larger canvas than I had worked on in the past, so I needed to write exploratory drafts (94) chapter by chapter, to figure out what approaches and associations might serve best. But then, that’s the way I always begin the writing of a poem -- starting with a shopping list of possible details, images, events, approaches – anything that might come into my head as I think about a subject. This page actually contains the record of three different exploratory sessions:(95) the first one, in pencil, to ask myself questions and run through a range of associations; (96) the second, done on another day, in green ink, to pen in still other possibilities; (97) and the third, completed later on with Xs and circles over the whole page, to get rid of what turned out to be false leads and find out where the true poem-in-motion was. The idea in these exploratory drafts is to keep things fluid and associative – or put it this way, never to let the left brain know what the right brain is doing. (98) Do ideas occur to you when you’re on the road in the car? Well, that’s what check-books are for. I gathered up these checkbook pages and pasted them into the notebook after some trip I took – revisiting the pages I pasted later on, as you see, with that black pen. (99) Here’s another draft page from the “My Brother Running” tablet – a mosaic of check-marks, stars, notes circled, notes added to notes. But on this page, which is for section or chapter number 10 of the poem, I’m beginning to try out actual lines, as you see in the foreground of that field of material. (100) In fact, that first line there in the top foreground is the first line of the chapter as I finally wrote it: “But of course it was my job...” – the other lines you find under that one disappearing in later drafts. Perhaps you’ve noticed that my handwriting here and elsewhere is not – what? – entirely legible? I have to admit that when I open my tablet on a new day of writing, I myself sometimes have trouble reading what I’ve written the day before. The most obvious reason my drafts are hard to read is that I’m often writing quickly, following the feeling or idea of the poem in motion. But I think there’s another reason for my illegibility that I’ve only recently figured out – and I admit is weird: I want to keep the poem-in-progress in some way a secret even from myself, that is, a mystery I have to dig for, or a secret code I have to discover each morning as I sit down to continue the process of making the poem. (101) Once I got each section of “My Brother Running” the way I thought I wanted it, I finally did give the poem to the left brain, which is to say I typed it up – always what happens at the very end of the process for me. But as you see from the marginal questions and notes here, even the typed version has become a draft, on the way to another typed version. By the way, that typed chapter you see at the very top of this slide, given its own title, is from an earlier version of “My Brother Running”-- a version that was totally different and represented months of work, after which I tore it apart, and started all over again. This poem about my brother, with all its stitching and unstitching, took me five years to write. And just for the record, my second long narrative, titled “Fire,” which also appears in different versions in my archive, took six years, and the shorter poems I’ve written can take anywhere from several days to years of return bouts. So you see writing, for me, is truly rewriting, as I have no doubt it is for all the other writers here. (102) And whatever poem I write, long or short, I always begin with an exploratory draft involving a listing of random thoughts and possibilities, as here in this more recent family poem called “Draw Me.” I’m not going to linger over the details of this page because I only intend a summary of my writing process here -- so we can wrap this up.(103) So I click on to a later page of the manuscript, in which I’m trying out both images and lines. There at the left, (104) where you see that listing of phrases beginning with the word “God,” I’m already investigating possible endings for the poem, which concludes in its finished version with a sort of ironic prayer. So I’m writing the poem, as it were, upside-down. (105) And every day I come back to my notebook once the poem gets going, I invariably copy out the lines and stanzas from the day before, (106) as here, to fall once again into the trance of the poem, testing out its language and its rhythms. (107) The result of this process over the years has been the books I’ve squeezed into this slide, also part of my archive in first editions, and a couple of books without covers for the future, one, at the top right, a forthcoming volume of poems, and the other, at the top left, a memoir in progress – almost all of them, even the new books, dedicated to my dear wife and best critic, Diane. Looking back on the writing I’ve done, I don’t really think of it as some great literary enterprise, but instead as a long and earnest conversation with the reader, that has come out of the life I have actually lived, and has helped me to understand that life, including the difficult bonds of family; and the struggles of the ordinary people who live around me, so many of their lives unsung; and the sometimes troubling mythology of my country; and in another key entirely, the mystery that exists in the commonest things. Of course, most of these books were written in our wonderful state of Maine, and often inspired by Maine, where I’ve reached my maturity as a poet and writer, so I want to end by saying that I’m very pleased my archive will be housed in this Maine college – the more so because Colby claims collections of letters written by two poets I love, namely, Thomas Hardy and the Maine poet E. A. Robinson, after whom this very room where we are gathered has been named. Besides, I’ve come to love Colby College itself, where I’ve found so many good students, and fellow writers, and valued friends. So thank you, my Colby friends, for your support, especially Peter Harris and Doug Archibald, and thanks to Clem Guthro for all your help in bringing my papers here, and thanks especially to Pat Burdick, the Head of Special Collections, who was instrumental in making this acquisition possible. Thank you all. [top] |
