♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -Though Wesley McNair lives in Maine and taught for many years at the University of Maine, and though he lived for a time in Vermont as well, he's a New Hampshire native, and we can say that he spent most of his life in New Hampshire.

There's no getting away from that.

We claim him as our own.

With 18 books to his credit, he is one of our most respected and honored poets.

Among those honors Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Fellowships, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Jane Kenyon Award, the Sarah Josepha Hale medal.

He is well decorated.

Philip Levine calls him one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry, and Donald Hall says, because he is a true poet, his New England is unlimited.

Whole lives fill small lines.

Real to this poet, therefore to us.

Welcome, Wes McNair.

[applause] -Thank you for saying those nice things about me, Becky... - I hope they were all true.

- They were true.

- They were true... -I hope my wife is listening.

-And you hope your wife was listening so she'll be impressed.

Well, I thought we might start with a poem.

And a poem that speaks to your, to your vocation, your avocation, your job, your life.

How I Became a Poet.

-Well that's a good one to start with.

This is a poem, as I guess you know, which is about my childhood.

I should say, by the way, Becky, in case this isn't clear, that when I was a, when I was a boy living in Vermont at the time, my father abruptly left the family, and he never came back.

Leaving my mother, of course distressed and angry, a good deal of the time.

My family consisted then of, of my two brothers and me and my mother.

And at a certain point after my father's departure, I sat down and drew a wanted poster, and I drew his face in the center of the poster and of course, at the bottom I wrote the word wanted.

And that becomes the occasion of this poem, which, as you say, is titled How I Became a Poet.

Wanted was the word I chose for him at age eight, drawing the face of a bad guy with comic book whiskers, then showing it to my mother.

This was how, after my father left us, I made her smile but at the same time, I told her I missed him and how I managed to keep him close by in that house of perpetual anger, becoming his accuser and his devoted accomplice.

I learned by writing to negotiate between what I had and that more distant thing I dreamed of.

So if a poem can be written in one word, I really do think that was my first poem.

So, you see, I came to poetry to talk about a broken family, and a broken world.

- Wanted, wanted.

- Wanted.

You say, I think I read in the interview that you see yourself, or you see poetry as a way of mending, a mender of broken things.

-That's true, I mean, this was a heartbreaking event, as you can imagine, my father's disappearance, but as I look back on it, I think of it as a kind of blessing because it ushered me into my life as a poet.

There's a, there's a writer you may know named, Ross MacDonald, who wrote the most interesting definition of a writer I've ever read, he said, a writer, is a person who, in childhood or youth, has suffered what he calls a shock, crippling or injury, that's so serious that it puts him or her at one removed from the world so that writing becomes a way to reclaim the world.

I don't insist on this as a profile for, for for all writers, but by God, I know it's true of me and certainly of all the writers I've talked to, artists too I think tend to have this biography.

And so mending broken things is our mission.

I always think of, of Leonard Cohen's, song anthem.

I don't know if you know that song, but it has, in it these words, There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in, you know, the light the light in this case being the illumination of the inside of your creative work.

-I came to poetry, to enjoy poetry late in life I think, later than some people.

And, what connected me to poetry was when I could see the world that I knew.

When you write about a dog on a chain and that, that, that the, the length of that chain becomes that dog's world.

I've seen that dog.

I know that dog.

And then when you sort of transcend that to just say, you know, we're all in some ways in this kind of confinement, -By God, maybe I should read that poem.

-What is that poem?

-It's called The Puppy.

-Do you know this poem, The Puppy?

[page turning] -Certainly It comes from everyday life.

The Puppy.

From down the road, starting up and stopping once more, the sound of a puppy on a chain who has not yet discovered he will spend his life there.

Foolish dog, to forget where he is and wander until he feels the collar close fast around his throat, then cry all over again about the little space in which he finds himself.

Soon, when there is no grass left in it, and he understands it is all he has, he will snarl and bark whenever he senses a threat to it.

Who would believe this small sorrow could lead to such fury?

No one would ever come near him.

-In my life, there are songs that come to me, you know, sort of the background of, of how I am in the world, and whenever I hear a dog cry or see a dog on a chain, I remember this poem.

And I think that's the power of poetry to sort of become a, a backdrop to your life or sort of enrich your view of the world.

-Well, thank you for thinking of it.

-It’s a powerful, it’s a powerful poem.

Your poem, First Snowfall reminds me so much of the ending of, James Joyce's The Dead, which is one of those stories that is always in my life.

You know, when I see snow, I remember the lines of that.

You know, when I see snow, I remember the lines of that.

-There’s certainly snow in that story.

-And it's, it's a wonderful story, and so I wonder if you would read it's a beautiful story.

-It’s a beautiful story.

-It is a beautiful... -That's one of those that I taught when I was a high school teacher and began to learn it well.

- Yeah.

It's so moving and so poetic.

-Well, how about that?

This is, this is the, it's called First Snowfall, as you say so it's about snow falling, picture it in late November in my area of Maine.

First Snowfall.

It is touching the highest fingers of the trees which have longed for it all this time, and it is sifting down over the store with a sign in the window that says, come in, we're open!

And the sign on the door that says we're closed.

And it is blowing across the gray stacks of lumber and the jacked up trailer of a semi at Dan's Customs Sawing.

And on the Rome Road it is coming down on the shoulders of telephone poles, struggling uphill, carrying wire to the double wide and the farmhouse with the year round Christmas lights in season once more and slowly, softly in the dark, it is once more bearing down on the old collapsing barn to squeeze the row of windows, shut nobody up to see it fill the driveways and walkways, except a snow plow holding a small light ahead of itself, opening the street that vanishes in the long drift and dream of it, coming down over the whole town where everyone under every last, lost roof is now far away and all gone, and good night.

[applause] - That’s beautiful.

- Thank you, thank you.

- Wow.

It just, it's just we’re all, it's the wholeness of it, isn't it?

That's what strikes me is it's it's everywhere, we’re all... -You know, it's, it's wonderful that you say that actually, because this is a new one so not many people have commented on it yet, but, but, it is written in one sentence.

I'm very fond of the one sentence poem.

So you, you and on purpose so that you can, you can actually hear it, as it were, hear it in a glimpse.

-Well, we might have to hear it again but did you realize it was one sentence?

But there was that kind of the rolling and the coming down and the wholeness of it, that well that we need to talk more about you know how, the shaping of a poem but before we go on to that, you talk a lot or you talk some, you've written some about contraries and when I think about short stories, I think about poems as well.

I think about tension and contraries.

The open sign, the closed sign, the Christmas lights in summer, you know, that kind of thing.

So that all through that poem I was hearing contraries.

Can you talk a little bit about that concept and how that works?

- You're a good listener well, well, poems, Don Hall has written about this, but poems, rely on counterweight just in general because you're, you're going in one direction and yet you're also honoring another direction, which can be the opposite direction.

You're telling, as I was saying before, you're telling a front story, but there's also a back story that's tugging against that, but also some of the most poetic phrases, I always knew a, a student who was going to be, an interesting poet.

When I could see, his or her work with paradox.

That is, it's, there's this wonderful, a poetic spark that can be given off by, by testing two things that don't seem to match against one another I mean, poetry depends, I think, on that awareness and that, that consciousness in so many ways.

So it's at the center of the craft.

I think, of poetry.

-I don't mean to oversimplify, but it's sort of, you know, there's good news and bad news.

It's... - Yeah.

-this is my greatest strength and my greatest weakness you know, there’s always that... -And this is so funny I want to cry.

-And this is so funny I wanna cry -I love those.

-Yeah, the paradox, the paradox.

-Well, can you talk about process and how poems come to be?

I'm really interested, first in the idea of how you recognize the spark in students, because we have a lot of teachers who watch this so that interests me.

But I'm, and I'm also interested in sort of how you, how you shape poems.

So either one of those things that you want to talk, you want to talk about students?

You know, talk about teaching?

Can you teach poetry?

- I like the shaping idea.

- Yeah?

-Because, this actually could be helpful to students if any of them are watching this because they probably think you just sit down and trick a poem off.

My poems come out of failure all the time.

-Yeah.

-I mean, I try and fail and try and fail and as I was saying earlier, learn from my, my failures.

But even before I get there, I usually, I don't want the, the right brain, the, or the left brain to know what the right brain, the poetry brain is, is doing.

So I, I, I don't put anything in a sentence until I've written lots of fragments, page after page of anything that comes into my head.

-And that's the right brain, sort of... - Sure.

- Associative.

-Exactly, exactly.

So it could be it could be a line I might use, or it could be an image or it could be a feeling.

Whatever comes into my head.

Richard Hugo, a poet, said there's a difference between what you call the triggering subject and the actual subject that you end up writing about.

And so I'm trying to work my way from the triggering subject to the actual subject.

It's a little bit like, you know, it's as if my pencil is a is a sort of, witching wand or a, a dowsing stick you know, I'm just sort of guiding it over the page and writing this or that, hoping to sense the rush of water underground, which is the feeling life of a poem.

And I don't always, but when I go back after a day to look at what I've written, quite often there are hot spots, you know there are, there are moments that I want to get back to and they're related in somehow and that will become the, the beginning of a poem quite often of course, then you, you keep trying, and to put it in the form, there's a poem that I wrote this is another new one, which is called November 22nd, 1963.

And it took me a long time to get the form of that one.

Maybe I'll read that poem and just talk about it a little bit.

-And I'm really interested in the idea of the triggering, the triggering, and then the real subject that hits home for me, sometimes we don't know what we're writing about, but we have an intuition that it's there's something here, there's something here and it's often not what we thought was there and so through the process... -Sure, and you're opening it I think the poem is always about the feeling life, so you're, you're opening it to to your, to your, your feeling, to your intuition.

You can't I mean to say I'm going to write about this is a way of employing the brain, you know, as if you're approaching the the issue too self-consciously but you have to have, there has to be a way to let your feeling and imagination into the, into the poem and have its way.

But then, then the question is, what form do you do you use?

So, so in this poem, November 22nd, 1963, you can probably tell from the title of that, that that it's, that the poem is about, my personal memory of the, of the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

And I tried writing this poem actually for a number of years, and I was never happy with with the result because, the event became fixed in the past.

-So the Kennedy assassination is the trigger, or your experience with the Kennedy assassination?

-That's right.

- But what's it really about?

- In that sense yeah, no that's a good point.

As you're searching for a form.

What I discovered was that I didn't like the way it was fixed in the past, the event, because the event has come unstuck in time you know, it's been revisited so much, you have the Warren Commission report, and then all the, the theories about it afterward and remember the Zapruder film?

We saw that countless times replayed -Over and over... -Yeah and then the then the other assassinations of the 60s that took us back and I don't know if you remember, during the Obama campaign, there were moments when he was in the open air or among people who say, oh, maybe it's going to happen to him.

So we haven't really forgotten it.

And I wanted to give a feeling of its, of its resonance.

I wanted to make it feel as if it was past but present in a certain way, at the same time so I finally found the form of a pantoum it took me a long time, a matter of years, actually, but, -I looked up pantoum on, on Google.

- Oh so you, you, [laughter] so you know about the pantoum?

- Well I read about it.

-Well maybe I better explain it just in case.

Just in case the audience or the viewers might not know, but they’re... -Well who doesn't know what a pantoum is?

But just in case there's one person.

-It's, it's a as you learned, it's an old poetic form.

-Yeah.

-It's written in quatrains, four line stanzas and in the, in the pantoum, the, each line, tends to be a complete sentence or at least a complete thought.

And there's a lot of repetition in it, so that in the pantoum the first, the second and the fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and the third lines of the second stanza, and so on and so on, until you get to the conclusion which ends the poem by picking up the two lines in the first stanza that haven't been repeated yet.

-You got that?

Well, let's hear your... - There won't be a quiz.

- There won't be a quiz.

Let's hear your pantoum, November 22nd, 1963.

-If I can find it here.

[pages turning] We were just starting out when it happened.

At the school where I taught the day was over.

As far as they could tell, it wouldn't be fatal, but the principal couldn't finish the announcement.

At the school where I taught, the day was over.

I had a dentist appointment right after work, but the principal couldn't finish the announcement.

By then we now know the president was dead.

I had a dentist appointment right after work.

On the way, I hurried home to tell my wife.

By then we now know the president was dead.

I remember Jackie's pink pillbox hat in the film.

On the way, I hurried home to tell my wife, turn off the vacuum cleaner I shouted at her.

I remember Jackie's pink pillbox hat in the film.

I kept thinking I was going to be late.

Turn off the vacuum cleaner, I shouted at her.

I had never made her cry like that.

I kept thinking I was going to be late.

In one frame, Kennedy's head goes out of focus.

I had never made her cry like that.

The funny thing was, the dentist didn't care.

In one frame, Kennedy's head goes out of focus.

We didn't realize there would soon be others.

The funny thing was, the dentist didn't care.

We were just starting out when it happened.

We didn't realize there would soon be others.

As far as they could tell, it wouldn't be fatal.

[Rebecca exhales] -Well, that's the power of art, isn't it?

To take something that we've all experienced and express it in a way that, we can understand it in a new way, -But the, and the pantoum helps with that -And the pan... that repetition is, really makes the poem I think it's that repetition that just be... you heard this sort of the gasp of the audience.

It's like [Rebecca gasps] -It's, it's a, it's an old form, but right up to date, very postmodern, as I was writing it, I could feel the repeated lines seeking a new context and not quite finding it, as the poem tried to ravel itself together in this relentless way, but never was quite able to you get to the conclusion, and it's inconclusive.

I mean, what you end up with the whole poem in pieces, which is very like the event itself... -And that’s that recursiveness, we go back to that event and back to that event and back, and it's a little different each time but there's still that center to it.

-Yeah, I'm glad you heard that, Becky.

Good summary.

- I was listening.

Well read, well read.

-Thank you, well, if you were one of my students, I would give you an A-plus for that.

[laughter] -A-plus.

Oh, gosh.

[Rebecca laughs] I’m flustered.

I want to, end on a bit of a lighter note.

I mentioned earlier that you can be very funny.

Can we do, one of your funny poems, Hymn... Well, you'll hear it.

-Let's end with a humorous poem, why not?

- Let's end with a humorous poem.

-Well, you mentioned Hymn to the Comb-Over, I assume that's what you're thinking.

-That's what I'm thinking of but you can pick a different one if you want.

-This is good, because I want to tell you a little story that goes with the poem.

I want to, when I was, or this would be August of 2000, I had all my hair buzzed off, including a little comb over thing that I kept on the top.

-Oh, that must have been attractive.

[laughter] -Well, I thought it was.

[laughter] So I'm sitting in the barber chair looking down at this comb over at my feet that had been snipped off and I thought of all the noble service that it had provided over the years, and I almost felt sorry for the thing, so I was telling my friend Bill Roebuck about this, and Bill said, Wes you should have saved the comb over.

You said you could have put it behind glass in the science building of that college where you teach next to the stuffed birds with a plaque underneath that said profess... professor McNair's comb over August 2000.

-Well, I think they would want it at Colby Sawyer for the archives.

But now it’s gone.

-Well, I know that's the trouble with it.

-But you can write about it and preserve it.

-As I did here.

-In words.

-To celebrate comb overs wherever they may be.

Hymn to the Comb-Over.

[Rebecca chuckles] -How the thickest of them erupt just above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff no wind can move them.

Let us praise them in all their varieties, some skinny as the bands of headphones, some rising from a part that extends halfway around the head, others 4 or 5 strings stretch so taut the scalp resembles a musical instrument.

Let us praise the sprays that hold them, and the combs that coax such abundance to the front of the head in the mirror, the combers entirely forget the back.

And let us celebrate the combers who address the old sorrow of time’s passing, day after day bringing out of the barrenness of midlife this ridiculous and wonderful harvest.

No wishful flag of hope, but thick or thin, the flag itself unfurled for us all in subways, offices and malls across America.

-Oh, that’s... [applause] [applause] Oh!

[Rebecca laughs] You gotta have a sense of humor about yourself, to be a poet, to call yourself a poet, you know?

-That's a good rule, I’ll go with that.

-I'm a poet, and here's my poem about comb overs.

Analyze this.

[Rebecca laughs] -That's what I'll do with the next reading it'll be a great opener.

[Rebecca laughs] -Well, we're just about out of our time together but there was one more poem that I know, well, that I liked because it sort of gives my sense of, how artists are.

-This poem is called As I Am, a self-portrait.

-Without without the comb over?

[Wesley chuckles] -With me, of me as a poet, As I Am.

-Behind my false beard, and the frown between the eyebrows I have developed by trying to pay attention to the world.

I am the same kid who could never remember his library books or what he had been sent to the store for.

Fog was the name my teachers gave to where I spent my time.

A haze that even today can descend while I'm having a conversation or suddenly lift, revealing the wrong landmarks, drifting past me on the wrong road I took ten miles ago.

God, it has been lonely to turn up all those years where everyone else has arrived long since.

Yet how, without looking just beyond the shoulders of others as they spoke, or searching everywhere for the pen I found in my own hand, could I concentrate on the thought I learned to write down at last, back from the place that has wanted me off course and bewildered just as I am.

-Oh, thank you Wes.

[applause] -Thank you, thank you.

[applause continues] Some fun, thanks.

-Bewilderment is underrated, [Wesley chuckles] I think.

- Of being lost too.

-And being lost and bewildered, places we should all find ourselves sometimes.

♪♪ I just want to say how much I appreciate your coming here today and I think we all appreciate it for all that you had to say.

[applause] ♪♪