Wesley McNair, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetWesley McNair
American poet
Date of Birth: 19-Jun-1941
Place of Birth: New Hampshire, United States
Profession: poet
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Gemini 
About Wesley McNair
- Wesley McNair (born 1941) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor.
- He has authored 10 volumes of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems (Godine, 2010), The Lost Child: Ozark Poems (Godine, 2014), and The Unfastening (Godine, 2017).
- He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon "Poets in Prose" Series, 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. According to United States Artists, 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." In 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." 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." The struggles of his family poems and others often link with national themes, as in his long narrative piece "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, 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. Wesley McNair's ten 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. 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.
- From 2011 to 2016 he served as the Poet Laureate of Maine, 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."
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