from Rustica, Issue I, Fall 2023 with interviewer Josh Billings

Wes, so much of your poetry moves toward inclusion and wholeness, and yet at the same time many poems seem to begin from the sense of something having been “left out”—whether that’s an unspoken word, or a lost tool, or, as is the case in your wonderful early poem “Remembering Aprons,” a forgotten kitchen garment. Could you talk about why there are so many of these spaces in your writing, and maybe also give us a sense of how you’ve learned to build poems that include and even benefit from such emptinesses.

 “Remembering Aprons” comes from a series of poems in which I was trying to get the sense of an agrarian New England from the pieces of it left behind—country accents, fragments of old stories and in this case, the aprons which farm women wore for their kitchen chores every day and are now forgot ten. To get at the feeling of what it was like to be a farm woman back then, I imagined the life of the aprons they commonly wore.

The poem is about more than aprons, though, because it involves the important process of remembering. We can’t write about the future, which hasn’t happened, or about the present, which is still underway. Our memory of the past is really our subject—what Wordsworth famously called “emotion recollected in tranquility.” This was for him poetry’s true origin. It gave him the opportunity of a second sight, a second knowing.

I’m very aware of this opportunity every time I write a poem. Maybe your sense of a “gap” or a “something missing” is the second meaning that the poem is moving towards as it re-enacts the experience on the page.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about your poems working to recollect a meaning that may not have been clear when the original experience actually happened. Do you think there is any danger in that Romantic tranquility—a capacity for self-hypnosis, say?

Actually, I don’t think of myself as a Romantic at all—certainly not as a Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing poems by self-hypnosis. I quoted Wordsworth about gaining a second sight about our subject as we write our poem, but I could easily have mentioned instead Jorie Graham, who once said that a memory for a poet is an experience that hasn’t fully been lived, and that we discover its true meaning by reliving it in our work. Sometimes the poem helps me. After I introduce my subject, a stray image will enter the poem, or a contrasting thought, and through that counterturn, the deeper meaning of my materials is revealed. Then it becomes a matter of shaping the poem around the counterturn. Yet I’m not guided by a formula; every poem is different and the process of making it is always mysterious. I only see what’s happening as it happens over several drafts.

Can you talk a little more about your typical process for revising a poem? Does it usually require many drafts? Are you a poet for whom poems feel, at a certain point, definitively finished, or are they more often stopped pragmatically with a sense of “that’s the best I can do”?

My motto as I begin the process of making a poem is never to let the left brain know what the right brain is doing. That means not starting with sentences at all but with associative fragments—images laden with feeling, memories, rough thoughts that lead me closer to the truth I have in mind. Over time, I think about how these pieces, or some of them, might help me reveal that truth through a story, long or short. At that point, I’m also thinking about the poem’s voice. I’ve long felt that if you can start your poem with the right voice, you can say almost anything. Gradually, the pieces you’ve found will fall together naturally, opening the way to connections you never predicted. So yes, my poems require many revisions, and I don’t stop until there’s no alternative left except the final draft.

What about when it comes to formal questions such as the particular shape of lines and stanzas? Do you find that they are determined by the voice—or that they do the determining? What guides you in making the particular formal choices that add up to the larger truth of a poem?

You’re right on target about the voice. How I speak in a poem has a great influence on my choice of line, and on the rhythm of thought and feeling in the poem. Every line I write is a spoken line, and I read each one aloud to test it. If it’s an open-hearted and open-minded poem, I use long, accessible lines. If I need to draw the reader into the mind-moves the poem is making as it delves into a subject, I choose short lines with breaks that emphasize inflections of voice. As you may have noticed, I’m fond of writing long sentences—just in general. I love the tension that can grow between quick line-stops and sentences that twist and turn and jump across stanza divisions. At my readings, I try to recite those poems in such a way that audiences hear and feel both cadences at once, the quick lines against the slow, late-breaking sentences. Whatever lines I use in poems, though, short lines or long ones, I always stress the anticipation of what comes next, throwing meaning ahead of myself as I go.

It sounds like you’re saying that the voice of a poem has a lot to do with its form.

Yes, but I need to add that free verse is not only about voice and sound. It’s a visual art—a post-Gutenberg invention that has to do with the arrangement of words and lines on a page. So it makes its appeal not only to the ear but to the eye. To my great discouragement, many poets, particularly younger ones, never even think about the visual aspects of free verse. Maybe that comes from preparing poems for the microphone at readings, where the main interest is in sounding authentic. But when you see their poems on the page, so many possibilities are unrealized. The interplay of the poem’s words and the space around them, for instance, that can be made articulate as the poem moves. And the wit of words that can come at the line break, the most important words of all in shaping free verse. Or the beauty of a free verse poem on the page, which can create, as Emerson says, its own architecture—whether it has ragged margins or symmetrical ones or some combination of both. What you’re looking at is the beauty of thought and thinking.

I often notice an affinity for painting in your work—particularly your early poetry and especially for American folk painters. Can you talk about the place, if any, that visual art has in your poetics, and how it may have influenced your own poetics and practices?

I like American primitive painting because of its beautiful distortions. Primitive artists are not bound by academic training. A dog doesn’t have to look exactly like a dog, and besides, it can be the size of the horse grazing in the nearby meadow, since the subjects of a folk painting are separately realized. If you remember from somewhere in your past an erupting volcano, as Rufus Porter did while painting one of his murals, you can go ahead and paint it on the distant horizon of a New England hunting scene. The distortions of folk art are often deeply earnest and hilarious at the same time. I love that mixture. And I love the primary role of feeling and memory in shaping the experience that’s depicted. It reminds me of how I work as a poet.

How about non-folk paintings? Do you find any inspiration there?

In the high tradition of American art, I’m drawn to subtler kinds of distortion. True, our essential tradition in art is realism, but that doesn’t mean our artists fail to interpret what they observe. I’m fond of painters who manipulate light to adjust the objects they portray—Fitz Henry Lane, with his Luminist paintings, for instance, where a third of the picture space is mooring ships and people on the shore and the rest is taken up with sky and light; or Edward Hopper, with his blank, lit walls behind seated or standing figures. When I was starting out as a poet, I taught an undergraduate course in American art for the American studies program I developed back then, so I regularly talked with my students about those paintings and others like them. And I think they influenced the interplay of the filled space and the empty space around it as I wrote my first short-line poems. I was also influenced by the choice of a metaphorical subject matter in the work of Winslow Homer, whose visual metaphors of the human struggle include a variety of mariners and villagers being tested by the sea. In a formative time, those paintings taught me to choose subjects with interpretive possibilities.

It seems to me that, like Winslow Homer, you’ve seen poetry in subjects that many people have overlooked, or maybe just thought of as inherently unpoetic. Was there a point in your poetic career when you thought to yourself: “Okay, this is my subject—this is the kind of thing I want to write about?” Or has each poem’s subject suggested itself to you in turn, and what a “Wesley McNair poem” is become clear only gradually, maybe only in retrospect?

I honestly don’t know what a Wesley McNair poem is. Probably that’s a good thing. What I do know is that for me, it’s vitally important not to let my ego into a poem, even when I’m using the pronoun “I.” That means going so deeply into your subject that it becomes you and you become it. That process applies to your choice of subject as much as to the writing you do about it. In Edward Hopper’s late career, he produced no more than two or three paintings a year. Much of his time was spent just staring at the blank canvas and thinking about what he wanted to paint. What I want most of all in a poem is to show what it is like to live a life. I think that’s what readers want most of all, too. When we email an amazing poem we’ve just found to a friend, we don’t do it because of its technique but because it tells us what life is like or could be like. There’s a moment for me and I hope for the reader where my poem becomes transparent, and life as I know or imagine it enters, staying right to the end. Finding that universal moment is why I write poetry.

Is that why you read poetry? Are there particular poets, contemporary or otherwise, who you feel are adept at creating those kinds of doorways into other lives?

I don’t really think linking one’s poetry to other lives is that uncommon. Many of our great poets have done it. Let’s take, for instance, our two most important poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Whitman insisted that poets of the future shape their visions by standing up “for the stupid and the crazy,” as he put it, and going “freely with powerful and uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families.” And then there’s Dickinson, whose work is studded with compassionate and instructive portraits of ordinary people who would otherwise never have appeared in literature.

You seem to be suggesting that it was Whitman and Dickinson’s radical subject matter—the dispossessed, forgotten, and passed over—that made them “poets of the future.” Do you think this is how it works in poetry? Does formal innovation allow writers to see subjects that were previously invisible to them - and to us? Or does a devotion to unseen subjects lead writers to create new forms to hold them?

As has been true throughout your interview, you’ve asked a good question—two good questions! Does the form you choose for a poem open your mind to the possibilities of your subject, or does your devotion to the subject create the form. For me, it’s a bit of both. At seventeen, I was reading a range of modern poets, along with Randall Jarrell’s amazing critical volume, Poetry and the Age. I capped it off by much more reading of free verse poets later on. That formative reading expanded my sense of what was possible in the mode of verse I’d chosen. Everything else has always depended on the feeling (like your “devotion,” perhaps) that each subject inspires: the length and variation of my lines, the use of the space around them, the decision to write the poem in stanzas or monoform. In each poem I write to serve the arc of feeling I discover as I go along. That arc leads to a closing epiphany, which arises out of my materials and comes by surprise, as if the poem has made up its own mind what it is for or about. Yet when I reread the poem, I see my ending has been predicted all along. The painter Robert Henri once said that the artist’s work is to surprise himself. For me, that’s especially true when the surprise happens at the close of a poem, because it always carries a change of mind or a change of heart, first for me and then for the reader.

There is so much surprise in the poems that close your most recent book Late Wonders: New and Selected Poems—many of which revisit places that are familiar to readers of your earlier poetry. I wonder if you could talk about the role that place—both the general idea and the specific place of Western Maine that so much of your work takes as its backdrop—plays in your poetry. Has your understanding of that role changed? Has the place itself, for that matter?

Actually, I’ve had two home bases for my poetry of New England. I wrote my first couple of books when I was living in a rural town in New Hampshire named North Sutton, which was very like Mercer, Maine. The difference was that the people in the towns around me had become self-conscious about the antiquity of their houses, putting dates over their doors and installing six over-six colonial windows. The houses had never looked better, but that was a sure sign the organic culture of the region had largely disappeared. Mercer, which is located well above the megalopolis, has been slower to adopt change, and when I settled here in 1988, this was what attracted me to it. But I gradually realized that my apparently unacculturated town was in the last phase of its dissolution—ending when the elders died off and the last farms shut down. There’s a poem called “Noplace” in the new poems section of Late Wonders that spells out this process. If you combine my New Hampshire poems with the Maine poems (there are some about Vermont, too), you see that the larger place I’ve been writing about over all these years is northern New England, in a time of social and cultural change. It’s been my ambition to show how the people of the north country carry on in spite of what’s been erased or taken away.

“Noplace,” to me, captures much of the beauty and anxiety of living in, as the everyday phrase goes, “the middle of nowhere”—as if the American dream of small town pastoral living really were something that might disappear if the dreamer woke up. In addition to your northern New England lyrics, you’ve written several poems about other American noplaces, like the Ozarks and rural Virginia. What is it that sent you to these spots? Was it something unique to them, or something they had in common with the noplaces you already knew?

They appealed to me because they were rural, for one thing. Also because I knew them in an intimate way through visits to relatives and their friends who lived there. I wrote about the Ozarks first during the late 1990s in one of my three long narrative poems, “Fire,” and returned to it in 2011, for my book-length series of poems, The Lost Child. I was dealing with the Ozarks of southern Missouri in the book, but when you write about one location, you’re touching on the whole region, which includes several states across the Mississippi River, all of them bound together by a culture of God and guns and clannish families and suspicion of the government. The impetus of the book was my Aunt Dot’s invitation to a family reunion in Mountain Grove. For two nights beforehand in the living room of her old farmhouse, the two of us stayed up late while she told stories about her family, and when she went to bed, I stayed up even longer to write down what she said and how she said it, adding my own stories after I got back home. 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. 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.

Has writing such an intensely localized poetry of place helped you come to an understanding of today’s America, Wes?

Without question—though my poems about American popular culture have helped me to understand the nation’s dream life. The poems that have most to say about America overall are the three long narratives I’ve mentioned, “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord,” which are brought together as a chronological trilogy for the first time in Late Wonders. Each part of the trilogy links a crisis in my family—my local material— with a related crisis unfolding at the same time in America, the trilogy’s larger place. Throughout the series is a growing apprehension that something has gone deeply wrong with the nation’s sense of itself over the past 40 years. As for today’s America, I never felt closer to it than in part three, “Dwellers,” since the American crisis in that part is the rise to power of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign in rural Virginia, where my sister and her people live. The depth of vision in the trilogy as a whole would not have been possible without the uses of place. Yet the critics and reviewers of today commonly re fer to place writing as a literary specialty. Have they never read William Faulkner, whose insights all came from a small, mythological county in Mississippi? Or Thoreau at Walden Pond, or Dickinson, who took her inspiration from the town of Amherst and often from her backyard garden alone? And what of Heaney or Yeats or Wordsworth before them, and before them, Chaucer? The truth is, writing about place is a core tradition of our literature. Let’s drop the qualifying word and call those who draw their metaphors from the places they know best by the name they used to be called: writers