Inspired Lives: Wesley McNair

WESLEY MCNAIR: My father, during my childhood, was around and not around. By the time I was seven, he had met another woman, and he abruptly left the family, which consisted then of my mother, my two brothers, and me, and he just never came back. I learned later that he went off to start a family in Chicago. But in this period, nobody knew where he went. There was no child support. My mother, who had no professional certificate of any kind, but was a pretty good seamstress, began to take in sewing from people in the neighborhood and also from local stores, in Springfield and then, later on, Claremont. 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. Of course at the bottom of the poster I wrote the word “Wanted.” As I look back on it, that word “Wanted” seems to me my first poem, because it shifted between meanings. He was wanted; he was accused, on the one hand. So when I showed the poster to my mother, he was a bad guy with whiskers. But at the same time, I was telling her that I missed my father and wanted him around. So by the act of writing that word, in the context of the poster, I came to poetry, I think, because I negotiated between the two of them. Eventually, my mother divorced my father – this was in 1949 – and finally married my stepfather, whom she met, I think, in that same year. My stepfather moved us to a tract of land, 13 acres, in West Claremont, and began building a garage, which we lived in for many years, actually, while he got the wherewithal to start a house. So this garage was probably one of the most forlorn family homes in existence. I think I learned – for the sake of survival, I learned how to distance myself and I learned that by the quality of my observations, by paying attention, perhaps the more secure I felt. I was present. But I was also a little bit like, over time perhaps, a little bit like an extra-terrestrial observing from a sufficient distance that would allow me to assimilate it and understand it in a different way. Though no doubt my becoming a poet was in the blood somehow, it might have been this experience that nudged me in a special way toward the kind of observation that is important for a poet to have. There is a writer named Ross McDonald, who once wrote the most interesting definition of a writer I’ve ever read. He said: Verbal artist, a person who suffers in childhood or youth what he calls a shock, crippling, or injury. Some serious and painful dislocation, that is, that sets him or her, one removed from the world so that writing becomes a way of reclaiming the world. I don’t insist on this as a profile for all writers, but it works for my writer friends and many of my artist friends, as well. You know, this sense, whether you know it or not, of a wound that you’re somehow driven to heal. I think that poets are menders of broken things. There’s a song called “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen, which has the refrain, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” The light, in this case, being the insight and illumination of your creative work. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my childhood to everybody, especially this event in it, but on the other hand, sometimes from this long perspective of having made poems all my life, I look back and see it as a kind of gift, because it ushered me into my life as a poet.