AUGUSTA – New state Poet Laureate Wesley McNair plans to work to bring poetry to the people.

“That Maine has produced so many of America’s great poets should be a source of pride for all of us,” McNair said at a Blaine House ceremony Wednesday. “The tradition they began gives me inspiration as I undertake the work I hope to do as poet laureate. I say work, because in this period of political discord, which has now made its way into the arts, our state needs something more than a ceremonial spokesman for poetry and literature. I will be an engaged and active laureate.”

McNair, a Mercer resident and professor emeritus at the University of Maine at Farmington, was formally installed as state poet laureate by First Lady Ann LePage in a Blaine House ceremony. Gov. Paul LePage did not attend the event, nor was poetry read during the governor’s inauguration ceremonies.

To bring poetry to the people, McNair said he will undertake two projects in his first year as laureate.

Working in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, McNair will launch the poetry column “Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry,” which will offer newspapers across Maine one previously published poem by a Maine poet.

Beginning May 1, the Maine Sunday Telegram will print the weekly selection selected by McNair.

It will run in the Audience section, and will include a brief biography of the poet.

This fall, McNair will launch the “Maine Poetry Express” a poetry reading tour that will feature readings by Mainers at locations across the state.

The poet laureate serves a five-year term and advocates for the written word throughout Maine.

McNair said he will take his direction from Maine’s three best-loved poets: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

McNair, 69, has received numerous awards and fellowships and read his poems at the Library of Congress.

He is the author of 18 books, including poetry, prose and edited anthologies.

He has received three honorary degrees for literary distinction, and has served on the nominating committee for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

He was appointed the state’s fourth poet laureate in March.

He is Writer in Residence at UMF, where he directed the creative writing program and received the Distinguished Faculty Award and the Libra Professorship.

He also served as a visiting professor in creative writing at Colby College, which acquired his personal papers in 2006.

About 35 people attended Wednesday’s ceremony at the Blaine House.

McNair read them his poem “Reading Poems at the Grange Meeting in What Must Be Heaven,” which he said takes place in his town of Mercer, at a grange meeting where he was invited to share his “hobby” of poetry.

The poem reads, in part:

“For I am rising with my worn folder beside the table of potholders, necklaces made from old newspaper strips and rugs braided from rags. It does not matter that in some narrower time and place I did not want to read to them on Hobby Night. “

 

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