Wesley McNair, former Maine poet laureate and winner of prestigious awards in the arts and letters, grew up in economic insecurity when his father abandoned a young Wesley and family. McNair found in writing a way to process the complex emotions that resulted. On the one hand, he felt that his absent father belonged on a “wanted” poster of the type typically used for accused criminals on the lam. On the other, writing was a means to maintain a connection with his missing father. “I reached out to poetry, and poetry reached back to me” is the way McNair described it.
That McNair survived and triumphed over these circumstances can be attributed to what the late Mike Pride describes in his last book as “a fertile mind, a resilient heart, persistence, modesty and a sense of humor that included the ability to laugh at himself.”
Pride, a leading editor at the New Hampshire-based Concord Monitor beginning in 1978, finished “Northern Voices: Forty Years on the Poetry Beat” shortly before he died in April, 2023. The book was published posthumously, and that Pride completed it at all in what must have been a race against time with his advancing cancer shows his perseverance and commitment to his subjects. Pride offers brief biographies of the poets and examples of their work, but in a meta sense the book is about a determined, respected journalist who loved the poets and poetry of northern New England.
It’s a solid book though a reader wishes, both for Pride himself and for the book, that he’d had just a little more time.
After landing in Concord, Pride was inspired by the poems of Donald Hall to invent the Monitor’s poetry beat. (I like the twist; most people when they hear the words “poetry” and “beat” paired think of them in the reverse order to describe the “beat poets” of the 1950s.) Pride covered poets in the Monitor, hosted and emceed poetry readings and befriended many poets. “Northern Voices” focuses on New Hampshire poets (McNair was born and lived in New Hampshire before moving to Maine).
As a Nieman fellow, Pride enrolled in a poetry course at Harvard, where he met the poet and playwright Seamus Heaney of whom Pride wrote. “…the lessons he taught will live within me for as long as I can hold a poem up to the light.” In addition to McNair and Heaney, Pride covers the careers and work of Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Charlie Simic, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds and Hayden Carruth — a group of acclaimed poets that includes Pulitzer Prize winners.
Robert Frost wasn’t among group of poets with whom Pride became acquainted beginning in 1978; Frost, who lived in New Hampshire (and taught in Vermont) much of his life, died in 1963. But the echoes of his work resonate: “Northern Voices” opens with a stanza from Frost’s “New Hampshire,” a poetry collection that won Frost a Pulitzer Prize.
A common trait of the poets Pride includes in “Northern Voices” is the accessibility of their work. As a group, they wrote with clarity about what they were experiencing and feeling in the real world. To McNair, this is part of a tradition of Maine poets going back to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edna Saint Vincent Millay who wrote “not for a closed circle of like-minded poets or academics but ‘about, for, and to readers from all walks of life.’”
In this way Pride sheds light on one of central questions in poetry: Is poetry a cryptic art form limited to academia, obscured by perplexing references and subtext that require the reader to use Google Search or have an AI assistant nearby? Or is poetry a space that is accessible and open to everyone?
Unlike the protagonist in Robert Frost’s oft-quoted “The Road Not Taken,” poets and readers, like musicians and visual artists, don’t have to choose a specific road and can fluidly traverse genres, styles and adopt experimental approaches to their art.
Pride met with poets over hot dogs at a diner and in their homes. He observed that many wrote about rural New England life with penetrating insight. For example, in his poem “Marshall Washer,” Hayden Carruth wrote: “They are cowshit farmers, these New Englanders/ who built our red barns so admired as emblems,/ in photograph, in paint, of America’s imagined past/…but let me tell you how it is inside those barns.”
In declining an invitation from Laura Bush to read some of her poetry at the National Book Festival, Sharon Olds wrote to the first lady of her experiences teaching writing classes to wounded soldiers: “When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing.”
Women poets wrote of the sexism they encountered, with Maxine Kumin calling out the contemptible, condescending “compliment” she got on occasion that “you write like a man.”
Many of the poets in the cohort that Pride covered on his poetry beat died before he finished his book. Reflecting on the inevitability of aging, he wrote, “my little world of poets is shrinking away.”
That may be, but poetry itself often celebrates rebirth and new beginnings. As Jane Kenyon wrote in the poem “April Chores,” “When I take the chilly tools/from the shed’s darkness, I come/ out to a world made new/ by heat and light.”
Dave Canarie is an attorney and faculty member at University of Southern Maine who lives in South Portland.
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