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In fact, of the book's 38 represented poets, only seven flourished before the 1970s. The other 31 made their careers from the '70s to '90s. If this anthology actually does what it claims, then we must conclude that Maine's Golden Age of poetry - apart from seven isolated antecedents including also Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Coatsworth and Richard Aldridge - has occurred over the last 20 to 30 years. Indeed, the book offers good poems by creditable postmodern-day Mainers: Leo Connellan, Philip Booth, May Sarton, Theodore Enslin, Kenneth Rosen, Constance Hunting, Gary Lawless, and state laureate Baron Wormser. But it's hard to believe that Longfellow, Robinson, Millay and four others could be the only Maine poets worth mentioning from before about 1965. Writers and artists do not spring full-blown from nowhere; their genius is nurtured and fired in surroundings that make demands of them, an idea implied in McNair's word "tradition." But missing from The Maine Poets is any real sense of historical surroundings. Wilbert Snow, Marsden Hartley, Holman Day and Sarah Orne Jewett are absent, as are all contemporaries of Longfellow, such as Abbie Huston Evans, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Arlo Bates, John Neal. In truth, if the book were what it claims, then many of the included poems - competently phrased though they are - should not have pre-empted poems by at least some of these poets. But maybe the book is not what it pretends to be. The introduction also declares, for example, that McNair "was simply out to pick the best poems I could find," suggesting the selection process had less to do with tradition after all, and more to do with radar. Otherwise, certain omissions are puzzling. No anthologist can match everyone's preferences, but it's hard to say why Bern Porter, William Hathaway and especially H.R Coursen were overlooked. The absence of Peter Kilgore, on the other hand, one of Maine's sharpest poets of the last 35 years, might be at least explainable by a radar theory of poetic stardom. Kilgore's work, despite its shocking acuity, has had little fashionable visibility, and he navigated largely unmonitored territory in the small-magazine scene of the 1970s and '80s. Even if noticed in McNair's control tower, Kilgore probably would be classified as a UFO. Given the lack of historical balance in this collection, there appear to be many UFOs. A poet who lived in Maine but mismaneuvered and strayed foolishly into unmonitored airspace - steering clear of awards from authorities such as the Associated Writing Programs, Maine Arts Commission or National Endowment for the Arts, or neglecting to stage sparsely attended readings on college campuses, or attend the hub-and-spoke writers conferences and colonies, instead making subradar flights over the actual Allagash or off-screen reaches of Orland, Garland or Area 51 - that poet vanishes. I'm not saying The Maine Poets is a bad book - it's not, it's quite a good book, for what it does. But it does not depict Maine's "tradition" in poetry. Instead, it maps some of the poets whose craft one way or another flew into range of Wesley McNair's radar screen, which is tuned mainly to the last 25 years and conveniently to some famous dead poets such as Longfellow and Millay whose brilliance reflects well on the rest. This anthology gives, with some puzzling exceptions, a view of some of the stars of Maine belles-lettres in the early 21st century, plus a few others who write competently and fly in appropriate circles. © Dana Wilde 2007; Bangor Daily News, 2003. Reading Forays home The Mind Errant |
The Maine Poets and the UFOs The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse, edited by Wesley McNair; Down East Books, Camden, Maine, 2003; 260 pages, hardcover, $25. The world was simpler back when birds, smoke, clouds and stars were the only things in the sky. You easily knew, for example, who the best poets were, because there were authorities appointed to tell you. In the 1800s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Maine native, was deemed by many authorities and common readers to be the brightest star in American poetry. And he retained that popular distinction until another Mainer, Edwin Arlington Robinson, launched his poetic project around the turn of the century. Around then, the two were America's most widely read poets, with one anomalous exception, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," which is probably the single most popular American poem ever. In the early decades of the 20th century, the world was changing more and more rapidly. All sorts of contraptions started flying around in the sky that had never been seen before. Ways of tracking them were needed, so radar was invented. Sometimes puzzling lights appeared on the radar operators' screens, and were named unidentified flying objects. About 1912 a third Mainer, Edna St. Vincent Millay, streaked like a meteor into American poetry. Longfellow remained a venerable beacon, and of the 10 Pulitzer Prizes for poetry awarded in the 1920s, Robinson won three and Millay one. Three of the four brightest lights on the radar screen of American popular poetry were Mainers. The fourth, Robert Frost, spent his time in New Hampshire and Vermont, but nevertheless arranged, through his poetic powers and ability to maneuver craftily, a radar signal so strong it could never be ignored. As Wesley McNair indicates in his new anthology, The Maine Poets, Millay's and Longfellow's signals faded toward the edges of the literary critics' radar screens after World War II. Postwar radar operators began monitoring other wavelengths, and the verse that earlier Americans so loved was not ironic or weighty enough for the new critics. Robinson's poetry maintained a holding pattern near the control towers because his irony bites deep, while retaining its Maine hues. Around the end of World War II, unidentified flying objects started appearing all over America, not only on radar screens - military pilots called them "foo fighters" - but to the naked eyes of everyday sky watchers. One UFO may have crashed and been removed by the authorities at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and in 1976 four men camping in the Allagash may have been abducted by one. No one knows for sure, because the authorities do not officially recognize the existence of UFOs; we just have hints that shocking things happen off-radar. Nothing like this could have occurred before the invention of airplanes. Before there were aircraft, there were no UFOs. Even Poe, who made war on Longfellow and is an anomalous figure in American letters, was uncategorizable but nonetheless identified. Today the activity in the sky is harder to track. This should be evident to anyone reading McNair's anthology with a knowledge of Maine literature. The book claims to represent "an ongoing tradition" of Maine poetry by collecting together verse of "Maine's poets from past to present," indicating the territory covered is comprehensive in space-time. And Maine's three biggest stars are well-represented - healthy selections of Longfellow, Robinson and Millay occupy the first 60 pages, together with three poems by Robert P. Tristram Coffin, who also won a Pulitzer in 1936. Perhaps Longfellow's "My Lost Youth," a reminiscence on Portland, should be included, but at least Longfellow is here at all - no other 19th-century poets are. |