A collection of appreciations
by Jason Smith
A poet plays favorites.
The Napkin Manuscripts. By Michael McFee. The University of Tennessee Press, 207 pages, $29.95.
I took Michael McFee’s
Intro to Poetry Writing class way back in the fall of 1993, and watched as Carolina basketball colossus Eric Montross scrunched all seven feet of his height into an improbable crouch and fluttered on the tips of his size-nineteen shoes to recite Robert Francis’ 1948 poem “The Base Stealer” to the rest of the class by heart—“Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate—now!” So forgive me if I’m a little sentimental over McFee’s latest book, The Napkin Manuscripts, part of which finds him looking back at thirty-some years of teaching and writing poetry at Carolina.
Montross was riveting; the poems we wrote were anything but. A friend turned in one about how I drove past him one day and didn’t offer him a ride (his title: “I Guess I’m a Chump”). Each and every one of us had to stand up and recite one poem from memory, McFee always ready with a quick prompt if we stumbled. “Honor the line!” he told us. Speak as it was written.
He wanted us inside those poems, and he wanted them inside us—to strengthen our memory muscle, as he puts it, and to understand “how each poem is a verbal journey.” McFee tells me I recited James Galvin’s “A Photograph of Miners,” and I’ll have to take his word for it.
But my atrophied memory muscle can still pull up parts of “The Man Who Became Old,” by Alberto Ríos:
For every year, he grew a new tooth
and this, at least among his friends,
created around him a kind of fame;
but the kind everyone gets used to
so that it was only occasionally enjoyable.
I recited that one in McFee’s Intermediate Poetry class. I re-enlisted because I liked that McFee was an Appalachian expatriate—he was from Arden, N.C., spitting distance from Mills River where I grew up.
But back to the book. McFee divides The Napkin Manuscripts into four sections. The essays in part one are personal. There’s a letter he wrote but did not send to poet Robert Morgan; a reflection on what the Confederate flag means, or doesn’t; an account of why McFee stole the footstone from his grandfather’s grave.
The essays in part two concern the crafts of teaching and writing. Topics include cover letters, rejection slips, and how McFee murdered his favorite typewriter.
Part three’s essays are close examinations of seven fellow North Carolina poets and their poems, and part four is a transcript of McFee being interviewed by Michael Chitwood at the 2002 Emory & Henry College Literary Festival.
As an undergrad, McFee ditched architecture at State for poetry at Carolina. The fields are similar, he says. They both involve constructions, makings, the visual. He thought poetry would be an easy A. But after many failures, he kept at it, never gave up, never stopped writing. Nowadays he has a standing weekly appointment to meet any of his former students for a drink: Linda’s, every Thursday at 5:00 p.m.
Arden is a little over two hundred miles and one world west of Chapel Hill, and depending on which of those measurements you want to use, you can argue that most every essay in The Napkin Manuscripts looks back toward North Carolina’s mountains either implicitly or unequivocally. At sunset, the shadows off the Blue Ridge are long. Michael McFee might have traded mountain views for the Piedmont’s red clay, but he’s never forgotten home.
Michael McFee is a professor and Assistant Department Chair in English and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. He received funding from the University Research Council and from the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Learn more:
- michael mcfee
- department of english and comparative literature
- the napkin manuscripts
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