WARNING:
You may be about to enter the Envy Zone, because
this poet and champion of N.C. writers is having too much fun at work.
LINKS
Hear
McFee read
his poetry
More
McFee:
Explore
R@C
McFee
in
The
Blue Moon
Review
Unexpected
Connections:
column & poem
in the N&O
UNC-CH
English
Dept: McFee
Notes
on a Napkin
by
Jason Smith
Twenty-five
years ago Michael McFee stepped into the student union. What he saw made
him draw a sharp breath and hold it: A fellow student, sunk low in his
chair and reading the Cellar Door, had opened the magazine to McFee’s
poem—the first he’d ever published.
Michael McFee would someday publish five books of poetry. He would win a Pushcart Prize and a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. And he would become an associate professor of English at Carolina, his alma mater, where he would win awards for teaching excellence and for artistic and scholarly achievement.
But at the time, McFee was an undergraduate waiting for another student’s reaction to his poem. “I was thinking he would jump up and say, ‘Hallelujah! I’ve been blessed!’” McFee says.
The student read on, cocking his head. His brow furrowed. He paused.
Then he threw the magazine to the table and stormed off, scowling.
Twenty-five years later McFee still remembers the lesson. “I’ve learned that it’s really okay to fail, or at least not to succeed the way I thought I was going to succeed,” he says. “I used to think you only sat down to write when you were really inspired by the Muses—and then when you did sit down, you wrote an immortal poem. And I’ve realized that’s fairly rare, at least for me.”
That’s not to say McFee doesn’t still feel butterflies when his poems go public. “I get this odd feeling,” he says, “because suddenly that poem isn’t mine any more—it’s a child and I’ve sent it into the world, and I’m watching to see where it ends up.”
But the places McFee’s poems end up—and the company they keep—would make any parent proud. He has published in the field’s heavyweights—Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, to name a few—but also in publications as far afield as Bulls Illustrated: The Official Magazine of the Durham Bulls.
McFee’s poems are tautly bittersweet, suggesting worlds below the surface of words. Fellow poet and longtime friend Robert Morgan of Cornell University is moved by an undercurrent of humanity in McFee’s poems, one that “connects the reader with a sense of family and community across time and geography.”
That undercurrent flows through McFee’s second and third books—Vanishing Acts and Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board—in which the poems are loosely based on family stories. “Cold Quilt” opens by describing a quilt stitched by McFee’s grandmother, who began sewing it “the day her husband died, a lifelong lament.”
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“I love metaphor, simile, and especially strong imagery,” McFee says.
“Often an unexpected image is like a glass of cold water in the face—it
wakes you up, delights you.”
His fifth book, Colander, is filled with object poems, written to describe some particular physical thing. McFee calls the object poem a “verbal still life.” To his painterly eye, the humble colander is “Upside down, a holy helmet / crowning my son’s impressionable head, / its feet fierce horns.” By poem’s end, the colander has become “A mask of sweet ether / my blinded mother lifted to her face / over the still-steaming sink.”
In “The Napkin Manuscripts,” McFee wrote that a poet “pays attention; he sees and says; he saves his world from oblivion.” Easier said than done. “But I’m always carrying a little piece of paper,” McFee says, patting his pocket. “I walk around hoping to be struck by lightning, by some minor bolt. I jot down something and then take it to my desk and fool around with it. It might eventually turn into a poem, or it might not.”
> NEXT PAGE: Why be a poet?
© Copyright 2000 Endeavors magazine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
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