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Wesley McNair (born 1941) is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored ten volumes of poetry, most recently, ''Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems'' (David R. Godine, 2010) and ''The Lost Child: Ozark Poems'' (David R. Godine, 2014). He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, ''The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry'' (Carnegie Mellon "Poets in Prose" Series, 2013). In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual. According to United States Artists, McNair’s poetry often deals with "the struggles of the economic misfits of his native New England, often with humor and through the use of telling details."〔(USA Fellows 2006 > Wesley McNair Bio )〕 In ''The Words I Chose'', McNair refers to the region of his poetry as "a place of farmers under threat, ethnic shop workers, traders, and misfits at the margins" and his exploration of "their American dreams, failures, self-doubts, and restlessness."〔The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press), page 58〕 He adds to these themes, love and its absence, loss and disability, and the precarious bonds of family and community. At the center of McNair's poems and his memoir is his family and extended family, whose conflicts recur throughout his several collections, forming a narrative of their own. His literary family, underprivileged and post-industrial, is at odds with those of earlier New England poets. He explains in his essay “Placing Myself” that whereas “a poet like Robert Lowell features a New England family of pedigree connected to the history of high culture...my own poetry family is lower class, consisting of mongrels whose history is largely unknown.” He continues: “Where Donald Hall skips a generation to write about his grandfather and the agrarian tradition he represents, I write about a broken family with no real patriarch and no clear tradition.” 〔Mapping the Heart: Reflections on Place and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press), page 5.〕 The struggles of his family poems and others often link with national themes, as in his long narrative piece "My Brother Running," in which he links his younger brother's fatal heart attack, following months of desperate running, with the tragic explosion of NASA's Challenger shuttle. In his recent collection, ''The Lost Child: Ozark Poems'', he moves from New England to the Ozarks of southern Missouri, where his mother grew up, though he does not leave his earlier concerns about family, community, and America behind. The core characters of the book, derived from his mother and her siblings, are part of a forgotten American generation who grew up in the poverty and hardship of the Dust Bowl period. Wesley McNair's ten volumes of poetry, inspired by region, American popular culture, and the broad human experience, include a wide range of meditations, lyrics and narratives. As critics and interviewers have remarked, his poems are attuned to the cadences and suggestions of American speech. A New Hampshire native who has lived for many years in Mercer, Maine, McNair received his undergraduate degree from Keene State College and has earned two degrees from Middlebury College, an MA in English, and an M.Litt. in American literature. He has also studied American literature, art, and history at Dartmouth College, sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. As of 2014, McNair is professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine at Farmington.〔(USA Fellows 2006 > Wesley McNair Bio )〕 In March 2011 he became Poet Laureate of Maine. ==Honors and awards== McNair has received two Rockefeller Fellowships for creative work at the Bellagio Center in Italy, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his other honors are the Theodore Roethke Prize, The Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, the Devins Award for Poetry, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, and the (Sarah Josepha Hale Medal )〔(Poetry Foundation > Poet: Wesley McNair (1941 -- ) )〕 for his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters.” In 2006, he was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship and in 2015, he was the recipient of the (PEN New England Award for Poetry, given for ''The Lost Child: Ozark Poems''. ) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wesley McNair」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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