By Christine M. Quirk — [email protected]
Nathan McClain didn’t set out to be a poet.
He saw himself as more of a prose writer, but in a college creative writing class, his professor challenged students to write in an unfamiliar genre.
“I … was writing more essays or short stories,” he said. “So I spent the semester actually writing poetry and came to love it because that sort of compression and economy of language was really quite compelling to me.”
McClain’s love has turned into two books of poetry, “Scale” and “Previously Owned,” the latter of which he was invited to discuss at the Concord Free Public Library in celebration of Black History Month.
“In part, it’s about trying to trouble the pastoral tradition and thinking about how Black writers and writers of color relate to, think about, and navigate the natural world … and how the natural world has used to perform acts of cruelty against people,” McClain said.
“But a lot of the latter part of the book is interested in thinking about fatherhood … and about the criminal justice system, and what it means for our children, and for my children in particular.”
Poetry of parenthood
McClain lives and works in Amherst, the home of Emily Dickinson. He had thought of poetry as the “ruins of a bygone era” but then discovered more modern poets like Carl Phillips, Larry Levis, Robert Hayden, and Ross Gay.
“To find out that there were contemporaries and living poets who were writing about things that were certainly familiar to my own lived or learned experience was really compelling to me,” he said.
All art is somewhat autobiographical, McClain said, though that reality is not necessarily linear. Sometimes, the truth of an event and the language a poem uses to convey one’s feelings are a little different.
“Anyone who knows me would certainly be able to recognize aspects of the work that come out of my own lived experience…”
Nathan McClain
“I think that the ways in which we make metaphor, and the ways that we construct images, so often come out of our lived and learned experiences,” he said. “The comparisons that we make come out of who we are and what we’ve done and where we’ve been. … Anyone who knows me would certainly be able to recognize aspects of the work that come out of my own lived experience, but there are definitely lots of imaginative flourishes that are part of my work as well.”
Parenthood, and fatherhood in particular, are themes McClain finds himself returning to.
“It’s something that I think I’ll write about for the rest of my life,” he said. “My experience being a child, and then my experience now as being the father of children has been deeply informative for my writing, and it’s something I go back to constantly.”
Forged connections
McClain sees poetry as a way to learn about oneself, and a way to create a snapshot of a moment in time.
“I think the role of poetry really is about detailing what it is to live during a particular period in time,” he said. “It’s within the poems that I’m really able to discover how I feel or what I think.”
It’s also a way to connect with others, he said, which is what he hoped to do with his Concord audience.
“Even as I approach poetry, the books that I pull off the shelf, or poets whose work I admire, I get an opportunity to really get inside their minds and hearts, in the ways that they have experienced the world and how they move through it,” he said. “There’s so much I get to learn about personal experience that that’s clearly very different from my own. I still find that deeply effective, and deeply moving as I read other people’s work. So I think that’s really great.”
