Michael McFee: Long Time to be Gone

As an undergrad, I sought out courses taught by visiting instructors whenever I could—they typically did not grade as harshly as the tenured faculty. That was partly my motivation for taking a poetry seminar with Michael McFee. I was not familiar with the name—he had only one book at the time—but he was on a temporary gig, visiting from North Carolina (a pedigree that made him right at home at Cornell, which listed Archie Ammons and Robert Morgan on the poetry roster). It turned out to be one of the most memorable and influential course I ever took.

McFee was an astute and generous reader (although our poetry probably did not merit such attentiveness). He challenged and inspired us, and instilled a bit of his poetic sensibility without eclipsing our own.

Since then, I’ve followed his work with consistent admiration. I’m happy to report that he recently released a new collection, A Long Time to Be Gone. If you’ve never read his work before, this is a great place to begin. And if you’re familiar with his work, you’ll find everything you love—magnified.

McFee has a distinctive voice, marked by a sense of compassionate bemusement at the human condition. He as a knack for noticing the gesture or word that reveals something we didn’t know we knew about ourselves. He approaches language like a curious scientist, seeking to take it apart and reverse engineer it. An offhand comment can set him off on a grand philosophic or philologic expedition.

Like many current poetry books, this one is arranged into thematic sections. The first is perhaps the most elegiac, with poems inspired by the recent or soon-to-be deceased—a group that includes the poet himself. The first poem, “Brother Ass,” sets the tone, with a meditation that likens his aging body to a stubborn mule that just keep going, a thing of the earth, bearing its burden, the poet’s soul and spirit (a more concrete version of Yeats, “fastened to a dying animal”). “I mortified my body for half a century / by simply ignoring it,” he writes, no doubt hearing the root for “death” in “mortified.” And in “In Memory of My Niece,” he looks out of “the last window you looked out of” to see a bird perched on a branch, its tail dipping every time it sings, and he imagines her ghost pressing it down, as though it were a lever on a toy—a wonderful image, which evokes both her childish wonder and the sound of her song, which survives her. So long lives this.

The second section focuses on the days of Covid lockdown. I suspect every poet has penned an obligatory Covid poem or two; these, I think, will outlast our memory of the pandemic itself. They display his typical sense of whimsy or bemusement, along with his penchant for dissecting language. But mostly, they focus on how the lockdown reduced us all to our purest human components, like an acid bath. Faced with something new and unknown, he looks at it through the lens of language—which renders it less threatening, more playful and approachable. “The Word,” for example, notes that “pandemic is framed by the word panic.” Of course it is—but it’s only obvious after he points it out. In “No,” he laments the ironic oxymoron of the ballpark “closed on Opening Day.” And in “Will These Hands Ne’er Be Clean?” he sees his hands beneath the faucet as “two lovers appreciating each other, / their slippery ups and downs and ins and outs.” A wonderful, sensual image—but one that is undercut, because he notes that they are in fact not like lovers, but rather like forensic detectives, probing every crevice not for pleasure but for evidence of the unclean. The human urge for contact is internally curtailed by Big Brother or the morality police.

The final section mostly comprises portraits, after a fashion. Most intriguing is his focus, in several poems, on the autograph. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a discourse on the topic, though McFee shows it’s an intriguing concept. On the one hand, it exemplifies our desire to have a connection to fame, even if it isn’t our own. It suggest that we can learn a lot about ourselves by looking at how we idolize. And it begs the question of what distinguishes an autograph from simple graffiti? Is it the medium? The prestige of the writer? The value imposed by the receiver? Ultimately, of course, every poem is an autograph, the inimitable signature of the poet. 

I could dote on every poem in this collection, but let me wrap up with a section of “A Grudge,” in which his linguistic sensibilities are on full display. He considers the sound and feel of the word, and in just a few lines, give us “growling…grumble…aggrieved…grousing…trudging…ridges…grump…gruesome…sludge…judging…drudge…grunting.” A stanza of infinite echoes. If you’ve ever pondered the relationship between playfulness and mastery, this will certainly give you more food for thought.

As a title, A Long Time to Be Gone can be viewed as a modernization—or syncopation—of the Latin axiom, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Here is art that will endure.