Wesley McNair, "Goodbye to the Old Life"

Last week, I returned to both Shields and Solomon for the second halves of my residencies. To commemorate the start of a new year, we read Wesley McNair's "Goodbye to the Old Life," a poem I first encountered as a subscriber to The Writer's Almanac email listerv. (Even though Garrison Keillor's taste in poetry can be maddeningly monochromatic, I have nonetheless come across many fine poems and poets this way.) Students and I discussed all the things McNair says goodbye to, looking more closely at a few of them to get at his particular intent. For example, when he writes,


Goodbye to the old life,

to the sadness of rooms

where my family slept as I sat



late at night on my island

of light among papers.

Goodbye to the papers



and to the school for the rich

where I drove them, dressed up

in a tie to declare who I was.



Goodbye to all the ties ...


I asked "what kind of papers?" (At least one student was flummoxed, thinking first of paper as a blank sheet rather than schoolwork, or perhaps drafts of poems.) Who (or what) is the them that he is driving? Why does he describe the rooms as sad? I also asked about the ties -- when does a person usually wear a tie? What does declare mean? Adding to the deceptive complexity of this poem is the manner in which McNair connects its stanzas, deftly using enjambment but also a certain chronology of thought as he considers each goodbyed item. It really is quite brilliant, yet in an offhand way. I also turned students' attention to the eleventh stanza, beginning


And to you there, the young man

on the roof turning the antenna

and trying not to look down


asking them who the young man could be, why McNair was speaking to him, and why at the end of the poem? They found the poem, and these questions to be very interesting. We had quite illuminating conversations in each of my six classes.

As for their poems, and an explanation for the prompt(s) based on McNair's poem, see blogs for Shields and Solomon.