MUZZLE MAGAZINE
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog

20/30: Nathan McClain, 30 Poets in Their 30s.

11/11/2013

 
Picture
Nathan McClain is probably the poet on the list with whose current work I'm most familiar. He is a great supporter of other poets' work, including mine, and our friendship emerged from our ongoing conversations about poetry.

The quality I find most admirable in Nathan's poems is how he manages to create abiding, sustained ache. His speaker never grandstands, and never indulges in self-pity – on the contrary, his discursive interrogatives often implicate him in his own sadness. Nathan accomplishes this using understated language, a quiet voice that knows sorrow well, and accepts it. Few poets have the courage to enter that place and stay there – I think of Larry Levis as one, and Carl Phillips, often – but it's fundamental to good writing: to look and speak clearly, even when it comes to pain. Please enjoy.

*

Houdini

Who would’ve known you’d grow so afraid of stillness,
enclosed spaces, that you’d no longer remember a time you weren’t
subtracting seconds from your life, as if each breath were held?
If you had the strength to pluck your lucky quarter

from behind your wife’s ear, would you have? Would she still laugh?
A teakettle boils on the stove, its steam enough
to unlock your lungs. Your wife reads from Robinson Crusoe,
whom you cannot help but dream of, enveloped

by endless miles of ocean. Outside, paper skeletons are strung
up on every house in your neighborhood. You hear a boy
skipping up and down the block, begging his mother,
for Halloween, Mom, can I please be a ghost, please?

*

Nathan McClain holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Weave, Quarterly West, The Journal, Nimrod, Toad and Best New Poets 2010. A recipient of scholarships from Vermont Studio Center and The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, he currently lives and works in New York.


Jen Sperry Steinorth
11/12/2013 02:52:33 am

Thanks for sharing this haunting poem and for the insight on McClain's work. I look forward to reading more McClain poems!


Comments are closed.

    Archives

    December 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    August 2020
    July 2020
    September 2019
    July 2019
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    September 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    March 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    December 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    April 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    June 2012
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    October 2010
    July 2010
    May 2010

    Categories

    All
    Npm2013

    RSS Feed

ISSN 2157-8079
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog