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Richard McCann

Visiting Poet

Richard McCann

Richard McCann has been instrumental in making poetry that speaks to the AIDS crisis and gay relationships. His work has been included in In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic and The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. His most recent collection of poems, Ghost Letters, received the Beatrice Hawley prize and the Capricorn Poetry Award.

McCann’s poems narrate a haunted world. The titles of his collections, Ghost LettersDream of the Traveler, and Nights of 1990, point to this poignant mixture of presence and absence, of imagination and fierce, unblinking reality. Poet Jean Valentine writes, “Richard McCann writes not about, but from, his losses. We listen to his ghosts and they are ours also.”

While the evocation of memory and death fills McCann’s poems with phantoms, both personal and cultural, they are undeniably focused on the body. Fiercely passionate and deeply elegiac, his poems are, as Mark Doty writes, “posted from the zone where mortality and desire intersect.”

McCann also has a deeply rooted sense of place. He was born in Maryland and has spent the majority of his life in the mid-Atlantic region, co-editing Landscape and Distance: Contemporary Poets from Virginia. Currently, he lives in Washington D.C., where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program at American University.

Select Poems

“The sweatings and the fevers stop,

the throat that was unsound is

sound, the lungs of the consumptive are

resumed….”

-Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers”

1.

What I could not accept was how much space

his body was taking with it: for instance, the space where

I was standing, the dazed fluorescence of his hospital room

where each night I watched him sleep. So this

is the spine, I thought, this articulation

of vertebral tumors, this rope of bulbous knots;

tissue, I thought, as I studied his yellowing skin-

tissue, like something that could tear.

Afterward, I waited in the corridor.

When I came back, he was alive and breathing.

Here, let me rub your back, I said.

Was it true what I’d heard, that the soul resides in breath?

Was it true the body was mere transport? I untied

the white strings that secured his pale blue

hospital gown. The blue gown drifted

from his shoulders. I rubbed his back.

I rubbed his back. Not so hard,

he said. I don’t need to be burnished yet.

From GHOST LETTERS (Alice James Books, 1994)

The wallpaper flowers

looked like foxes, sharp

noses pointed down as if

they were climbing

to the floor, although

really they were twisted

stems to make bouquets. I

pressed my hands to your shoulders as if

they might have joined there: what

did this crying sound like

in the next room? I couldn’t imagine us

past that wall. But when you embraced

me as if I were something to be carried

a long way; and when you rose

to dress in the bathroom

adjoining and the tap

water struck the porcelain

and you said

while shaving Don’t

you know I

love you, why don’t you know

I love you-I knew

what day it was; I knew

how the sleeves of my shirts

were folded inside the shirts I had folded

into my luggage; perhaps I could even have imagined

the concierge downstairs, his hand hovering

over the racks of room keys

like pawnshop watches…

From GHOST LETTERS (Alice James Books, 1994)

Tonight the Chinese lanterns along the dock could lead your ghost to water;

the departing ones need light, for their sight has already dimmed.

As for me: I’m sitting at the edge of the old canal,

whispering this ghost letter, staring at the moon. Dear friend:

There is no one pitiable in this life. No “pitiful abundance.”

If you saw back into this world, you would see me by the hydrangeas

still trained to the chain-link fence, where you first took my photo.

If you have the inclination to look back, that is; if the dead

are changeless; if the gravesite is something other than a way of having,

in the end. When you were dying, the hospital chaplain stood in the doorway:

she said we should be tending to your immediate journey; she said

we should take turns sleeping; she said the room was too cold for words.

And someone told her: Quiet! Don’t you know the dead go on hearing for hours?

What might I have said? I’d made so many promises. According to one book

I’d consulted, the autumn fields were set afire after harvest, to warm

the dying, as they rose.

From GHOST LETTERS (Alice James Books, 1994)

About Richard

Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2003