Many years ago as an undergraduate student I took a basic course in poetry writing.
Most English majors take a creative writing class or two because secretly we all really wanted to be writers instead of the teachers or lawyers or real estate agents or waiters we ended up becoming.
So there I was. The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was President. Iranian students protested our government’s support of the Shah of Iran on the steps of the student union, and Saturday Night Fever was the movie we all watched before heading back to school at the end of the summer.
Not that it matters. Nothing much about that class matters, really. I didn’t understand what poetry was, and I am certain whatever I produced that semester was absolute garbage.
And that doesn’t matter either. What matters now, what I still carry from that class are the memories I have of the teacher. The man’s name was Thomas McAfee. He was a southern gentleman, an Alabaman who came to Columbia, Missouri years before, first as a student and later as a professor of creative writing.
It isn’t too hard to describe what he looked like. He was tall and painfully thin. His face was that of a man who understands alcohol, flushed with veins pushing out across his cheekbones. He brought an ashtray from the hallway into our classroom, and throughout the course of the class period he smoked one cigarette after another. Each one he fitted carefully into a plastic cigarette holder, and after he finished each one, he reached into his tweed jacket, pulled out one of those little bottles of nasal spray, and sent a blast up each nostril. He always wore the jacket and a tie and dress shoes, but they all looked like they were lifted from a rack at the Salvation Army. He carried himself delicately, and watching him it felt like he might break at any moment.
In those days lots of professors like to prowl around the front of the classroom engaging in demonstration of their enthusiasm and passion for their subject. Mr. McAfee had none of that. He sat all hour at the chair behind the teacher’s desk, and he spoke softly, like a man with a headache that wouldn’t go away until later in the day.
He was soft-spoken, and he read to us. He read selections from our textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and he read his own poetry from the chapbooks he had published. One day he even read to us from his one and only novel. Its title was Rover Youngblood, and it was long out of print even then. (It’s not a bad book, really, but I’m afraid its realistic use of the N word makes it an unlikely candidate ever to be rediscovered by critics or film directors.)
For a little taste, here is the first paragraph:
It was in May and the reason I’d run off from my home in Clearpoint, Alabama–the truth is, I lived about ten mile from Clearpoint, out in the country–was because of the mess I’d got into with pa and some other things. He wasn’t what you’d call a bad man but he was always beating on me and I was sixteen year old and getting tired of it. You’re getting to be a man about that time and you want to be treated like a man.
A couple of pages later, the narrator’s pa is described:
Pa wasn’t religious and always said he didn’t hold to anything but the Bible itself and said he didn’t want to hear no preacher trying to tell him what the Bible meant. ”Looka here,” he’d say, “one says to sprinkle and another says to duck. Got some of these that tell you to handle snakes. How do they know more’n I know? I learnt to read and can read as good as any of them preachers.” Another thing he said was that a preacher charges you to listen to him.
It isn’t hard to see where my old teacher’s personal story is headed. A short five years after I took his class, McAfee was dead, a victim of lung cancer. Sometimes when I’m in the company of poets or serious scholars of poetry, I bring up his name, but it has been years since I’ve encountered anyone who is familiar with the name, much less the man’s work.
I would really like to be able to go back, today, and talk to that man. When I was 19 (or whatever I was in 1977), I knew McAfee was very bright man in the process of killing himself very slowly. I knew he had lots of knowledge that I didn’t, and in a late-adolescent kind of way, I thought I wanted to know what he knew.
Thing is, later this year I will be 54 years old, and that’s the age McAfee was when he died. All of his life’s work was behind him when he was my age, and I’m vain enough to sit here and think my best is still ahead of me. This is as good a place as any to start.
