Coming Down From Pisgah: A Memoir of Michael McFee

FEATURED AUTHOR—MICHAEL McFEE Coming Down From Pisgah: A Memoir of Michael McFee Robert Morgan I have known Michael McFee for about thirty years, since he reviewed my second book of poetry, Red Owl, for The Arts Journal in Asheville around 1976. 1 remember what a pleasure it was to discover someone interested in poetry from my part of Western North Carolina. Michael was born in Asheville and grew up in Arden in Buncombe County, just over the county line from my native Henderson County. Michael at that time was an graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, my alma mater. But he had started out at N.C. State, as I had also, a decade before him. Though we did not meet face to face until four years later at The Arts School in Carrboro, where I was giving a reading, Michael and I had kept in touch by mail in the intervening years. He sent me copies of his own poems, and published some of my work in The Carolina Quarterly. He reviewed my books Land Diving and Groundwork. Michael demonstrated his passion for writing and reading poetry, editing and reviewing poetry. I have rarely seen, especially in one so young, the commitment and intelligence he brought to his work in those years. It seemed to me he read everything published, especially by Southern poets, and he wrote and published and grew steadily as a poet. While I was on sabbatical from Cornell and living on Bob's Creek in Henderson County, North Carolina, in the fall of 1979, Michael and Belinda visited us at the old stone house on the hill above the creek. We walked far up the Cicero Mountain and explored a grown-over pasture as it grew dark. I drove them to the family graveyard and to old family house sites on Mount Olivet and Bob's Creek. Michael and I spent the most time together when he was visiting writer at Cornell in 1986-87. I was acting chair of the English Department that year, and with the pressure of hiring committees, budget crises, and promotion reviews, needed the distraction of a friendly face from North Carolina. We met for lunch and in the evenings. Michael and Belinda and little Philip Pickett often came for dinner at our house in the country. Michael and I showered each other 23 with new poems, and read each other's book manuscripts. We discussed poetry and poetics day after day, joined often by outstanding students such as Stephen Marion and George Estreich. Michael is one of the best readers of poetry I have ever encountered. I trust his judgement of new poems implicitly. Michael's year at Cornell was marred by the sudden death of his mother, Lucy Farmer McFee, in February of 1987. She had not been ill, and her death was a wrenching shock. Michael had been very close to her. Her death gave the remainder of Michael's time at Cornell an edge, a new seriousness, a reaching back into memory that produced some of his best work, the long meditation on his mother's youth called "Grace," published later in Sad Girl Sitting On a Running Board. In those years Michael reviewed scores of books of poetry in print and on WUNC radio. He supported his contemporaries through essays, interviews, and editing magazines. He compiled an exemplary anthology of North Carolina poets called The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat. He organized many readings after he took a teaching position at UNC-Chapel Hill. There is a great range in Michael's poetry. He can be witty and epigrammatic, satiric and parodie. He has written eloquent elegiac poems for both his parents, and long narrative poems incorporating family stories, and the mountain past. He is the master of a spare, taut lyric, of language tough and alert, yet humane and good-humored. He began his studies as an architecture student at N.C. State, and his poetry shows his love of structure, both traditional and innovative. There is a humanity, a curiosity and relish in his work. After his year at Cornell, I inherited a number of Michael's students in my...