FOREWORD

Reading again through Mac's poems in order to prepare these remarks, I was struck most forcibly by 3 things.

In the first place, that I've known many of these poems—and remember them vividly—from the moment of their first public appearance, some as long as 30 years ago, when Mac would read them to a group of us writers who began meeting in 1964 at Cole's Restaurant (Leslie Fiedler was also a charter member, and Bill Sylvester came along the following year). And I feel something like awe before the span of time they measure and the freshness that, for example, "Tho Old Prospector" and "The Mad Scientist" retain.

Then I was struck how early on—in his early, ambitious opus, "The Horse Opera" (which takes the stock figures of the Western flick—The Cowboy, The Badman, The Wagon Master, The Preacher, and so on—and turns them loose as commedia dell'arte actors who, in improvising their roles, compose the soul-parts of the poet)—how early on Mac discovered his insignia, his name, though not yet—this, necessarily, would take longer, the meaning of his name. His "Barkeep," after reciting the bloody and drink-obsessed history of his forefathers (one thinks of the House of Atreus or of Faulkner), concludes, "Am I the Jack of Diamonds? I am the Jack of Hearts."

It is this heart—neither hardened nor shattered, but hospitable, affectionate, vulnerably offered, lacerated, bleeding--that beats through and animates the body of Mac's work, and does so in the face of losses past and losses to come, whether that of the father-abandoned lost little boy (in "1931, Des Moines") at the fair who cries out—in capital letters larger than his throat, larger than himself, that overwhelm and drown out the very cry they spell, "I HAVE NO NAME"—or that of the nuclear family, whose dark, unnamed member is heartless extinction.

Certainly this heart doesn’t lack courage; it refuses the premature consolations of satire or nostalgia, the deadening surgery of explanation. Until I re-read it, I hadn't recalled how powerfully biting, dire, explosive about the family Mac's collection Cold Turkey is or how pervasive generally the sense and scene of father-loss. Remarkably, these nourish one another: the pain of the shattered family romance keeps the satire from being for other people only, while. the attack on the family prevents the literalism of the explanations of the family romance (what made one this way) from substituting itself for experience and understanding—by demanding of the poet other terms and larger selves and sympathies.

And because it stays alive, the meaning of the Heart comes to reveal itself in the course of Mac's poetry, most signally in the dogs of "Six Dutch Hearts" who mediate between father lost and lost son, but also in the annual Valentines Mac has written for his friends and colleagues these many years: the meaning of his Heart is FAITHFULNESS.

Much of this seems to me to come together in what is possibly Mac's most beautifully and deeply realized poem, his late poem, "The Last Poem" —which can be thought of as his "Ode on a Grecian Urn." But here it isn't the fugue of sexual passion which is stabilized but the nuclear family at its most complete and ther􀀈fore most menaced moment, when the children aren't so tiny they're worrisome and not so large that they are leaving. The volcano has done its worst, lavished on them its terrible eternity, imprisoned and preserved them in Vesuvian lava, and holds them all now, as in a single vision, under its eye. Anna draws, Ross plays, Katka is at the stove--they are named in the poem. No one will abandon this small domestic world; everything here is serene: the dreadful doom of the family romance has been suspended. And The Poet himself sits in his bathrobe writing this very poem, this "last poem ... before the poems to come."