{"id":9,"date":"2013-01-09T15:38:58","date_gmt":"2013-01-09T15:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faculty.wpengine.com\/lee-manchester\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2013-01-09T16:08:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:08:53","slug":"new-york-times-writer-reflects-on-the-mary-mackenzie-project","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/new-york-times-writer-reflects-on-the-mary-mackenzie-project\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Times writer reflects on the Mary MacKenzie Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"New
\nHIDDEN TALENT, FOUND TUCKED IN A DRAWER<\/strong>
\nBy LISA W. FODERARO
\nSunday, June 19, 2005 \u2014 Metro Section<\/p>\n

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. \u2014 When the village historian, Mary Landon MacKenzie, died here two years ago at the age of 89, her relatives found a trove of historical research in her home office, as well as other expected writings \u2014 magazine articles, speeches, letters.
\nBut in a bottom drawer, they found something unexpected: a brittle cache of some 150 poems, all written by Ms. MacKenzie in the 1930\u2019s. A longtime widow with no children, Ms. MacKenzie had for some reason shut that early passion down, instead pursuing her interests in local history, geology, mountain climbing and gardening.<\/p>\n

But her nephew and his wife, Chris and Nancy Beattie, who own a bookstore in this village in the northern Adirondacks, were struck by the poems and told a local journalist about them. The reporter, Lee Manchester, had written Ms. MacKenzie\u2019s obituary for The Lake Placid News, a weekly, and had already decided to edit her historical papers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew I was going to have to look at them as a courtesy, but I was dreading it,\u201d Mr. Manchester recalled. \u201cI thought they\u2019d be written on scented paper with a purple fountain pen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then he started to read.<\/p>\n

The carefully typewritten poems were at turns romantic and austere, expressing a near-mystical celebration of nature or exploring lost love and the creep of death. \u201cA Sleepless Night\u201d begins:<\/p>\n

How long is forever?<\/em>
\n Can it be longer than tonight?<\/em>
\n I am a corpse with pennied eyes,<\/em>
\n And blanched with pale moonlight.<\/em><\/p>\n

And while many were dark, there was humor, too, in poems like \u201cTo a Man Upon Hearing Him Suck His Teeth for the 14th Time\u201d and \u201cCacoethes Scribendi\u201d (Latin for an \u201citch to write\u201d), which starts:<\/p>\n

Let the scientists sputter and gamble and guess,<\/em>
\n Let the clergymen preach and the christians transgress,<\/em>
\n Let the married ones quarrel and lovers caress \u2014<\/em>
\n I’m young<\/em>
\n And I’ve got a new dress!<\/em><\/p>\n

Other poems, like \u201cMarcy Trail on a Rainy Day,\u201d are paeans to intrepid Adirondack explorers like herself.<\/p>\n

I have seen people hug their fireplace on days like this.<\/em>
\n I could tell them of open shelters where the winds wail an endless song, …<\/em>
\n I could tell them of clotted smoke rising from sultry, singing fires,<\/em>
\n And the scent of coffee, and dripping bacon, and fresh-cut wood.<\/em>
\n I could tell them of haughty, quiet pines and naked rocks where birds scream.<\/em><\/p>\n

Recalling how he felt when he first read the poems, Mr. Manchester said: \u201cI don\u2019t have much hair, but what I do have was standing on end. I should not have been surprised because her historical prose was really lyrical and evocative.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year later, Mr. Manchester, who lives in nearby Jay, N.Y., sought to have the poems published. He consulted a local writer, who suggested he contact Blueline, a 25-year-old literary magazine at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Mr. Manchester sent off a dozen representative poems to the magazine\u2019s editor, Prof. Richard Henry, and waited.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe editor of Blueline e-mailed me back and said, \u2018You know, we might be interested in seeing the whole thing,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Manchester said.<\/p>\n

Professor Henry, who teaches English, passed the poems on to the poetry editors. Although the magazine has published special sections in the past, the editors decided to publish Ms. MacKenzie\u2019s poems as a supplement, titled simply \u201cCollected Poetry: 1931-1937.\u201d The softcover book was sent to the more than 400 subscribers.<\/p>\n

In an interview by e-mail, Professor Henry said the editors felt the poems were of \u201csufficient quality and met the general mission of the journal,\u201d adding that the \u201cproject grew from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

He cautioned that today\u2019s reader might be put off by the rhyme schemes, now considered antiquated by many. \u201cNor does she use them with the knowing wink that many of the moderns did (Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example),\u201d he wrote, \u201cthough, like Millay, she is definitely aware of the forms she uses (indeed she uses many).\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Professor Henry said the collection included \u201csome wonderful poems that work within that constraint extremely well.\u201d One, \u201cFrogs Sang in the Morning,\u201d reminded him of Robert Frost. Others, like \u201cMarcy Trail on a Rainy Day,\u201d seem \u201cremarkably contemporary,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

How Ms. MacKenzie, who had only a high school education, came to write such sophisticated poetry is a mystery. One of five children and the daughter of a pharmacist and a hotel maid, she was born and raised in Lake Placid. She founded her school\u2019s literary magazine, serving as its editor for two years.<\/p>\n

It is also not known whether she ever tried to publish her poems. They were written from the ages of 17 to 23, while she was embarking on a long career as a secretary. Mr. Manchester said that after she graduated from Lake Placid High School in 1930, at 16, she took a job working for the local committee of the third Olympic Winter Games, which took place here in 1932.<\/p>\n

After writing what were apparently her final poems in 1937, she moved to New York City for a year. But she returned to Lake Placid, where she met her husband and continued in various secretarial jobs, and later began to immerse herself in local history. In 1964, after her husband\u2019s death, she became the official historian of North Elba, the town that includes Lake Placid. Shortly after the 1980 Olympic Games here, she was named the village historian as well.<\/p>\n

Her nieces and nephews were proud of the many articles on local history that she had published in newspapers and magazines like Adirondack Life. A few months before her death, she published a short book of local history, with the help of Mr. and Mrs. Beattie.<\/p>\n

A niece in California said Ms. MacKenzie had told her about the poems, though she had never seen them. But Mr. Beattie, the nephew, said: \u201cWe had no inkling. She never mentioned it.\u201d He is convinced that his aunt, who suffered from shingles, left the poems in her desk intentionally. \u201cWe don\u2019t know why she threw out other personal papers, but we think she wanted somebody to find this.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, even in her early 20\u2019s, Mary Landon, whose only brother died in his late teens, mused about her posthumous self, albeit tongue firmly in cheek. Her 1937 poem \u201cPlease, God, No Curlers Tonight\u201d concludes:<\/p>\n

When to the airy kingdom I take flight,<\/em>
\n Far from the world of men, beyond the light,<\/em>
\n Ah, shed no tears, but on my tombstone write:<\/em>
\n She died with smiles \u2014 no curlers tonight!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HIDDEN TALENT, FOUND TUCKED IN A DRAWER By LISA W. FODERARO Sunday, June 19, 2005 \u2014 Metro Section LAKE PLACID, N.Y. \u2014 When the village historian, Mary Landon MacKenzie, died here two years ago at the age of 89, her … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faculty.wagner.edu\/lee-manchester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}