The poet Wesley McNair is the author of 10 collections of poems and other books. A New Hampshire native, he moved to Maine in 1987. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Maine Farmington and served as the state’s poet laureate for five years ending in 2016. Through readings and a weekly newspaper column, he brought poetry to the remotest corners of his state during his tenure. As a poet, he is known as a poignant, personal and often humorous storyteller.

Dwellers in the House of the Lord (David R. Godine, paperback, $16.95) is a single poem in three parts covering 63 pages. The narrative melds two stories about love. At the center of one, McNair’s sister, despite a troubled life, never gives up on the possibility of love. At the center of the other, President Trump sees love as a weakness.

McNair and Mike Pride have known one another for 35 years and speak often about McNair’s work and poetry. For The National Book Review, they recently conversed about Dwellers in the House of the Lord, which Pride describes as a “powerful depiction of current times in America.”

Q: This poem is explicitly set in the age of Trump. Why, and what challenges did this present?

A: Like many others, I’ve been upset about Donald Trump’s politics, but I’ve been equally upset by the failure of journalism, particularly TV news, to deal with the threat he poses to us. As Trump himself has said, his main tool as a politician is to create fear. And our 24-hour news cycle has often helped him to create it, recycling the anger of his daily tweets and his demonizing of opponents directly into the ears of his followers. Even when he’s criticized, he seems to win because the coverage is all about him.

I wanted to use poetry to get underneath all that and see Trump in a different way, a way poetry has taught me. The danger in dealing with him at all, of course, is that if you make him the subject, he has a way of taking the subject over. I was determined not to let that happen.

Q: There are two strands to your story: trouble with the American ideal and your own family history. How did you balance these elements?

A: Grace Paley once said, “I know I have a story when I have two stories.” One story in Dwellers is about Trump’s rise to the White House and his first months in office; the other is the story of my sister’s troubled marriage to the owner of a gun shop in rural Virginia. The first is a story made for television and based on fear and anger, and the second is based on love and reconciliation, which are tested in every possible way in real life.

Trump was successful in his presidential election in part because he stoked a fear of immigrants. And there are immigrants in my family story, too, but they are not figures in a made-for-TV drama intended to scare people. They’re people from my own experience, presented with a sympathy for their aspirations and their broken dreams.

Q: Yet a third aspect of the story is your background as a child of poverty who rose to become an affluent liberal.

A: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself affluent, though I am generally liberal in my politics. That background is implied in the poem. But in my role as the poem’s narrator, I’m less a character than a poet who’s experienced the events in both of my stories and is revisiting them to explore their intersections. So, the poem is a process of mulling.

And I go along – as he goes along – with this mulling of his, one memory or thought leading to the next, he discovers that each of the stories has an agent of fear and anger in it. In the big national story, it’s the red-haired Trump, and in the family story, it’s my brother-in-law, who’s so full of anger he doesn’t know what to do with it, frightening my sister.

But my brother-in-law – a Trump supporter by the way, at least at the start of my poem – takes an unexpected turn toward love and reconciliation; Trump, meanwhile, seeing love as a sign of weakness, simply rages on, because that story has no end. My compassion for my brother-in-law’s journey would have been impossible had I not put aside my political leanings and really seen him.

Q: So, you are telling two stories at once. What challenges did you face in helping readers connect one to another?

A: It’s important to realize that these two stories began as problems I myself was trying to sort out, apart from the poem. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would wake up thinking about my sister’s difficulties or the trouble in Washington in the way we do when we’re troubled, one thing reminding us of another reminding us of something else.

From that beginning, I began to think of telling the two stories together in the same poem. Because of the anger in both stories, and the sense of love lost, I intuited they were related, but I didn’t know exactly how. So, as I wrote, starting with my sister’s story, I fell into a pattern of associated thinking, which is poetry’s way of thinking. Metaphor is all about association, finding likenesses in things that aren’t apparently related.

I introduced that way of thinking first with my sister, starting her story and thinking about it as I told it, going back and forth in time. When I got to the Trump story, which starts in part two of the poem, I was readier to focus on the connections between the two. It took many drafts to transform my private mulling into a poem.

I had to select the associations that seemed most resonant as I went along and then adjust and shape each entry so that the poem, by way of its associations, might grow into a vision – that is, a new way of thinking about our politics and the lives we lead right on the ground.

Q: You mentioned a lack of love as a central characteristic of President Trump. How do you see that affecting America and how does it play out in the poem?

A: It’s not only a central characteristic, but the ultimate problem Trump poses for us. I’d put it this way: he is unable to love or to accept love. Therefore, he’s different from most of the rest of us. Who knows what made him like that, but it probably has something to do with the fact that his father raised him by telling him that to be a man, he had to become what his father called “a killer,” and to prove his strength by making people afraid of him. His mother didn’t much like him. When he was 13 and he gave them problems, they sent him away to military school. There were probably other influences – some have pointed to Roy Cohn as a later mentor – but we know from his interview with Bob Woodward that Trump considers fear to be his most important political weapon. And you can’t have fear without the conflict that justifies it, even if you have to gin up the conflict. Reaching out to others for reconciliation of any sort is out of the question, so long as he is in charge.

By drawing comparisons between Trump’s big, noisy story of fear and conflict and the more intimate family story of reconciliation in the face of conflict, I want to show the limits of Trump’s worldview and his power.

Q: In the poem, Aimee is love in name and deed — Trump’s antithesis. She is the glue to your narrative. She seems so lost but so powerful. What is she trying to tell us?

Nobody could be meeker than my sister, but she is called a soldier in the poem for the way she picks herself up after conflict and destruction and goes on, buoyed by the possibility of a loving connection. She is not only a sister and wife, but a daughter of immigrant refugees, and the reconciliation she represents at the end includes them, too. She is trying to tell us that to find order and peace in our homes and in our nation, we must be soldiers, too, putting aside the chaos of conflict to find what can bring us together.

Q: Aimee is based on your actual sister. How much liberty did the artist in you take in portraying her and other family members in such a deep and personal story as this?

A: When I started the poem, my sister had been stricken with Pick’s disease, a fast-moving form of dementia that often occurs early in a victim’s life. When I did my late-night mulling about her, I was thinking about this, too.

She was in her fifties when she was afflicted. We were close, so this was a blow for me. I was especially sad about it because she’d lived such a hard life, beginning with her troubles with my mother, who had her own sad story, and struggling later with an abusive husband. But nobody ever got to her loving spirit. In this she was unbowed.

When I told my story about her, I wanted to emphasize that truth. At the same time, I felt duty-bound to stick to the basic contours of her experience, and my brother-in-law’s as well. Every artist who writes memoir must decide how far to go with invention; for me, it’s important not to go all the way with it, so you’re just making things up. Most readers trust that you’ve honored the basic facts of what actually happened. In my view, anything less risks violating the reader’s trust.

Q: What are the advantages and challenges of writing about one’s family, and have they changed as you’ve aged?

There’s a saying that writers carry the unresolved lives of others, and in my family, there seem to be unresolved lives everywhere you look. I speak freely about this because I’ve lived long enough that my immediate family members are now dead except for my sister, and she has Pick’s Disease.

My challenge has been how to resolve the lives of these others in my poems. As I see it now, the advantage is how deep into poetry I’ve had to go in order to do the job. I’ve been challenged to open my heart, too, and become more compassionate toward the people I write about – never more so than in Dwellers in the House of the Lord. I don’t think you’ll find a single family member in the poem who is not sympathetic in some way. If you see weakness or damage done, it isn’t long before you’re led to a compassionate understanding of why.

Q: The most enigmatic character in the poem is Mike, Aimee’s husband. He is a gun-store owner with a natural affinity with Trump, but toward the end of the poem we see a sympathetic side of him. What meaning might a reader take from that?

My real-life brother-in-law, like his double in the poem, suffered at the hands of his mother, who couldn’t see her way out of her own pain as a young woman, paralyzed on her right side by a stroke. Sometimes, as in the poem, he spoke to me about his early trauma, though he never used the word “trauma.” Like most working-class men I’ve known, he was formed by a male culture, in his case, the Navy, learning to keep his feelings to himself and be tough, at least on the outside. But he’s carried his early unhappiness all his life, I think, and the only way he could express it for a long time was through anger. There are a lot of reasons for anger, and men store it up, which makes them natural targets for someone like Trump.

Yet my brother-in-law has another side, which in his later life he began to express by way of his affection for my sister’s cat, as does Mike. And near the end of the poem, when Aimee leaves him, and he weeps off and on and gets his own cat, he finds deeper access to his emotions. As one of his daughters observes, it was cats that “gave him permission to feel.”

Mike may seem enigmatic if you’re looking for a character who talks about what’s going on inside him. But he’s been trained not to do that. As with his peers in America, and there are millions of them, you have to look at what Mike does and how he does it to see how he feels. Still, the emotional crisis he goes through in the poem, and the change that comes from it, are more dramatic than in any other character.

Q: In 1993, you published My Brother Running, a long family-centered poem with the Reagan presidency as a backdrop. Eight years later, you set the long poem Fire in the early George W. Bush years. What do these Republican presidencies say about America that impels you to entwine them with your family stories?

I’m glad you brought up those other long narratives because even though Dwellers in the House of the Lord is a stand-alone poem, it’s also intended as the final poem of the trilogy you mention. I’ve been working on that trilogy for over 30 years, and each poem deals with a family crisis that happened to occur at the same time the country was going through its own crisis.

In My Brother Running, the personal crisis was my younger brother’s fatal heart attack after a period of relentless, daily running. His death is linked with the Challenger shuttle disaster, a real-life simultaneous event. To put it succinctly and callously, his heart exploded in the same moment the shuttle exploded, and that synchronicity allowed me to explore the underside of the Reagan era and its view of American exceptionalism. In Fire, a fire that actually happened while the Gulf War was taking place links destruction in my family with the destruction of American wars, going back to the Eisenhower administration, when I was a boy.

For me, the three poems of the trilogy are less about presidents than about cultural moments that I have opened to reflection through family stories, conferring in the process a kind of dignity to those I’ve known and loved.

Mike Pride is retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and editor emeritus of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, where he ran the newsroom for 30 years. He has written, co-authored or co-edited six books.