Aircraft Lab

In 1941, this group gathered for a photo at the campus Aircraft Lab. Do you recognize any of these folks? Are you pictured? And who is that canine? If you know, Aggie Panorama would like to hear from you. (Photo provided by the Rio Grande Historical Collections at the NMSU Library.)

Pathfinders

Wilson charts life's course with fountain pen

NMSU Professor Emeritus Keith Wilson says he helped students "find their own way as poets." Photo by Michael Kiernan

Keith Wilson is enjoying a sunny respite from spring winds battering his nerves. "Keith means spirit of the wind in Celtic," he says, "but even so it wears me down." Quickly he puts his irritation aside, the laugh lines in his big Irish face deepen, and he begins telling stories - funny stories, serious stories and scraps of stories recognized from their reincarnation as poems. His poems - 27 books worth - say as much about Keith Wilson as any biography. It is no accident. One of his aims in writing poetry he says is to be a historian of sorts, showing people how it felt to be there. "I want people to know how it feels to be under fire in Korea, to confront a rattlesnake or to mourn," he says. His poetry reveals a complex and sometimes conflicted man who followed the family military tradition but found himself drawn instead to the writing life. In his poem "Echoes, Seafalls for Heloise" he speaks of "sea winds crying my name," but decides instead to find "a home

safe from waves." Home was to his native New Mexico and to Heloise, his wife now of 41 years.

Wilson's mother, Marjorie Valentine Edwards, came from an upperclass family in Washington, D.C. When the family fortune evaporated, Marjorie joined her brother Keith Edwards at Ft. Sumner, N.M., where he was an "end of the line" railroad lawyer. Wilson's poem about his mother's arrival wearing a beaded gown and "wildly overdressed for New Mexico sun and wind" practically begs for a beau. He appears shortly in the character of one Earl Charles Wilson, a handsome rascal of an Irishman.

Earl Wilson, according to his son, was a "magnificent liar and storyteller" who brought mostly grief to the family. But he also possessed a gift for language that he bequeathed to his son. "My mind is like a tape recorder of things people say," says Wilson. "Those words hang around in my head."

As the last male in his mother's family, he was destined to be educated in the family tradition. In preparation for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy, he attended the University of New Mexico where he was introduced to Chaucer's poetry. He graduated from the Naval Academy in June 1950 with an engineering degree and an ensign's commission.

After three tours of duty in Korea he decided to resign his commission. "I intended to spend my life in the Navy but I found I couldn't write and meet the 24-hour a day demands of a naval officer," he says.

The poems of his war experiences, however, gave him his break as a poet. In 1969 Grove Press, a respected avant-garde publisher of poetry, released Graves Registry and Other Poems, Wilson's first book of poetry.

By then Wilson was teaching poetry at NMSU. "Teaching is an honest occupation," he says, adding that he and his students were the best judges of that honesty. His aim as a teacher was to get students to bring that same honesty to their work. "I sometimes had to lure them off the trail they had set, but in doing so I tried to help them find their own way as poets."

Although he retired eleven years ago, his life remains full. He is devoted to Heloise, his four children and a collection of grandchildren. He recently returned from the Naval Academy where he was the first graduate to be honored as Distinguished Visiting Writer. In honor of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Las Cruces, Wilson wrote the lyrics for a three-part choral program, which was performed in April by the NMSU choirs and the Mesilla Valley Concert Band.

He still composes poetry, now in a tiny, leather- bound notebook, writing with an antique fountain pen. As a result, he says his poems are getting "shorter and shorter."

Linda G. Harris, '80