III. A Deepening (1/4/1980 – 10/6/1980)
There is good news as this section opens. Joseph Amaryllis sends word that Poetry magazine has accepted two of my poems. But there is bad news as well. Don becomes so upset about my dual submission of poems to another editor that he decides Joey can no longer represent me.
The other editor is a friend who founded a new Boston magazine about to go to press in its first issue without enough material. My work would help him with his start-up, and me with a Boston audience, I thought to myself, and besides, these were lesser poems that had been going nowhere. But Don (whose initial letter on the subject is missing) thought I had behaved badly, and he was right. The scrape I got myself into passed, but not without its lesson. I learned from it not only about proper submission, but all over again about Don’s value to me as a submitter, advisor and friend.
That is likely why I begin to sign my letters following this event with love, and to take his criticism more seriously. Asmy relationship with him deepens and I feel the vindication of my NEA fellowship, my correspondence becomes more frequent. During 1980, I write him nearly as many letters as in the four previous years combined, many of them accompanied by drafts of poems, and some others appraising Don’s own poems.
Don’s enthusiasm for my new work and Joey’s success in publishing it blunt the pain of not placing my book with any of the presses I send it to, including the house for which Don is poetry consultant, Harper & Row.Yet I still grouse about my situation, and Don steps in to encourage me, most notably in his astonishing letter of July 8, 1980, after which I find myself encouraging him about his own work.
September arrives with news that Don has won the 1980 Caldecott Medal for his children’s book The Ox-Cart Man.The September letters also show us in conversation poems I hope to give to Joey for submission to magazines. In this fall, the two of us switch roles. Sponsored by my NEA fellowship, I am home at my farmhouse writing and revising poems; meanwhile Don is at Colby-Sawyer College, teaching a course in composition to spark interest in the second edition of Writing Well, his college textbook.
[This section has 48 letters]
Hall to McNair: January 4, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: Howard Dinin is a friend who wanted me to ask Don for poems to publish in his new magazine, a start-up called The Boston Monthly. Don is responding to my phone call about it.
Hall to McNair: January 21, 1980
Editorial note about this letter: The “mini-poem” included in this letter is “The Fat Enter Heaven.” Here, from McNair’s writing notebook, is a draft of the poem as sent in this letter.
The Fat Enter Heaven
It is understood, with the clarity that is possible only in heaven,
that none have loved food better than these.
Angels gather to admire their small mouths and their arms, round
as the fenders of Hudson Hornets. In their past
they have been among the world’s most meek,
the farm boy who lived with his mother, the grade-school teacher
who led the flag salute with expression, day after day.
Now, their commonplace lives, the guilt about their weight,
the ridicule, fade like a dream. They come to the table steaming with food
more appetizing than they have ever seen, shedding their belts and girdles
for the last time. Here, where fat itself is heavenly,
they fill their plates and float upon the sky.
Read The Man (published version)
Read Country People (published version)
Read Memory of North Sutton (published version)
Hall to McNair: January 22, 1980
Read The Poetic License (published version)
Read The Bald Spot (published version)
Hall to McNair: January 28, 1980
Editorial note about this poem: Though McNair does not send Hall a completed version of his “mini-poem” until 3/29/1980, his final revisions at that time reflect Hall’s concerns.
Read The Fat Enter Heaven (published version as sent to Hall on 3/29/1980)
McNair to Hall: February 2, 1980
Hall to McNair: February 8, 1980
McNair to Hall: February 14, 1980
Read The Thin Man (published version)
Read Ox Cart Man (published version)
Hall to McNair: February 19, 1980
McNair to Hall: February 22, 1980
Read Old Trees (published version)
McNair to Hall: February 23, 1980
Read Holding the Goat (published version)
Read When Superman Died in Springfield, Vermont (published version)
Read Hair on Television (published version)
McNair to Hall: February 26, 1980
[Click image to view] |
February 26, 1980
Dear Don, I believe I forgot to send in my last letter Saludos, Wes |
Hall to McNair: February 27, 1980
McNair to Hall: February 29, 1980
Hall to McNair: March 3, 1980
McNair to Hall: March 25, 1980
Read Flies (published version)
Read The Black-Faced Sheep (published version)
Read Names of Horses (published version)
Read The Days (published version)
Read The Stump (published version)
Read The Old Pilot (published version)
Read New Hampshire (published version)
Read The Repeated Shapes (published version)
Read The Man in the Dead Machine (published version)
Hall to McNair: March 26, 1980
Editorial note about this letter: Jim Wright is the poet James Wright, with whom Don had a lifelong friendship, and whose work was important to both of us.
McNair to Hall: March 29, 1980
Read Mount Kearsarge (published version)
Read The Fat Enter Heaven (published version)
Hall to McNair: April 2, 1980
McNair to Hall: April 8, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: The “longer fat poem” I’m working on when I write this letter is “The Fat People of the Old Days.”
Hall to McNair: April 11, 1980
McNair to Hall: April 14, 1980
McNair to Hall: April 26, 1980
Read Epithalamion (published version)
Read Scenic View (published version)
Read Whip Poor Will (published version)
Hall to McNair: May 1, 1980
McNair to Hall: July 3, 1980
Hall to McNair: July 8, 1980
McNair to Hall: July 14, 1980
Read To a Waterfowl (published version)
Read The Thugs of Old Comics (published version)
Read The Before People (published version)
McNair to Hall: July 26, 1980
Editorial note about this letter: Going Back Poems was for a short time an alternative title for McNair’s book in progress, though he eventually returned to his earlier title, The Faces of Americans in 1853.
Read Calling Harold (published version)
Hall to McNair: July 28, 1980
McNair’s note about this letter: The early version my poem “The Fat People of the Old Days,” whose initial draft has been lost, had an epigraph linking the title to my daughter’s question as a young child: “Were there fat people in the old days?” — the epigraph Hall refers to in his discussion here. I continued to come back to the poem during the spring and fall of the ensuing year, sending Don another draft, not quite complete, on October 8, 1981.Yet the poem’s published version, which appears in the footnote of the next letter, shows that I eventually retained the parts he liked and replaced those he questioned, including the epigraph, despite my initial reluctance.
McNair to Hall: July 31, 1980
Read The Fat People of the Old Days (published version)
Hall to McNair: August 1, 1980
McNair to Hall: August 8, 1980
Hall to McNair: August 10, 1980
McNair to Hall: August 30, 1980 (1)
A note from McNair about this letter: In the title of this draft of the baseball poem I return to my original inspiration, which was a caution sign in my neighborhood of North Sutton that said, “SLOW Children Playing,” leading me to imagine the poem’s scene.
McNair to Hall: August 30, 1980 (2)
McNair to Hall: September 2, 1980
Read Ox Cart Man (published version)
Hall to McNair: September 3, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: The class Don refers to at the outset of this letter is the one he is teaching at Colby-Sawyer College to prepare notes for a new edition of his college textbook on composition, Writing Well.
McNair to Hall: September 5, 1980
Hall to McNair: September 8, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: Though Don’s and my conversation about “The Retarded Children Play Baseball” is almost over with this letter, off-and-on work with the poem was just beginning. In fact, I puzzled over how to write the poem off and on for nearly fifteen years, finally publishing the version below in my collection, Talking in the Dark. I actually completed the poem two or three years earlier, but magazine editors would not publish it, perhaps in part because they found its term “retarded” pejorative. Even sensing this, I decided to risk my title, since it reflected in its way the condescending attitude of the children’s teachers, and besides, my poem balked at substituting politically correct terms for the title such as “mentally handicapped” or “mentally challenged.”
Read The Retarded Children Play Baseball (published version)
See also a selection of McNair’s manuscript notes and drafts of this poem.
McNair to Hall: September 9, 1980
Editorial note about this letter: The poem enclosed is “The People Upstairs,” the text of which appears in the next letter.
McNair to Hall: September 9, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: Below is the text of the poem “The People Upstairs” as I sent it in this letter. The poem is a response to the footfall of tenants in our North Sutton farmhouse as they ascended the stairway to their upstairs apartment, and lived their lives above our heads.
The People Upstairs
1
each night
we hear them
ascending the stairs
descending
deeper and deeper
into the floor
falling while rising
away from themselves
their weightless voices
drifting out
of earshot far
into the next world
2
o feet
forgotten servants
left out
of the conversation
of mind and hands
we hear you
waiting
under the desk
we understand
your great patience
and your
mystery moving
beyond the cloud
of ceiling carrying
the body dream
3
above our heads
the faint scream
of pipes dissolves
the corners of rooms
and feet walk past us
in space
free of the tables
lamps and chairs
which hold us here
dying of definition
McNair to Hall: September 10, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: The issue Don has raised about the need to hold onto poems before showing them begins to take effect here and returns in my correspondence later on (for instance, in the letter of Section IV dated October 22, 1980), becoming one of Don’s most influential notions about revision, second only to his injunction about the possibility of publishing a book or getting a grant: “Expect nothing.”
Hall to McNair: September 11, 1980
Editorial note about this letter: After Don’s small complaints about “The People Upstairs,” McNair sent him this revised draft in his ensuing letter.
The People Upstairs
1
each night
we hear them
ascending the stairs
descending
deeper and deeper
into the floor
falling while rising
away from themselves
their weightless voices
moving out
of earshot far
into the next world
2
o feet
forgotten servants
left out
of the conversation
of mind and hands
we hear you
waiting
under the desk
we understand
your great patience
and your
mystery moving
beyond the cloud
of ceiling carrying
the body dream
3
above our heads
the thin scream
of pipes dissolves
the corners of rooms
and feet walk past us
in space
free of the tables
lamps and chairs
which hold us here
dying of definition
Hall to McNair: September 12, 1980
McNair to Hall: September 13, 1980
A note from McNair about this poem: Eventually, Don’s “reflective judgment” about “The People Upstairs” as well as my own led to pulling the piece from my book-length manuscript of poems; I also dropped the verse about Elinore Quelch (See Elinore Quelch). However, I “raided” parts of “The People Upstairs” for my later poem “The Longing of the Feet,” whose published version is available in the footnote of the letter from June 3, 1982.
Read Memory of Kuhre (published version)
Hall to McNair: September 17, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: To view the ill-fated Elinore Quelch poem in manuscript, which I agreed was not up to grade, click here.
Read The Last Peaceable Kingdom (published version)
McNair to Hall: September 28, 1980
Hall to McNair: October 6, 1980
A note from McNair about this letter: I quickly abandoned “Waving Goodbye,” the poem in question here, but it returned many years later, less abstract in its conception, fastened down by human experience. The final version of “Waving Goodbye, published in my 1998 collection Talking in the Dark, appears below. Sometimes the creative cycle a poem requires is long, and “Waving Goodbye” took nearly as long as “The Retarded Children Play Baseball” to think through. So this section of letters ends with a kind of promise to my future development as a poet.
Read Waving Goodbye (published version)
See also a selection of McNair’s manuscript notes and drafts for “Waving Goodbye.”