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hoorah for Ape! |
A note from McNair about this letter: Don’s handwritten message arrived in its envelope clipped to a check from The Atlantic Monthly, which had just published my poem, “Mina Bell’s Cows.” In the poem, my character Mina Bell mourns the death of her cow, April, nicknamed “Ape.”
Among letters about mutual visits, hopes for a teaching position, new publications in magazines, and continuing adjustments of The Faces of Americans in 1853, is the most important news of this section: the acceptance of my book in August by the University of Missouri Press as the 1983 Devins Award winner, chosen by David Wagoner, who published my first poem in Poetry Northwest years before. I phoned Don immediately to give him the news, and I still remember his reply. “Wes,” he said, “I could kiss you.” As I say in my essay about our early correspondence (in Mapping the Heart), “I could have kissed him, too. I could have kissed the first ten people I saw.”
I also notified Jerry Costanzo, editor of Carnegie Mellon University Press, who had written me a generous letter on February 1 about being unable to accept The Faces of Americans and his hopes of accepting it in the fall. In his response to my later news that the book had been taken by the University of Missouri, Costanzo offers the possibility of publishing my second book with him – though Don has already gotten “guarded interest” in my next book from David Godine.
In August of 1983 Don has his own literary successes. His play, Ragged Mountain Elegies, is produced for the second time in Peterborough, New Hampshire. And he receives the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for literary distinction at the Opera House in Newport, though I am unable to be in his audience, busy with summer teaching to pay for my son Sean’s first college year. Unfortunately, August is also the month of a setback for Jane that lasts throughout the fall: vertigo, resulting from an ear infection.
But Jane soldiers on, as does Don, even though he has deeply mixed emotions about the play he has written, feeling both high and low about it. “We must fear depression,” he writes on September 16, “[and] we must fear elation…There is no ending this unless we stop being poets and writers.” At another time, I might find wisdom in these words. But what I feel, looking forward to the publication of my first book and my Devins Award reading in Columbia, Missouri, is elation, without qualification.
[This section has 75 letters]
My year-long sabbatical leave from Colby Sawyer has been crucial to continuing the momentum started by the NEA fellowship, providing a range of poems in progress together with poems for Joey’s “fall campaign,” as Don has begun to call the process of submitting to magazines. “You are really building up a nice group for Joey,” he writes on September 30. On sabbatical in a period when my two oldest sons have left the nest, I have settled into the luxury of a daily writing schedule, teaching classes at neighboring colleges at night to make ends meet. Going into isolation with my poetry (naming the creation of poems a “vocation” twice in the early letters of this section), I write Don mostly when I am sending work for his critical assessments. I have caught the rhythm of the writing life at last, and I am possessive of it.
That rhythm continues right into the fall of 1982, even though I am teaching a four-course load at Colby-Sawyer and two night courses elsewhere. Outside of this correspondence, I am preparing all of my classes and correcting papers on weekends, just so I can spend a couple of hours each weekday morning writing poems. “Writing is going fine, in spite of all my teaching and other duties!” I write Don on October 31. “I remain on my daily schedule!”
In the meantime Don continues with his freelance writing and his poetry readings around the country. Busy as he is, it’s hard to schedule time in the fall of 1982 to discuss the organization of my book manuscript, The Faces of Americans in 1853, at his farmhouse, but I persist. Four years into the submission of my collection (I call it the”Most Famous Little-Known Unpublished Manuscript of Our Times”), I spend more time than ever in these letters fretting over its shape and content.
We meet at last to prepare the book for my own fall campaign.
[This section has 55 letters]
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[Postmarked January 20, 1981]
Tuesday Joey |
A central narrative in this section of the letters is my growing sense of myself as a poet. Returning to Colby-Sawyer College from my NEA fellowship to teach in the fall, I am committed to organizing my life around poetry. So I write to Don in the first letter of this section about applying for a new college position as a poet, against the odds of obtaining one. (“I plan finally to adjust my teaching assignment to my real self, kept secret for so long!”) Shortly afterward, I report my decision to resign as coordinator of the American studies program I founded, and my intention to apply for a full-year sabbatical in the ensuing year in case my job search doesn’t pan out. My NEA grant has allowed me to create enough poems for part of a second book, I tell Don on December 5, 1980, and I want to continue the momentum. “For the first time in my life,” I write, “I can call myself a poet, without misgivings.”
Yet events conspire to limit my output of poems. A mid-life crisis, brought on by the death of Diane’s father, family struggles, and an up-welling of regrets — leaves me “crying a lot,” as I tell Don on January 17, reluctant to spend time with poetry and its reminders of my “inner life.” By opening up my emotional life in this period, poetry has itself no doubt contributed to my situation.
One exception to my inactivity as a poet in early 1981 is the poem I write for Diane in sympathy for her grief , “A Dream of Herman.” Fussing over its final line with Don occupies a series of our early letters in the section. Otherwise, I try to hold myself together, using my spare time to teach in the night school at a nearby business college so I can pay some bills and send Diane to a summer session in pottery at the Haystack School in Maine. In one letter, I toy with the idea of writing a textbook for a new source of income.
In May, however, spurred on by acceptances by both Poetry magazine and The Atlantic, I tell Don I’m ready to start writing once more. And I do, sporadically, though my personal struggles continue. They include Diane’s two back operations that have resulted from her work in the state liquor store and prevent her from attending Haystack. All summer, our lost summer, she must recuperate, and I must serve as a house-husband, summer-school teacher, and occasional assistant for carpenters renovating our house. Dealing with such troubles and distractions, I send only three letters to Don in the summer of 1981, one of them composed in September.
Don’s correspondence in this section, like mine, is more personal than it has been before. It tells of his own sorrows – his son’s car accident, the dire health and eventual death of Jane’s father in Michigan, and Jane’s difficulties with depression. But by the fall of 1981 Diane is on the mend, and though Don is often on the road with an author tour and visits with Jane to Michigan, the two of us are back to active discussions about poems in progress and the revision of my still unpublished book, which the editor of Carnegie Mellon University Press has invited me to submit during his 1982 round of submissions. My year-long sabbatical, with its promise of new poems, has begun.
[This section has 60 letters]
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July 26, 1980
Dear Don, I’m not sure which “Superman” poem you ask about, You’ve no doubt noticed that I’m including two recent But I will certainly not give Davison any of 2/ for them elsewhere – or maybe you feel that they (or Incidentally these 2 are not the only poems I’ve Thanks for your help! Love, Wes |
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)
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July 14, 1980
Dear Don, Thank you for your bracing letter. I have mailed the book to You mentioned that you are in a period of uncertainty about your own I am speaking of your “Waterfowl” poem, which appeared on the back page I am sure your poem also helped open the way to other humorous “pop- Of course, your poems about the region of [inserted: northern] New England are also very I hope I managed to lift your spirits a bit with this small Love, Wes |
Read To a Waterfowl (published version)
Read The Thugs of Old Comics (published version)
Read The Before People (published version)
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8 July 1980
Wes McNair Dear Wes, These feeling [sic] simply do not end! Believe me I am There is only one place, or one moment, in which one So I do two things: I assure you that you will publish; In connection with your own book, I am pursing two I wish I could tell you the names of people at Viking, I think that the University of Georgia with Zimmer is At the University of Illinois Press, please address I’ll be happy to talk with you about which poems to 2/ If you are happy with the writing that you are doing Fine to see small batches of poems. You won’t hear Best as ever, and just keep to the bench, as the Don |
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July 3, 1980
Dear Don, Hoping that I might hear something positive from U. Weary of resubmitting – also to Yale, where the The thing to do now, I guess, is to send the book 2/ send it to places like Viking, Doubleday and Knopf? Earlier, you mentioned the possibility of Houghton 3/ I am happy with the writing I am doing now, There is, after all, no one whose opinion I value Love, Wes |
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11 April 1980
Wes McNair Dear Wes, Thanks for your note, though I’m sorry to hear the dis- Have a terrific time at Detroit. I spent seventeen years Best as ever, Don |
