Colby College

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Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

Lovely to read all about you, in the Argus. In the
same issue, it said that Denise was reading her poems tomorrow
night, the 17th.* I cannot believe that she is reading Saturday
night – especially since the Cochrans have invited us for supper
that night. If you ever know of such things happening in the
future, please do let us know. I think that maybe in our absence
a bulletin has arrived and been overlooked.

We just took a ten-day cruise. Did I tell you that?

Anyway, I am delighted. Which term are you going to
take off next year?

I talked to Fran yesterday. She is not hopeful about
any early moves – so I am really glad that you are sending out
elsewhere. Nothing sinister in this. It is just that another
editor (Ted Solataroff) has gotten away with signing up a good
number of non-money-making books, which tends to mean that the
powers that be will be sour on taking on more, just yet.

The readings are going well. I am having tons and tons
of them. I think it is a combination of Remembering Poets, Kicking
the Leaves, and Writing Well – since a lot of places where I go
seem to be using Writing Well.

Love as ever,

Don

*[Written note on bottom: I telephoned. The 27th — & I will
be in Arizona, damn.
But Jane will come to the reading!]

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Wes McNair
Dept. of English
Colby-Sawyer College
New London, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

It is kind of maddening of me to admit this, but I cannot stop
from doing it: I have known that glorious secret for about two
months. But I was sworn to secrecy (which I will retain) and I
like to be somebody you can count on. I was bursting to tell
you, but I had promised that I would not tell you. But it was a
great pleasure for me, to hold that inside, and to think that you
would be hearing about it one of these days. The person who was
the chairman of that committee, which gave you the award, the
chairman of the literature committee of the NEA, or something like
that was…Frances McCullough! You might say, your fellowship is
not a bad sign in coming (partly) from an editor as well as from
other poets.

I know those fellowships well, and most of my friends – the
older ones, that is – have had one. Jane tried this year, and
apparently did not. I tried years ago, twice in a row, and got
turned down. But back then they were only worth three or four
thousand dollars anyway. What are you going to do? My only, very
faint distaste about all this is that I bet you will be off next
autumn, when I am teaching. Well, I cannot complain. I’m absolutely
delighted, and I hope that you translate those dollars into poems,
with a little leisure, time to read, time to take walks – such as
you have never had, or not for twenty years or so. I’m really so
happy for you I cannot tell you.

Joey has the word. Actually, there are some poems at the New
Yorker right now. The New Yorker saw a few last spring, and by the
time they had decided not to take them, it was too late to send them
other ones – so they had to wait until this autumn. Joey will hold
[Written in margin: i.e. they close down all summer for poems]
onto these until he hears from The New Yorker about the ones that
The New Yorker already has. And by the way, Joey just made his second
sale to that magazine.

Joey needed fair copies of the two poems because he doesn’t
like to steal Donald’s. And Donald’s, as a matter of fact, were residing
together with your letter in a box which will achieve the immortality
of files at the University of New Hampshire.

Joey says send no stamps, he will just keep ten per cent, like
all the other agents.

The Bly poem is one of his best known, from his best known book,
Sleepers Joining Hands. I assumed you would know it.

2/

I have not had time to read the new manuscript. In the last
few days, I have mailed a two-thousand word article to The Nation,
a book review; a treatment of “film” for a textbook; and a three-
thousand word article on Robert Giroux for the New York Times Book
Review. I have finished drafting six thousand words for Country Journal,
twenty-thousand words of an Appendix for a textbook, and a three-thousand
word introduction to the textbook… I have been writing twenty to
thirty pages a day, and revising earlier draft on the same days. And
next week I go away for five days, four reading in four nights. Life
is full, you might say.

I would like to keep this copy. Why don’t you send a copy
– after it returns from Dartmouth College, further duplicated – to
Fran McCullough at Harper & Row, telling her you have added a
bit and updated a bit. …And asking her how she likes the changes.
She is, by the way, a very clever intuitive editor for such things.
She helped me quite a bit with the structure of Kicking the Leaves.
I say “intuitive” because she finds it hard to tell why she thinks
what she thinks. But once she really thinks something, one does
well to pay attention.

I really look forward to reading the revision, and new poems,
and everything…but the thing I look forward to the most is your time
off from teaching because of this new fellowship!

Love as ever,

Don

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Dear Wes,

Let’s just forget about a reading. Nobody should read for $50.

“The Thin Man” is just marvelous. I love it, and I think maybe
it is even one of your best. I have two suggestions, or one suggestion
and one query. The query is “yearning,” which seems to me a terribly
corny word, a word from greeting cards, and very dangerous to use,
especially so early in the poem. I wonder what you have thought about it –
if you have questioned it – if you think it might possibly be improved?
And on the other thing I feel more dogmatic: please remove the epigraph.
Everybody in the world has heard this business about a thin man being
inside every fat man…and therefore to use it as a epigraph is or appears
naïve. I mean, the statement itself is as commonplace as “hot enough
for you” or “it takes all kinds to make a world.” If you had a poem
about watermelons, you wouldn’t have as an epigraph that watermelons
are ninety-eight per cent water…or whatever. I mean to say, it has
the status of sort of commonplace information.

The poem exploits this commonplace information perfectly, and
when we come to the reference or allusion, within the poem, we are pre-
cisely ready for it – except if you have that epigraph there. In that
case, it kills the surprise and spoils the poem. When I say that the
poem is superb, I mean without the epigraph. I really do think the
epigraph acts like a dog with a hundred eyes, or maybe a hundred sets
of jaws, guarding the entrance and preventing anybody from getting in.

And it is a wonderful poem. What a superb ending.

If you are going to be over this way, could you perhaps drop off
the book by Jenny? Or mail it, as I mailed it to you, if you can not
get over.*

Best as ever,

Don

*Or you could leave it with the C-S
receptionist?

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Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

Here is a book by Jenny, which includes reference to earlier
books, and a famous anthologized poem. I know that I have been in
anthology with her and that poem, and I cannot find it. Maybe – doubltess [sic] –
it is somewhere in the Colby-Sawyer library. But then, it is somewhere
in my library too, and I cannot find it. Jenny is a bit younger than I
am, and has done a lot of BBC stuff and journalism of one sort and
another, as well as the books of poems which are of course what she takes
most seriously.

As far as I can tell, there would only be two possible days,
the 27th or the 28th of September. She is visiting with her daughter,
and has a lot of things planned ahead of course, and I don’t think
that she could stay around or come back.

Let me know just as soon as you can, please.

Well, I am delighted about Fran’s initial response also, and I
know that I must not be “not too hopeful” and I hope to heaven you
know it also. Chances are, as ever, that we will not get what we both
want. But I hope that we do!

Don’t be disturbed about me feeling that things do not work. I
cannot remember ever having been wholly satisfied with anything by
anybody I know. [Written in margin: Or by me.]

I don’t feel more comfortable about that image with the o’s,
because I don’t know where the telephone linesman came from. I think
they have to be in there, cutting and making this unnatural, artificial,
man-made o. I was trying to imagine a natural one, which is what I felt
you had me imagining.

I don’t know whether the line would stress the car more than the
driving…I wasn’t particularly happy about the line that I suggested.
But I felt the lack of the bone, with the verb missing. I don’t think
that an incomplete sentence is really unusual syntax exactly. It didn’t
bother me as being peculiar or unusual or eccentric. It bothered me
as seeming somehow incomplete – I mean not just incomplete in the way
that it literally was. As lacking some essential organism to make it
thoroughly alive and vigorous.

I look forward to the two longish poems, heaven knows, and everything
else. Also to read the new order. I suspect that I will like it.
But it is hard for me to know without actually reading through it again
In the new way.

I told Joey and he says cool.

Love as ever,

Don

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Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

Good to have your letter. These are good poems. I have a couple
of questions. I guess I cannot quite see how they grow o’s. I can
see them growing over or under. I guess I can see one branch going over,
and another under, which do not touch but visually cross each other…
but an o seems too symmetrical, possibly? I love the cadence and
feeling of this poem, and then I am a bit disturbed by finding it
visually not exactly perceptible.

Again, I like the language of Driving Poem very very much – but
I am troubled by the syntax, wanting it to be a sentence and finding
no way to turn it into a sentence. Do I take it that the “room” is
the driver’s seat of the car? Or perhaps more accurately the car itself?
I might wonder about having a first line like: “This is the room…”

Joey would always like to have more poems to send out, if you
feel like it letting him.

I do have considerable hope that you will find your GM – or that
some decent GM will find you. And in fact, I have good hope for Harper
and Row. It does not mean any more than it says, but it is a fact
that Fran McCullough likes the manuscript very much. She wants to look
at it some more, and confirm herself in her feelings – and I don’t think
this is a sinister doubt. But the problem is elsewhere. It takes her
a long time, and a good deal of effort, to get a book of poems accepted
by the powers that be. The poetry-schedule is full up for a while.
She cannot even bring the subject up, to the powers that be, for a while.
And when she does, if she does decide to push your book as I hope and
mostly believe she will, the powers that be may not take to it,
or may feel that they cannot take on another books of poems at that time.
Therefore, you are to be pleased that she likes her work, you are to be
hopeful but not too hopeful, and you are to sit tight! OK?

None of which should deter you from going right ahead with revising
your manuscript and so forth. About the “dirty” poems, I too feel
ambivalent. I am not sure that they belong there – but I am not certain
that they don’t, either. Make your decision against them this time.
Be prepared, possibly for some argument on another occasion.

Best as ever,

Don

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Wes McNair
Box 43
N. Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

Thank you for that good letter. If I have been a help, I am
delighted. And I don’t mean to be false
[Written in margin: ly modest]
about it: I have been a help!
But I am delighted to have been, and want to continue to be.

I like that cartoon. But I don’t think that your situation
is quite so desperate!

I think your saturation-bombing approach is excellent. And I
would indeed submit to all of these places. Including the Walt Whitman.
The University of Illinois is getting its books around. Princeton
does a very good job. Carnegie-Mellon makes very attractive books,
and mails them to people. I don’t think it would be a bad deal.
Heaven knows, Houghton Mifflin would be the best deal. And I will
mention things to Jon Galassi. But that means little. They will get
at least a thousand manuscripts.

So will most of the places. Which always makes it a lottery.

I have been doing some more thinking about small presses, not
with you in mind, but just in general. That phrase covers so many
different things. I would not publish with Ithaca House. I’m not sure,
really, that I would publish with New Rivers – but more likely. I would
publish with Sheep Meadow. Or with Alice James… First of all, I
would publish with Greywolf. Do you know of that? They publish Tess
Gallagher, and do lovely books. “They” is a young man named Scott Walker,
whom I met at the NBA thing about small presses, where Jane read her
poems. A terrific, energetic young man – who makes his living by
publishing poetry! Obviously, the secret ingredient in such a “living”
is, as Pound would put it, low overhead. But he does, doing everything
himself – editing, designing, overseeing the printing, distributions,
sales, wrapping packages…

I liked him enormously, his vigor and intelligence. He does not
think of himself as some sort of bush league. He just wrote me a letter,
saying – freshly, cockily – that if established poets really liked small
presses, how come they never made small presses their major publishers?

I think I was being solicited, but I am not certain.

I told him that I was very fond of Fran McCullough, and would stay
with her out of loyalty – something which I think will shock him; I think
that will sound to him like being loyal to General Motors. But he is not
prepared to be some sort of farm system. He wants to be the continuing
publisher of terrific poets who never leave his stable. Tess Gallagher
has had opportunities to go elsewhere, but she will stay with him.
[Written in margin: So far, anyway.]

Distribution for small presses is getting better and better. It is
probably not quite so good as big presses, but in many ways it is less
frustrating. The thing about a small press, when it is expertly run like

2/

this one, and a few others, is that the author benefits from the
absolute, total, undivided attention and commitment of the publisher.
I cannot say that for Harper & Row! Fran McCullough cares, but she
does not handle marketing, distribution, remaindering, advertising,
promotion, and wrapping packages, the way Scott Walker does.

All I am doing – with you, and I will do the same thing with
a few other people – is to recommend re-thinking the notion of
the big publishers and the little ones.

Best as ever,

Don