Colby College

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair
Hominy Pot Rd.
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

From what you say about Felix, I think it is still unclear.
This is the plot. In 1984 a man of fifty-five or so is daydreaming
while driving in his car alone all day. Of course he daydreams about
unpleasant things in the recent past… Then there suddenly a mnemonic…
he sees a sign that makes him remember driving all day with his dear
friend, same age, thirty years ago, just before the friend was killed
in the Navy. That is, he and his friend were driving to catch the
carrier where the guy flew an airplane, and shortly thereafter the friend
went off the edge of the carrier and drowned. That is the only accident.
Because he remembers his old friend, he suddenly has a vision of him
beside him sitting there. Naturally enough, he does not see his friend
at fifty-five, but at twenty-five… However, the morbid imagination
pictures him as rather waterlogged, you might say! In the moment of his
vision (not an hallucination, just say a quick flash) he remembers some-
thing that happened on this trip, connected with the sign for the Bar.
Then he remembers that story, just as it happened thirty years ago.
He remembers drinking pitchers, coming out, having a near-accident,
and what Felix said. That is all.

So there was only one accident, and it was the fatal accident on
the aircraft carrier. There is only one Felix, but he remembers another (?)
Felix, and it is as if the old Felix is restored to the carseat beside
him for a second. When you copied out one line you made a mistake in it,
and it is interesting because I have changed the word. You write “thirty
years passed and I was a young man driving/…” It should have been “thirty
years perished.” I am trying out “drowned” instead of perished.

I have got rid of twenty-five-years-old forever. I think.

You are probably right about my reluctance. I am afraid to be
known as the Vicar of Bray. Some people seem troubled by the great
variety within my work, even within the same book, often. I think that
a lot of “voice” is faked continuity. But. Anyway, doubtless I will
publish the metrical things under my own name. When I get around to them.
Wendell Berry hates the Ragpicker with a fierce passion. I hope that
you are the right one!

Best as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair

Dear Wes,

I am sure you realize this, but: you are eligible
to enter the NEA again this year. Do you have the applica-
tion form and so forth? Do it! I don’t think you need any
urging.

Best as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair
Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

Many thanks for the good letter – and the good last one. You
were not unclear. One is thick about understanding the objections to
one’s poem! Well, this one is, anyway. And then maybe I have a defense
of a poem which might be like yours, but I cannot be sure it will be like
yours, unless you make it – as with the Ragpicker. You know, I was just
reading those lines of Frost’s last night, before I got your poem this
morning. I’m really glad you like that poem. There may be only two of
us! Well, I think Jane makes three of us.

I had not been thinking about nursery rhyme. It makes me like the
poem better, to think of it as you think of it. Thank you!

Have you shown that poem to anybody? I have a half-idea of selling
the metrical poems as Joey’s. What do you think of that notion? I mean
to say, eventually I could print them as my own – if I was ready at that
time to blow Joey’s cover. Or for that matter I could claim that I had
given them to Joey to print as his own…

I was in Richard, not you. I felt him as high school age,
and without noticing it I made him younger – especially with the word
“babysitter.” Everything rides on the words chosen at the end and the
sequence of them. You have helped me a great deal. It is possible I
might coinclude a tentative, interim version with this letter – I will
see what it looks like when it comes back from Lois! More likely I
will show you another version of this and of others in a later letter.
[Written in margin]: nope

It is possible that I cannot write the poem I attempted to write
there – and I may then try to write the poem that you were thinking I
was trying to write. Or that I partly slipped into. But as of now,
with your help, I am working on what I thought I was doing in the first
place.

It has been subject and object and then it has been subject again…
changing every day.

The one question I don’t think you exactly answered in this letter,
is why “twenty-five years old forever” detracts from “the wrinkled and
puffed skin in the watery chair.” After you wrote that, I have noticed
that the “twenty-five years” is almost repeated a couple of lines later
with “thirty years” – and I decided that maybe there were too many years
around. What do you think? Or do you now think that “twenty-five years
old forever” is right and necessary? At the moment, I seem to miss it a
bit, when I cut it out… just fiddling with things in there.

I love the sounds you make. I pay some conscious attention to making
sounds – but the best sounds I make are unconscious, and they always turn

2/

out to be the high points of the poem – but I think that I get into
high sounds (for me, especially repeated dipthongs) because of the
excitement of the poem; and not the other way around. I think of the
in and out, the up and down of excited sounds in something like
Names of Horses. Quite unconscious.

But in the long process of working on a poem, I will occasionally
get conscious – I will see that there are three of a dipthong…I will
look around and see if I can add a fourth.

Don

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair
Hominy Pot Rd.
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

I like the second after. It is a music for me. Stet!

I’m really pleased that you like the poems I sent. I have all
sorts of questions of course. Isn’t “Sums” a weird one? I cannot read
it aloud!

Now about “The Ragpicker’s Horse.” You find it “charming and funny.”
Two other people to whom I sent it have hated it, I think because it was
charming and funny. Their notion – which I understand – is that this is
a poem about horror, about destitution…in which the children are first
of all mourning a horse, and then howling in terror because they hear their
parents howling, and their parents are howling about rickets and starvation.
So what the hell am I doing being charming and funny about it? Do you have
an answer? Why is it funny? I mean the last line mournful and horrible…
but can I do that when I rhyme “tsoris” with “horse is”? My fear is that I
allowed the decorativeness of the rhyming to carry the poem away with it,
and that in the process I became a heartleass beast.

I love it that you talk about three poems here, written in rhyme and
meter, without ever mentioning that they are in rhyme and meter. That is
the way I want it to be also. There are so many friends of mine who will
believe that I have turned from Communist to White Russian…the politics,
totally mistaken I do believe, of formal poetry!

Maybe you are right about “hurl,” but it seems to me that I remember
sheep standing quite still, staring around, and then throwing their heads
with great impetuosity down into the grass again. Does this ring any bells?
Didn’t you You didn’t miss no an allusion. Of course from “hurl” I took up an r with
Roman, and h with “heads.”

I felt that “Waking the Next Morning” – the title itself – was
necessary for the plot of the poem. Is it clear without it?
[Written in margin]: Why’s it wrong? Not that I’m wedded to it.

You are extremely helpful with Phototropism. You did not notice
that it is written in syllabics – and I don’t blame you. I never thought
of the jade plant cluttering the poem – and it is going out! Well, the
only thing I think about it – thinking further – is that it links the
woman to the gardening business. Maybe it doesn’t go. But I had not even
considered the idea that it cluttered it with an extra plant. I must
think more about that. I also think that the daylilies might have a location.
All sorts of good help here.

I have a lot of questions about your reading of “Felix.” You say
that the image which you love – me too! – “collides” with “twenty-five

2/

years old forever…” Why? I don’t know why. This morning I was looking
at it and I noticed that there is all sorts of figures and numbers in it,
and the word “years,” would not be the problem? I seemed to need to say
that he is still the same age he was when he drowned. But I could have
that, without the numbers of twenty-five years old forever, by saying
“forever still out of flight training school, or recently graduated from
Yale…” as it were.

You think that the speaker is more articulate than he out to be.
But then you say he ought to be more “trucker-like,” and he is nobody’s
trucker. At the very beginning he has that image about the ruler’s line,
which is supposed to make it possible for him to “talk poetry” again at the
end. And he is a Yale graduate, fifty-five years old, who is driving through
Texas for some unnamed purpose – doubtless to meet a client, who is a rich
oilman, about buying Manhattan.

I think I make him middleclass. They are driving from New Haven
to San Diego because they were back there for their third reunion at Yale.
(I do realize I didn’t tell you this!) But here is a man who has been divorced
a couple of times, who has been in a detox center, and who wishes to think of
himself as being mild, speaking reasonably…as he revises his old arguments,
in his driver’s daydream. What more do I need, or where have I given you
misleading information?

Troubles with “Richard,” also. I suppose that this is a poem more or
less “about” childhood schizophrenia. But it is not early childhood.
I think that I will change “school” to “high school,” or something like
that. Because Richard, who is having this fantasy, is probably fourteen
or fifteen years old anyway. Then I think of putting It in quotation marks
again – my sign that I am using “I” as a persona, or some persona other
than the usual persona that might call itself “Donald Hall,”… (Forgive
me the word “persona”; it is an MFA word and when I hear it I reach for my
gun.) That is to say, I would put it in quotation marks and use the word
“I” instead of using the word “he”.

You want the poet’s language to be closer to the perception of the
boy who actually experiences the disparity… Well, that is what I want too.
There is no amused adult in the poem. What makes it sound amused? I find
it grim. These are the fantasies of the adolescent himself. Maybe I will
repair it simply by the minor changes I mention. Would you look at the poem
with these in mind? See what else I need to do. I need all the help I can
get! You give me a lot of help here – most especially with Phototropism.

Love as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

Wesley McNair
Hominy Pot Rd.
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

I love this new poem. When I first looked at
it, I was bothered by what/that…right on top of each
other. And of course there is the rhyme on “not” a
little later… I think in the long run I like it much
better than I don’t like it. I like the whole poem.
You are terrific.

I know that a version of the new book is at Norton.
I had a letter from Fran McCullough the other day, at
Dial, saying that she wanted to start a new poetry series,
and would I help her. I said yes. I told her that you
might have a book. Nothing to do about it right now.

Here is some more stuff to look at. What do you
think?

Good for your Whitman reading in November. There
will be more!

Love to you,

Don

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair
Hominy Pot Rd.
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

I handed Joey the cheque, and he immediately telephoned People Express…
He says he will be back in September…

And in fact, I propose saving the good new poem until Howard Moss
is back. I know it has been useless to try him so far…but he will
come around eventually! Summer is actually a very difficult time to
place things. Most every place closes down, and when you send out poems,
they come back with a slip saying that nobody is reading them until October.
Not all places but most.

“The Name” is very nice. I have mild skepticism about “searched,”
as a commonplace, mildly-speaking a dead metaphor. Then I have no others…
I like it a lot.

Here’s the Atlantic poem.

Good luck with Norton. Like all other editors in New York, she
tends to take eight or nine months to get around to replying. How can
they do this! Jane is floating around, at two publishers right now –
then we’ll clear the decks for Alice Quinn at Knopf – who averages eight
or nine months.

Love as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

9 July 1984

Dear Wes,

Sorry about my stupidity. Of course I remember. I
knew I was forgetting something. What I was really for-
getting was to put it down at the time! Davison sent back
the latter two. I will see what I can do. That is, my
friend JA will…

Best as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, NH

Dear Wes,

Joey thinks that he has failed, so far, to place
Thruway, The Before People, My Brother Inside…,
The Minister’s Death; as well as Killing the Animals,
The Shooting, and Seeing Cooch…

Is Joey right?

Very good to see that big bunch in Poetry!

Love as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

Wes McNair

Dear Wes,

I think it is probably better to wait for Ironwood…
and Light Year tends to be an annual publication, so
probably there would be a chance for Light Year 86. (And
I don’t think they are light anyway, as I mentioned before.)
I don’t think it is worth it, to risk putting people off.

When it comes out in Ironwood, do remind me please.

Love as ever,

Don

[Click image to view]

The coronation will
be 20 October.

The Gov. swore me
in on Friday.
Call me Larry.

Love,
Don

What about Ironwood
& Light Year?