Letters Between Poets

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Dear Mr. Amaryllis:

Enclosed is the uncorrected proof of Wesley
McNair’s poem, “Trees.” Please have him look
it over carefully, making any necessary changes
or corrections, and return the galley to me
in the enclosed envelope.

Thank you.

Very truly yours,

Nina Engelhardt

Assistant to the
Managing Editor

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Wes McNair
N. Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

Good to have your letter.

Are there any textbooks which resemble the one that
you propose on interdisciplinary themes in American culture?
On the whole, I think this one is the less likely. If there
are no other textbooks in the field, any publisher will be
reluctant to take up a new field – and of course there are
far fewer courses which would use such a book, than might
use an introduction to poetry. On the other hand, there are
dozens of introduction to poetry texts!

There is an old rule in the textbook business: if
somebody proposes a book telling you that it is absolutely
new, and nobody has ever thought of doing this before, reject
the book! It is a very cynical field. The usual notion –
the old wisdom – is to find the one or two books in the field
which are selling the most copies, and do another book which
is very much like them, maybe taking the best features of each,
doing a few new things in it, but very little, and covering
everything that they pretend to cover – and then bring it
out and advertise it as absolutely new and the perfect thing
for everybody’s course, knocking every other book out on its
rear-end.

Do you know Perrine… Sound and Sense? I hate it.
It is the one to shoot for. Probably the second best seller
in that field right now is X. J. Kennedy’s Introduction to
Poetry. There are others by Nims and Simpson, which sell
a little every year but not terribly much… there is the old
Understanding Poetry, which sticks in there. And I have two of
them, in a sense. One is my old The Pleasures of Poetry, which
has never done very well, and the other is the poetry section
of my new Holt book, To Read Literature, which will probably
be issued as a separate text, the poetry part by itself, next
year or so.

Perrine is full of lies by simplification. Kennedy and
I are known as too sophisticated.

The ones that sell best integrate a lot of poems into
many chapters, and the subject matter is pretty well decided
upon for you, and even mostly the organization. Then usually
these books have a brief anthology of poems for further study
appended to them. The trouble with Simpson and with my first
one is that they had a brief introduction, not organized particularly
as a text – no study questions and so forth – followed by a good
anthology. Apparently most teachers want – though most teachers
will tell you that they do not want – something that leads them

2/

by the hand.

I know so much about this, I would take twenty pages
to tell you about it. Think about it, and if you continue
to want to do one, let us get together and talk about it.

I think that the first thing for you to do is to work
out a plan for such a book, which would detail what the chapters
would contain, and what sort of thing you would do by way of
study questions and by way of a supplementary anthology…
then in order to convince a publisher you would need some
sample pages, maybe one whole chapter and a couple of things
from other chapters…and then you would have a sort of
prospectus for a book which you would be worthwhile (sic) to
send around to publishers. I do know some people in the
business. I think I could be of help.

It is always wise to remember: some textbooks make
a tremendous amount of money, another percentage make a
small but gratifying regular income… And most textbooks
fail and do not make any money at all. However, it is better
than gold mining, and more remunerative than writing excellent
verses.

Best as ever,

Don

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Dear Wes,

Got your note. Andrew is doing very well.
He is up and around and cooking all the time, but
he needs to wear his brace. Tomorrow he starts
the journey back to New York, as I drive him down
to a friend in Massachusetts, who will then take
him on further.

Best as ever,

Don

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Wes McNair
North Sutton
New Hampshire

Dear Wes,

It was good to see you, however briefly, yesterday…
and today I have your letter, mostly about Herman. I am glad
if the bottom seems to be raising a little. …I do appreciate
having helped some other people, from time to time – very much
including you. I believe it and I warm myself at that fire.
And then I remember Robert Frost, as quoted by Lowell in that
poem about Frost, Frost always so miserable about his family,
saying how little good his own successes did his family. Well,
Andrew goes off Thursday, and I suppose I will keep my fingers
crossed for the rest of my life – or his. I have hopes for him,
with some reason I think. But his is a tenuous hold, really.
He is another casualty of the sixties and the war, like many
many of his generation. I don’t suppose he will ever really
be free of it. I mean simply that he grew up at a time when
resistence to authority was decent – and somehow or other it
was a revolutionary act to drop acid when you were fourteen
years old.

I have been going over “A Dream of Herman,” and, yes,
I do feel certain about the last line. Of course this does
not mean I am right! But I feel very certain. And I
understand about loving certain lines. They give one everything
one could ever ask for! They are the golden dream! When I wrote
Ox Cart Man, it ended with: “bees wake/ roused by the cry of
lilac.” And I still think it is just plain exquisite. But
it was decorative, finally; it came not at the end but after
the end… Louis Simpson made me take it out! Sometime maybe
I will use it some place else.

The last line here looks like a last line. It looks
like something cherished and set apart and framed and put on
top of the piano. The fact that it is iambic lends to this
quality. It is not the only thing. Everything in it claims:
beauty. But therefore, somehow, it seems to look at itself,
and not at Herman or at the experience. It seems to be poetry!
(I will understand that everything I say is answerable. But
you reading this letter any way try to understand how I can
mean these things negatively.)

I do have a suggestion. Cut it out. End the poem
instead with something like this: “And then he lifted his
sacksx and opened/ one more flourishing song.”

My “flourishing” is no good, but it is meant to do
something like the wideness of the trees, and the spectral
quality of the moment. You could end it simply “one more song”
but the line would be terribly short, and I think we could
stand the perfect adjective right there. I’m a little troubled
by the way the lines at the end get more consistently long,
anyway, and would be grateful for a short line, tying me back
to earlier line-lengths.

I think of one weird coincidence – and that is all
it is. In The Alligator Bride, look at a poem called (I
think it is called this) “The Old Pilot.” That was my little
elegy for my first wife’s father! I did indeed have some of
the same problems. And I am not sure that I avoided sentimentality.

I do not find this poem sentimental – except I guess
in a sense in this last line, probably especially with the
word “lovely,” but really with the whole gesture of the line.
I think we should end with a fantasy of the real saxaphone [sic]
bursting into real $ong [sic].

Love to you as ever,

Don