Letters Between Poets

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Dear Don,

I wrote you earlier that I have applied
for an NEA – that is, I sent before
the deadline, last March. Do you mean
there is a new and up-coming deadline?

If it means money for time off, I
am shameless! Let me know if there’s something
I haven’t thought of!

Love,

Wes

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Dear Don,

Before I lose them, I want to get to your questions.

First, the one about “Felix.” I was troubled by the
“twenty–five-years-old forever” because I expected
the narrator to recall Felix as a young man before
the accident. I expected that Felix because I was
stuck in the earlier sentence which seemed to set
up the recollection: “thirty years passed and I was
a young man driving / … with Felix.”

True, you go on in the passage afterward to
speak about what happened after the driving,
but that whole passage is predicated by the
subjunctive “would.” So when you go to the
next sentence, “For a moment Felix sits beside me
again,” I think of driving again, and the
pre-accident Felix.

Now that I reread these parts, I go back
to being troubled by “twenty-five-years-old
forever.” Am I worried by the repetition of “Thirty
years”? What bothered me about the phrase is
that I half want Felix to be a different Felix –
not the undead one, but the living one.

2/

The other question was about printing the
metrical poems under Joey’s name. I’m
not sure why you should be reluctant to
sell the poems as Donald Hall, since I’ve
begun to see a fair amount of formal verse
around, particularly in Poetry. Your misgivings
may stem from being seen as a literary conservative
a long time ago- – and so now will be thought of
as a poet who has all along wished free verse
would go away. My own sense is that you’ve
written some exceptional free verse, and that
by now you should be able to write any damn
thing you please. Who knows but that printing
these poems under you own name, you’d
become known as the pioneer of the new poetry?
Why give such distinction to Joey?

Good luck with the revision – and the selling.

Love,

Wes

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Dear Don,

I see from your letter I was not clear in my response
to three of your poems. I will try to be clearer.

I still think “The Rag Picker’s Horse” is a good poem,
because of the tension between what is “charming and
funny” and what is serious. I don’t think the humor
takes places at the expense of the poem’s serious
content. I think the humor intensifies the seriousness,
and vice-versa. This approach must be OK,
because Frost approved it: “If it is with outer
seriousness, it must be with inner humor.
It is with outer humor, it must be with
inner seriousness.”

For me, the poem exploits the language and
tone of the nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes
have the simple phrasings, the naive pictures –
and sometimes the half-rhyme, comic rhyme
and extra metrical syllables – of this poem.
All of these devices give to the childhood
rhymes their enchantment and their
humor. Yet the content of nursery rhymes

2/

is often unpleasant and unsettling. There’s the woman
who lived in a shoe and “Had so many children, /
She didn’t know what to do.” What she finally did
do, you’ll remember, was (after feeding them a
very limited supper) to “whip them all soundly /
And put them to bed.” Certainly there’s futility and
despair in that poem, however comic it may be on
its surface. Or recall the poem Wally Tripp includes
in his illustrated book of Mother Goose:

Granfa’ Grigg had a pig
In a field of clover,
Piggy died, Granfa’ cried,
And all the fun was over.

What sort of “beast” would tell the story this way?
Yet we could argue that an inner seriousness lies
behind the outer humor here, too.

When I first read “Richard,” it seemed to me
you were writing about a young, imaginative
child who was so in tune with the variousness
of the world, he could not see how adults,

3/

or other creatures of habit, could behave as if the
unique things he knew were parts of an
unsurprising and unpredictable reality. The
“amused adult” was the narrator who, in
furnishing some words Richard doesn’t have to
explain his thought, was sympathetic. And while
he is also aware of the realities that had
already begun to threaten his imaginative view
of the world, I thought you wanted him to be
on Richard’s side in the struggle. Again, I am
speaking here of the poem I thought you wanted
to write – the poem that seemed as yet incomplete.

Obviously, your saying that Richard is not a
young child changes the poem for me. To make
him older, I do think you need to change
“school” to “high school.” Maybe that would
be enough, though I’m not sure about the
words “children” and “babysitter” (kids in
their mid-teens don’t usually have babysitters,

4/

so far as I know). Aside from the revisions regarding
age, maybe you should consider other changes:
Aren’t “crowds / seated in rows at the movie” (line 5)
“spectators” in the first place? I know you make these
crowds special spectators, but you do so after the
comma which follows “spectators.” And besides, movie
crowds ^already are in a way “rehearsed to behave as crowds
behave.” More: Should “subject” in line 6 be
changed to “object”? I seem to think so, given
the infinitive that follows the colon. Yet changing
to “object” would make what’s around the word
awkward – as if the spectators see something they
can’t yet see…..Incidentally, I still think this
is potentially a good poem!

How I got the idea your speaker in “Felix” was
a trucker, I do not know – except that the idea
had to have come from negligent reading. Yet
maybe a little part came from something else: my
feeling that you ought to give some identity to
the speaker beyond the identity provided in the
poem. I’d still like a hint about why he’s

5/

driving west this time (I like the continuous direction
of west in the poem, and the continuous failures resulting
from westward journeys). And I’d like, still, a language
that is less, well, literary. I fully accept the speaker’s
metaphoric leaps (the “watery chair” sort of thing).
People do make leaps like these in spirited talk – and
capitalizing on that fact is all the better for poetry. What
I object to is this sort of thing: “The voice of my mind /
turned mild and persuasive.” I’d prefer a speaking voice
closer to what someone might actually say – a voice
with more emotional tone, showing how this guy feels
about what he’s going through, so I can sense him
more strongly as a character. I’d especially like a
more feeling recollection, and daydream, of Felix, the
emotional center of a poem, and of the life. I
find the emotional neutrality of the language odd.
I know you could say that the man is frozen
emotionally, the outcome of his past experience and
current despair. And you might be right in saying so.
But I don’t think you would be.

About “Waking the Next Morning,” you are right:
you do need the title to explain the circumstance of

6/

poem. I made the suggestion of “The Word” or
“The Repeated Word” because “Waking the Next
Morning” seems to tell too much, referring to what
happens in the morning, and implying also what
happened the night before. But I can see no other
title at this point that would work.

Incidentally, I agree that the essential thing is
not whether a poem has rhyme and meter, but
whether it is a poem. And besides, I have always
put rhyme – or related sounds – in poems, even when
I never thought about such things. Even now I
am surprised at how often images and lines come
complete with appropriate sounds – before I work
on them. And when I don’t like an image or line,
I often discover I don’t like it because its sound
isn’t right – the sound within, as at the end of,
the line. And of course rhythm is extremely important,
too, though rhythm-as-meter still feels
uncomfortable to me now. (I like too much the
excitement of arguing with the space to the right

7/

of the poem as I write it.) But who knows? Maybe
someday I will turn Communist with you –
and join the other New Hampshire McNairs! I do
think that you achieve something in a poem like
“A Walk in the West Country” that free verse
could never quite get. A fine sense of order
that makes the disorder of which the poem speaks the
more overwhelming.

Anyway, I do like all of the poems in this batch,
some of them as is, others in their potential.
I only hope this attempt to help with them
is less confusing than my last attempt!

Love – and courage –

Wes

PS. Thanks for the affirmation of the second “after.”
P.P.S. Forgot to mention that “watery chair” image works
in its context. I’m sorry I sent you scrambling for nothing.
You should have no worries there. The mistake is mine.

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Dear Don,

I’m glad you like my poem. And I’m happy to say
I like the poems you sent, too. I’d have responded
earlier about them, but house guests have recently
prevented writing of any kind. More:

I like the language of “Sums.” The odd spellings
and usages of the poem create a mysterious barrier,
which are undoes as if entering a time capsule.
The language is strange and delicious.

“The Ragpicker’s Horse” is charming and funny,
with its bits of pictures. There’s a wonderful
naïveté in it.

“A Walk in the West Country” is also a good new
poem, singing its way to a conclusion that “encloses”
like the fence. I like the repetition of “stone” in the
poem, and especially the image of the man as a leaf.

2/

The “mutter” of the sheep is wonderful, esp. in the way it
mocks the utterance of the poem itself. I do wonder about
the word “hurl” in line 2 – it seems too active
or violent for what sheep do when they eat grass.
Do I miss some allusion in the hurling of Roman
herds?…

“Waking the Next Morning” is fine, too. I do like
the odd perspective on an event. I’m not sure I
like the title, is all. Maybe “The Word,” as “The
Repeated Word,” would be better?

I suggest a few small changes in “Phototropism.”
It seems to me “long and pale,” five lines from the
bottom, pushes the erotic analogy too far
(toward a cartoon) and ought to be dropped.

Maybe that section of the poem could go like this:

just so, in August,
wrapped. tight
daylily buds tip
forward….

(like the way
this word word links
the to sections
together, echoing “below”)

3/

I think the next-to-last line of the poem is confusing
without a comma between “rises” and “opens.” And
I think you ought to consider, at least, whether the
jade plant clutters the poem somewhat, interfering
with the human-to-plant analogy the poem
centers on. One more possible thing to consider is
whether the daylilies should have a location in the
poem. The phrase “east-by-south” halfway suggests
a location, after all, and there is a strong sense
of location in the opening lines. I’m not sure
such considerations should lead to changes, but
maybe so.

I guess I don’t like “Felix” as a whole,
though it contains an extraordinary image, the
most striking are in this entire batch, for me:
“his skin wrinkled and puffed/ from thirty years
of soaking in his watery chair.” WOW! I think
the image collides with “twenty-five-years-old
forever,” though. And it seems to me the speaker

4/

is more articulate than he ought to be. I think you
ought to try and make him communicate roughly
the same thing in a different, more trucker-like,
language.

About “Richard.” I love the idea of the poem,
and I think that idea would be better in execution
if the language were altered somewhat. I think
the poem’s language should somehow get closer
to the perception of the boy who actually experiences
the disparity between the people acting as if the
world all made sense, and the nonsensical world
itself. I do think you need to retain the voice
of an amused, older person in the poem, but I
feel that the voice you have becomes too knowing in
the lines between the two colons (only there),
taking the poem too far away from the boy’s
consciousness. With a few changes, this will be
a wonderful poem!

5/

All other comments will have to wait until next
letter, as I’ve got to run to get this letter into
the mail and get to my teaching at Merrimack
Valley College (my last night there). I hope
this is helpful – and I’m sorry for the delay.

Love,

Wes

PS – Note, with poem, enclosed!

WHAT IT IS

It is not what,
carrying that
afterthought of legs,
he runs to, and not
what his interrogative, foldy
face detects
on the floor, because
it is always changing, always
turning out to be
some other bug
or bush his nose wanted,
leaving his tail
smoldering
behind, and
it is never
after all that scratching
and lifting of leg,
enough: not even
after he joins
the dinner party, smiling
upside-down
and rolling
his testicles, not even
in his whimpering sleep,
dreaming in the tips
of his paws
that he is chasing
it, that very thing
which, scratching,
he can’t quite
reach, nor sniffing find,
because in the perfect
brainlessness of dog,
he will never know
what it is.

D- Is the second “after” (in “after he joins”) OK, or does it
repeat, awkwardly – Should I use “when” instead?
W