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January 27, 1977
Dear Don – I’m so surprised and pleased at the same time, Thanks so very much. Yrs, Wes |
Editorial note about this letter: The invitation from Marietta College was for a week-long NEA residency in late February.
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26 Jan 77
Your decision sounds fine. We want Best, Don |
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7 January 1977
Wes McNair Dear Wes, Many thanks for that letter. I’m delighted that you like the If you want to take a chance and wait to do a book-book, I will I’m happy – we’re happy – if our admiration for your poems has Go ahead and be consumed with self-doubt. Some day you will hear We look forward to the revised copy of the manuscript, heaven knows. Best as ever, Don |
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January 4, 1976 [misdated: should be 1977]
Dear Don and Jane, I have read the poems which I took with me after my last visit, Jane, you mentioned that I should send along poems for Don, you have me thinking about a “book-book”. Counting up You both may not realize that the confidence you expressed Thanks so much for your kind words. Yrs, Wes PS- My typist made a handful of typing errors |
Read Rufus Porter by Himself (published version)
Read When Superman Died in Springfield, Vt (published version)
Read Going Back to Elinore Quelch
Read Names of Horses (published version)
Read Kicking the Leaves (published version)
Read The Black Faced Sheep (published version)
Read Flies (published version)
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25 Dec 76 Thanks for the BAUHAN. Call to check us out, but it ought to be ok most any time, to come call, with the illustrations. We’ll be glad to see you again. Don |
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Postmarked Dec 23, 1976
Don- Sorry to have fouled up the spelling WILLIAM L. BAUHAN I have just received the illustrations Wes |
A note from McNair about this letter: The second paragraph refers to the chapbook manuscript I showed to Don and Jane with illustrations done by an artist friend (Don did not find them suitable in the end, and neither did I). I chose the painting on my card, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” because Don and Jane especially liked my poem “The Last Peaceable Kingdom” in the manuscript I left with Don. In fact, after Jane read the manuscript and discovered this poem had not yet been published, she chose it for her new poetry journal Green House, together with “Rufus Porter, Itinerant Muralist and Inventor, Undertakes a Commission in Bradford Center, N.H.”
Read The Last Peaceable Kingdom (published version)
Read Rufus Porter, Itinerant Muralist and Inventor, Undertakes a Commission in Bradford Center, N.H. (published version)
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Dec 16, 1976
Don- How long can a ball-point pen last when one is on the Have been in touch with Betsy Tunis (The baseball Also, the publishing house in Peterboro is WILLIAM BAUGHAN. Will stop before my pen does — Yrs, Wes PS. Was that you I saw in The Blackwater Gazette? |
A note from McNair about this letter: Don had a baseball question for my friend, Betsy Tunis. He has also asked me to provide names of small New Hampshire publishers who might print a chapbook he had in mind.
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Dec 76
I like the poems very much. Amazing Don Hall |
In this first, “getting acquainted” section of letters, sent in the afterglow of Don’s praise for my chapbook (“you saved my life,” I write on January 4, 1977), Don says more about the poems I left at his farmhouse, and I assess the poetry he mails to me in exchange. We do favors for each other—he recommending me for an NEA visiting poet fellowship, and I signing him up for a poetry reading at my college, Colby-Sawyer. We exchange visits. Jane Kenyon asks for, and accepts, poems for Green House. And I begin to mull Don’s suggestion that I go beyond the chapbook and attempt a full-length collection — a “book-book.”
Between my letter of thanks for Don’s reading at Colby-Sawyer in April of 1977, and my departure for my Fulbright year at the Catholic University of Chile at the end of August, I wrote him only five letters, four of them no more than notes, immersed as I was in, as I explained to Don, “fixing up the house for renters, preparing the calendar etc. for the Am. Studies program and making arrangements” for the family trip. In one of my letters I write as the coordinator of American studies, asking Don to give a public lecture in my absence.
My correspondence picks up considerably once I get to Chile. Though I taught American studies classes by day, in a busy posting, I wanted more than ever to continue my conversation with Don about poetry, which I now wrote in my off-time whenever I wasn’t exploring our new place with the family, or designing college American studies programs, or giving lectures at other universities in Chile and Argentina. Thus began my process of mailing Don my poems in progress, all of them with stamps he sent me from the United States. My letters at this point in our relationship were intended for Jane, too, with whom I also corresponded separately, critiquing her first book-length manuscript of poems in this period. In a note on October 12, 1978, I wrote to Don that I wanted to know what both of them thought about my poems in progress, because “you folks are the only ones who know what I’ve been up to here.”
Some of the poems I sent Don were mine, and others were translations of Chilean poetry, completed with the help of my graduate students at the Catolica. Primary among the translations was the work of Nicanor Parra, whom I visited during my Fulbright year. In return, Don mailed me his own new poems. One of them, “Stone Walls,” I shared with the students of my literature class, in a version I helped Don to create by way of my letter of September 3, 1977. By the time I came back to the US in August, 1978, Don and I both had books, though his, titled Kicking the Leaves, was available in bookstores, and mine was a manuscript which, as I wrote in this section’s last letter, made me “scared as hell,” since sometimes it seemed “good,” and sometimes, “no damn good at all.”
[This section has 46 letters]
