I love the book in its gross state, and think it is a
great improvement, far more improvement than it ought to be.
I love the feel of it, and really think it makes a quantum
leap. I also like the three new poems, and they are already
gone.
Yes, it was lovely to see you two – and Lily and Wolf also.
And it would be good to see you more often. We are very laggard
this way, both of us inclined to go to bed at about the time we
would be having people over. But when we do see people – I mean
a few people! – we love it.
You are absolutely right about the energy and the vulgarity
of country-western, and this is something wonderful in your work,
and generally it is the best part of your work. Yes, and do not
forget “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal-posts of life/ ,
end over end, neither to the left nor the right.”
Iowa was a lot of fun. I saw quite a bit of Don Justice,
whom I admire. Also there was Hank Coulette, and Larry Levis
and Marcia Southwick… And the Justices had a lunch
party for me, and two other people had dinner parties for me,
and somebody else had a big party after the reading. I felt
feted…and I feel even better to be home.
Unfortunately my piece about Kevin McHale seems to be
doomed. Inside Sports is folding. I feel about fifty-two per
cent disappointed, because I had looked forward to writing it;
and forty-eight percent relieved, because I can do something
else instead.
Best as ever,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: “Wolf and Lily” were local restaurateurs and mutual friends who swelled our dinner company in North Sutton to six….The three poems referred to in this letter are “A Dream of Herman,” “Mina Bell’s Cows,” and “Small Towns are Passing.” So Section IV concludes with one more generous letter from Don, thanking me for a visit; complimenting me about the poetry collection I will once more send out to editors; and submitting new McNair poems in the guise of Joseph Amaryllis. Less noticeable, but also helpful, is his last paragraph, with its model of cheerfulness in the face of writerly disappointment.
It was very good to see you and Jane last night. I’ve made up
my mind we will do it more often, barring conflicts in your
schedule or Jane’s, It does seem silly not to get together more
than once a year–a hazard, I guess, of living so near each other.
Enclosed is the revised manuscript I forgot to give you.
As you suggested, I made it “bulky”. I am very excited about the
result. What do you think? If I hear nothing negative from you,
I will have it run off next week.
I’ve also enclosed two poems for Joey, if you agree they’re
ready. I am awfully glad you like “Mina Bell’s Cows”
[Written in margin: and thanks for your suggestions!].
I was worried about that one. I like my poems, too, when they are “thick and
muscular and even fat,” as you put… “thick and gross.” (Your
description is so close, it gives me hope!) I was hoping for that
kind of thing in this poem, and I thought I was on the way with
the handling of the story, and with words like “Ape” and “walleyed”.
I’m glad you discover “grossness” in the poem.
I sometimes think of the energy and even the vulgarity of
country-Western music with poems like these–of getting that sort
of thing into a poem and refining just enough to make “literature”.
Early comics, say, or dirty jokes have a similar energy. Or Dear
Abby letters. “The tears have washed I love you from the blackboard
of my heart” and “I want to be a cowboy for Jesus in the Holy Ghost
Corral”–words like these have in them the yearning and sadness and
humor of the poetry I often want to write–this in spite of their
bathos, maybe even because of it.
Anyway, I hope you like book, poems and all. Let me know
when you can.
Love,
Wes
P.S.: How did the reading at Iowa go?
A note from McNair about this letter: The two poems referred to in this letter are a revision of “Mina Bell’s Cows” and the same version of “A Dream of Herman” I mailed to Don on October 8.
I’m so sorry to take so long with you, all fall. You
know there have been all sorts of little things. And now I
have been interrupted by this and by that – but (sic) a poetry
reading, by having to go down and watch the Celtics practice
and talk with Kevin McHale…all sorts of things that just keep
me from concentrating.
I don’t feel the urgency that you feel in one sense: the
book is going to change every few months anyway. I know I may
be wrong. I don’t believe I’m wrong. I don’t think that you’ve
hurt yourself madly by leaving these poems out – but I do think [you]
hurt the book. Because I think that these [poems] include some of
the best things that you have written. I don’t know as you are
doing this, but let me counsel against something that some people
do from time to time: they hold back on new poems in order
to get started on the next book. It is always wise, I do believe,
to print your best poems now, and hold nothing back. And it is
wise to get rid of the weaker old ones, even when they are old
affections and old favorites for various reasons. Also, I would
say that the shape of the book, that you perceive, as you put it
together, is far less important than the individual poems. I do
believe in trying for a shapely book – but only after you make
the decision to include all the best poems and leave out all the
weaker ones.
The book will seem thicker, with more texture and tweed
to it, more grit, more content, and much more particularity, with
most of these poems added, and one or two of the old ones taken
out. Just how you do it – just how you make it a single whole –
I’m not sure. But also, I do not worry terribly about it.
I love the new one, by the way. I have one or two little things
to question about it. But very very good. The only one of these
poems – nine poems – that I would omit is The People upstairs. You
were having some doubts about it. I would put the whole thing back
in the drawer. Two years from now you may find it and it may be
the start of something else great. As I have come to see it, over
the last year or two, I have come to feel that it does not work.
It is too thin. It is too tenuous a music.
I tend I guess usually to like your thicker and grosser
things – like the absolutely wonderful Peaceable Kingdom, which
was the poem in your manuscript at the very beginning which took
my eye – and my eye has never left you since! The new one is an-
other one of your thick and gross things. (By “gross” I am using
an exaggeration, as opposed to the very ephemeral, very short-lined
things, of which The People Upstairs is an example.)
2/
Leaving out. I would leave out Elinore. Elinore has
never been a favorite of mine, and as you have written more
poems, and gotten better and better, Elinore has receded until
Elinore just waters the soup at this point. I think that you
could put Holding the Goat and When Superman Died in the previous
section. In general, I think maybe you have too many sections –
and all the blank pages and the short line pages and the short
pages combine to make the manuscript seem a lot thinner than it
genuinely is. I want you to look for, and even enjoy the idea
of greater bulkiness. The book feels thinner than you are. I
would think about omitting some of the poems in the second part –
but I think that in a bulkier book they would stand up better.
They wouldn’t have to carry so much on their own backs. I don’t
think that Fire in Enfield or Kuhre are up to the best of your work…
but I don’t think that they actively hurt you, unless they seem to
be padding out the thin book. Lines or paragraphs like “Kuhre/
just lurches/ off/into the tractors/ noise and/…” This is very
very thin, when the word “off” has to carry whole line on its
back. And there is, in this second section, really less vigor
than there is in much of your work. I like your work best when
it is thick and muscular or even fat, when it is vigorous in its
positive or negative way – I don’t really make any distinction
between the positive and the negative! I make a distinction between
the vigorous and the frail.
I would leave out The People Upstairs. I would leave out
Elinore. I would think about leaving out Kuhre or cutting things
down. I would think about jamming things together a little more…
And I would add these eight poems and I would have absolutely
no doubt about that. Of the eight, the most nearly weak one
is the Beggars. I meant to say, it is not quite up to the wonderful
other ones. Even Calling Harold, tiny as it is, is wonderful and
gritty.
I don’t think you ought to worry about affirmation. I think
that books work as well by contradiction as they do by consistency.
In a poetry reading, for instance, I like to put poems right up
against each other that are absolutely opposites, that contradict
each other in every way…you get energy from contradiction. And I
think you can do this in a book as well. You need not – as everybody
assumes – print like with like. I really don’t [like] printing by sections
anymore. Maybe I will do it again, as I used to do it, but in the
Kicking I did not do it.
I am writing in haste Monday morning, dictating that is,
and I must get up and drive down to Brookline almost immediately,
to watch the Celtics practice, then talk with Kevin McHale,
Cedric Maxwell, and Bill Fitch, and then drive two and a half hours
back… It’s a good life, really, and I’m not complaining…but
I mean to say I cannot answer your questions about Ploughshares
(and I probably won’t know for sure for a month or two) and the
revisions in the Herman…although I like the poem as I read it
right now.
3/
And I do love Mina Bell’s Cows…although I have a couple of
changes to suggest. When you have contemplated the changes and
possibly made anything that sounds sensible, could I have another
copy of it, for Joey that is?
Three things. First of all, totally trivial, shouldn’t it
be hay “chute”? In my copy you have “shute.” It seems to me there
is the word “shoot,” partly working by folk etymology, but that
the real word is “chute” from the French for “fall.” Maybe I’m
talking about a typo. Then in the last line, when I read it,
I hear it in a way that you didn’t type it… I absolutely hear,
every single time, “who never would come home.” And Ifind (sic) it very
hard to say it the other way.
Then I find something a little awkward in the second to last
line, it seems to center around the word “and,” which is idiomatic
enough, but not exactly grammatical, and a little strange…and
kind of slows me down every time. And I am not sure that “meaning”
is [the] exact word, or that it is the exact word if you come at it this
way. I mean to say, I might want you to say something like “ape,
ape, as if she called all three of them,/ her walleyed girls…”
I’m not suggesting this as the right way to do it…just that some-
how the word “meaning” seems like the author’s interpretation,
and therefore to insert the author into the poem suddenly. The
author having a window into her skull and her hidden “meanings.”
I love the poem. Love the book, also,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: In this extensive and insightful response, Don gave me a new way to think about arranging my book, which was organizing its poems around a signature approach that was beginning to emerge in my work. As I look back, I see that I bumped poems out of my manuscript partly because of my overly strict adherence to themes, and partly (though I never confessed this) to save them, out of the fear that the slow trickle of my work in this period might eventually dry up and leave me with only one collection.
Below is the text of “Mina Bell’s Cows” as Don first saw it:
Mina Bell’s Cows
O where are Mina Bell’s cows, who gave no milk
and grazed on her dead husband’s farm?
Each day she walked with them into the field,
loving their swaybacked dreaminess more
than the quickness of any dog or chicken.
Each night she brought them grain in the dim
Barn, holding their breath in her hands.
O when the lightning struck Daisy and Bets,
her son dug such great holes in the yard,
she could not bear to watch him.
And when the baby, April, growing old
and wayward, fell down the hay shute,
Mina just sat in the kitchen, crying, “Ape, Ape,”
and meaning all three cows, her beautiful
walleyed girls who would never come home.
Jane is doing just fine. Of course after the relief –
even the high of the death of someone whom you have seen to
suffer the torture of the absolute damned…then there is time
for the grief to begin. But she shows every sign of taking it
all well. What is so important: she knows that she did the right
things. Oh, maybe some day there will come the day when they make
a computer which relieves us of being good. But I don’t look forward
to the day.
Jane got an NEA. The relief and pleasure for her, the
independent affirmation of her worth…you know something about
what that feels like! Very good for her.
I know Gerald Costanzo a little bit. He is a good man.
I’m delighted that he liked the book, and that
he wants to publish it… As you well know, nothing is firm until
you have the book in your hand, or see ten copies of it at once!
Still, I’m absolutely delighted.
I don’t think that one should ever save poems for a new
book. One should at any moment present the strongest possible
book. On the other hand, sometimes it is wise to leave poems out
of a book, not in order to save them, but in order to give a shape
to the book. I don’t know which you are doing, or whether you are
doing something else… I wondered if I might be able to help by
supplying an external opinion. I didn’t mean to leave you “most
concerned…”
You know, even after a book is taken, you are usually allowed
to revise it, to add to it, to subtract from it, to revise the poems
in the manuscript. Jane’s From Room to Room hardly resembled,
when it was printed, the manuscript that was accepted.
Your reasons for leaving out these eight poems… A lot
of them make sense. But sense isn’t always what matters. That is,
I think you may be worrying too much about “affirmative” and “negative.”
The quality and power of the poems is what matters, I think I might
argue. Do you have copies of these eight? Obviously I know them all –
but I don’t have copies of them handy. Could you make xeroxes of them
over at the English Dept., and send them to me, and let me play
with the manuscript as a whole, and make a (non-dogmatic) suggestion?
2/
I don’t think enough people pay attention to the book, [as shape,]
but pay attention just to making an anthology of poems; it is
possible that you pay too much attention to the book, and not
enough to the anthology of poems. But I don’t mean to tell you
so, in this letter – just to think that I might think about it,
and might wind up saying so…and if I did, that would be no
disaster, and if you disagreed with me, that would be no disaster
either…
I think it is important – and I’m sure you agree – to
put your best possible foot forward. Spend every penny you have.
Save nothing. In your first book.
I did not get a bunch of poems recently, except for the
book itself…maybe you sent them more recently than you think –
but I got the letter here, and have not yet received the revisions
of a dream of Herman or others.
Joey is about to submit some McNair poems to Donald Hall
for a special issue of Ploughshares. Probably the new revisions
are in order, in such a case.
Love as ever,
Don
A note from McNair about this letter: The poems Joey submitted to Ploughshares for Don, as a guest editor of the magazine (which was a matter of Don submitting them to himself) were: “Old Trees,” “The Fat People of the Old Days,” and “Calling Harold.”
Yes, I did just get word from you that Jane’s
father died. I suppose it is finally a relieving
thing for you both, since he had been hanging by
a thread for so long. I hope Jane is holding
together, and that you are. Diane and I both
wish you both well.
You wrote about my book at the very time I
was set to write you some good news about it.
Gerald Costanzo, of Carnegie Mellon Press,
sent me a very full letter about it, said
he found it “excellent” and did want to
publish it, though it was too late for this
year’s publication list. (My best information
was that manuscripts of poetry should be sent
to C.M. any time during the year. Apparently,
this is no longer so.) He asked me to send
it to him again in 1982, between September
2/
15 and October 15, and while he did not flat out
say he would publish it, he left me with the
impression that he would. The letter really did not
seem to be an elaborate “no.” Whatever it
may have been, it left me ‘up’ about the book’s
chances in the current form.
But I remain most concerned about your
feeling that the book might benefit from the addition
of other poems. If you finally feel I should
revise the thing, I will certainly consider doing
so. My main problem is that I went ahead
and ran copies of the present version (you’ll
remember I told you I had to do so because
contest time was coming up fast). But no
matter. I still have a bit of time for a
revision if I know of your ideas soon.
You ask if there was any “near-misses”
for inclusion in the book. I have not really
considered any poems for the revision
3/
other than the ones you found in it. Here are the
titles of the poems which seem to me appropriate
for some book, and which I’ve left out of this one:
(1) The Poetic License; (2) Beggars; (3) Trees That Pass Us
(4) A Dream of Herman; (5) The Fat People of the
Old Days; (6) Calling Harold; (7) The People Upstairs;
(8) The Fat Enter Heaven.
I left “(1)” out of the new book because it
broke the affirmative–unironically affirmative–
mood which the Porter poems establish in part 5,
and which moves into part 6. (I should say
also that the Porter poems establish a feeling about
region that I don’t want to intrude upon.)
I left “(2)” out because it has little to do with
the book as a whole, and little connection with
the poems of the last section in particular.
I suppose there might be some reason to include
one or two of the other poems–though probably
(5) and (8) wouldn’t fit. I can’t see much
justification for adding others, though. Maybe
4/
(3) could work in the affirmative last section; problem is,
it’s still another “region–viewed–from–car” poem,
and I have too many poems of that kind in the last
section already–three, in fact. Poem (6) might
be put into the last section, too; it is, after all,
a positive sort of verse. But it has nothing to do
with the new consideration of region (“new” after
the region of part 2)–and I do want this
business to dominate in Part 5.
For me, the book, whose epigraph promises
a “journey” that goes “backward in time”
“after a few wavers” begins with wavers,
or waverings, in the present, (sections 1 and 2),
goes backward (sections 3, 4, 5–hints in 2)
and returns to the present (Section 6). The
journey works on personal, regional, and national
levels. All of the poems must fit that movement,
and must relate to the more-or-less negative
beginning and positive ending of the book.
5/
That, in brief, is the way I see what I’ve done
with the poems of the book. Please let me know
where you may disagree! Also let me know
if you have any response to the revisions
I recently sent–particularly to “A Dream
of Herman.” Perhaps you didn’t get the
poems I mailed. I worry about that. Then again,
maybe I sent them more recently than I think.
Anyway, I look forward to your comments
about any of the above (new pen). And please
give our very best to Jane.
I like the book very much, and the order seems to me
sensible… Yet I may have notions about how to improve it.
I want to sit on it some more, dream on it some more. And
also, I would appreciate it if you would send me copies of
any of the near-misses. It seems to me that I remember a
few poems, recent ones, not the old “sexist” ones, that you
have left out. I am wondering if I can see a place for them,
and argue with you. But maybe I would not want to.
Why do you have so few lines on a page? Does one of the
contests demand that you only have so many lines on a page?
It has the curious affect of seeming to thin a rather solid
and bulky manuscript. Maybe that number of lines suggests
double-spacing.
I am going to wait, for further conversation, until I
hear from you.
Did I tell you in my last letter – I cannot remember whether
I wrote you a note a week ago or not…maybe I did…maybe this
week… – that Jane’s father died last Friday? We are relieved,
and it is wonderful to be back here together, and staying here.
We look forward to seeing you again, inspecting your
remodeling.
We had a wonderful time with Geoffrey Hill and Aileen.
And yes, it was invigorating, because nobody in the world is
so serious, and – when it comes to composition and publication –
so disinterested.
You have not heard from me because
I have not been here. We went back to ann Arbor.
Actually Jane has been there all but six weeks, since
early in June. And I have been there seven weeks, all
together. I just came back after twelve days. And
Reuel died just as I got back here, last Friday af-
ternoon. Thank heaven. End was peaceful. Jane
will be back on Tuesday. Maybe again we can start
to live the old life. Of course “normal life” is
nothing but how you live in the interstices among
disasters. And I will read the book! It must seem
strange to you that I have not been able to. But I
really have not been able to. I will be back with
you – and back among the living, for a while – as
soon as I can be. Love to you all, Don
I had to go ahead and have my book
mimeo’d, since the contests are calling
for manuscripts now. I’m therefore
going to have to assume you like The Faces well enough–
Hope all is well at the Farm–
Love,
Wes
THE FAT PEOPLE OF THE OLD DAYS
Oddly, being so large
gave them a sense of possibility.
Women with huge upper arms
felt freer.
Children never stopped opening
the landscapes of flesh that grew
in their hands.
Their word for the thin ones
whose long faces seemed
part of their necks
was “chinless”.
Barking dogs and stray cats
were also called “chinless”.
No one knows when
the thin ones began
to seem beautiful,
when the fat people first worried
about weight.
A woman came to fear her knuckles
and elbows were sinking
into dimples.
A man believed his chin
which shook when he talked
was also speaking.
For many years
the fat life continued.
Each day inside strange houses
with wide doors
the fathers rose folding themselves
into their pants.
Each night the families dreamed of bones
hung forever in fat’s
locked closet.
–Wesley McNair
A DREAM OF HERMAN
for Diane
I was driving the old Dodge wagon
again, with Coke cans rolling
to the front at stop signs,
and you stroking the dash
every so often to thank the car
for not needing the spare tire
we hadn’t fixed. We were on a trip
that felt like going to your father’s camp, only
we never got there and didn’t care.
It was a beautiful day, just enough wind
coming into the back to make the kids
squint with pure pleasure
as it scribbled their hair, and your mother
patted them, saying what a nice ride it was
in the odd, small voice
she used only for your father.
It was then in the rear-view mirror I saw him,
wearing the brown cardigan he always wore
and putting on the shining bell
of his saxophone as if just back
from an intermission. You were smiling,
and suddenly I saw the reason
we were traveling together
and did not want to stop
was Herman, who just sat there
in the cargo space, breathing the scale
until the whole family leaned back
in their seats, and then he lifted his sax
and opened one more song as wide
and delicate as the floating trees.
–Wesley McNair
Editorial note about this letter: Minus its fifth stanza, this version of “The Fat People of the Old Days” is the way the poem finally appears in The Town of No. The published version is here:The Fat People of the Old Days. The above draft of “A Dream of Herman” is its final version, later published in The Faces of Americans in 1853.
Many thanks for the manuscript. Unfortunately,
I cannot read it right away. I am just about to
go off on an author-tour for Oxford, for the Anec-
dote book, and when I get back there will be a
great pile of things. I wish I could read it right
away, but things are rather frantic right now! As
soon as I can!