Section VI

McNair to Hall: January 7, 1983

Aliya Weiss / 1983, Letters Between Poets, Section VI, UNH, Wesley McNair /

April 30, 2012

Letter from McNair to Hall, January 6, 1983, Page 1, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire

[Click image to view]

January 7, 1983

Dear Don,

Could you and Jane come here for
dinner this month? – say, January
2! (a Friday), or maybe on the
19th or 20th? That would give us a
warm spot in a cold month—

7:00 PM—your choice of date, just let
me know—

Wes

Hall to McNair: December 6, 1982

Aliya Weiss / 1982, Colby College, Donald Hall, Letters Between Poets, Section VI /

April 30, 2012

Letter from Hall to McNair, December 6, 1982, Colby College Special Collections

[Click image to view]

6 December 1982

Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, NH 03260

Dear Wes,

I like this one, and I will never like quite so much as
the other recent ones, as your best work – because it is an
anecdote only, because it depends upon a “trick ending,” and
it does not quite survive that… But it is good anyway. It
is just smaller.

And there is one problem with it, as I see it. That is
the meaning of the word “it” at the beginning. It could mean
“veil,” or “apron,” but as it used at the end of the third line,
by the sense of things, it must mean “apron”. But how do you
close an apron around a canning rack? Or close it in the winter
around reluctant lids of jam? In the latter case, maybe you
use it for friction to open the canning lids.

Obviously I am not getting something that you intend.
Obviously I think it is your fault… Maybe not.

The only other thing… I think that “a far-off look” is
pretty trite. Otherwise I like it a lot, and I certainly intend
to pass it onto Joey…but I think maybe you can touch it up a
tiny bit.

Joey is out digging up the sassafras root, so he can’t
speak.

Don

A note from McNair about this letter: I eventually abandoned “The Wish,” (Don’s sense of a trick ending killed it), but bits of the poem’s imagery and narrative have reappeared over the years in three poems – ‘The Name,” “Remembering Aprons,” and part 5 of “Town Limits”.

Read The Name (published version)

Read Remembering Aprons (published version)

Read Town Limits (published version)

McNair to Hall: December 3, 1982

Aliya Weiss / 1982, Letters Between Poets, Section VI, UNH, Wesley McNair /

April 30, 2012

Letter from McNair to Hall, December 3, 1982, Page 1, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire

[Click image to view]

December 3, 1982
Dear Don,

Here is another one for your collection.
If it seems worthy, please pass it on
to Joey.

And please tell Joey the reason
the tea is not helping his headaches
is that it’s ginger tea he should
be drinking, not the regular.

Love,

Wes

THE WISH

Bernice Manchester,
who exchanged the veil
for an apron, and wore it
on Frank’s farm for fifty years,
closing it each long summer
around hot canning racks,
each winter around reluctant
lids of jam,

who tied herself back
into it after bearing
each of his children,
and grew old lacing herself
into her black shoes
and walking to the same
places, stove, dining room
and chickenhouse,

who marched right through
five decades with string beans
and bread and apple pie
for his hired men, who carried
him eggs for breakfast
through the great hurricane
and windstorms no one knew
about within,

lay apronless at the end
beside the pink flush
toilet Frank installed,
and with a far-off look
announced that in her final
rest, she wished
to lie by him,
the salesman

everyone but Bernice had forgot
died just after she married him,
at seventeen.

-Wesley McNair

VI. A Book at Last (12/3/1982 – 12/29/1983)

Erin Rhodes / Letters Between Poets, Section VI /

April 30, 2012

mcnair-1982-001-c — Wesley McNair and Woody, ca. 1983

Among letters about mutual visits, hopes for a teaching position, new publications in magazines, and continuing adjustments of The Faces of Americans in 1853, is the most important news of this section: the acceptance of my book in August by the University of Missouri Press as the 1983 Devins Award winner, chosen by David Wagoner, who published my first poem in Poetry Northwest years before. I phoned Don immediately to give him the news, and I still remember his reply. “Wes,” he said, “I could kiss you.” As I say in my essay about our early correspondence (in Mapping the Heart), “I could have kissed him, too. I could have kissed the first ten people I saw.”

devins-award-01 — *Argus Champion, 1983*

I also notified Jerry Costanzo, editor of Carnegie Mellon University Press, who had written me a generous letter on February 1 about being unable to accept The Faces of Americans and his hopes of accepting it in the fall. In his response to my later news that the book had been taken by the University of Missouri, Costanzo offers the possibility of publishing my second book with him – though Don has already gotten “guarded interest” in my next book from David Godine.

faces-americans-cover — *The Faces of Americans in 1853*

In August of 1983 Don has his own literary successes. His play, Ragged Mountain Elegies, is produced for the second time in Peterborough, New Hampshire. And he receives the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for literary distinction at the Opera House in Newport, though I am unable to be in his audience, busy with summer teaching to pay for my son Sean’s first college year. Unfortunately, August is also the month of a setback for Jane that lasts throughout the fall: vertigo, resulting from an ear infection.

But Jane soldiers on, as does Don, even though he has deeply mixed emotions about the play he has written, feeling both high and low about it. “We must fear depression,” he writes on September 16, “[and] we must fear elation…There is no ending this unless we stop being poets and writers.” At another time, I might find wisdom in these words. But what I feel, looking forward to the publication of my first book and my Devins Award reading in Columbia, Missouri, is elation, without qualification.

[This section has 75 letters]