| 15 February 1982
Wes McNair
Box 43
North Sutton, NH 03260
Dear Wes,
Good to hear from you, and I’m glad you got Joey’s postcard.
(Basically some place or other I must be Celtic, with all this
dual personality stuff. Next I will be Fiona McLeod.)
I don’t think you are good enough to submit to the New Yorker.
I think you are too good to submit to the New Yorker. With this
most recent issue, full of Howard Moss again, I concocted a
bitchy definition of “disinterestedness”: When a poetry editor
prints great quantities of himself, on the basis of quality
alone, although he realizes that he will be criticized for it…
Good to hear about the writing and re-writing. Me too.
Sometimes I think I carry it a bit too far! You know, I have not
published a satisfactory poem – virtually not a poem – since Kicking.
One little one which will stay as it is – but which I probably will
never reprint in a book because it is too damned little. And
Ploughshares is coming out with one, the Joyce Peseroff issue –
but I am changing it in the meantime. And last week New Republic
came out with one, and I had already changed it, and now I’m changing
it some more – and that little thing is only a few lines long
anyway.
But I am working on long and ambitious things, and maybe
eventually they will not only be publishable but Immortal…
And after all, that is the only thing worth thinking about!
Well, I am both pleased and sorry about the extra teaching,
you will understand. I’m glad it is there if you need it; I am
sorry that you need it, but my goodness the economy is terrible,
and going to get worse. Reagan is worse than Nixon any day. The
worst president we have ever had, and the country is going to be
in the worst shape, quite possibly.
Lately, I have been hearing from Gerry Costanzo – and not
about you. I have written him twice about you, and he has not
mentioned it in reply, and I am going to shut up – because I don’t
want him to get the sense that he is being pushed. However, I don’t
think it all bad that he is being in touch with me, because appar-
ently he wants to write about me – he asked me, and he sounded
serious, if he could be my authorized biographer. Well, I don’t
want one of those! But I think he means it about writing about me.
And I am going down to his place again this spring, to read poems
and give a talk. I am hoping that he will do you, next year,
because I think he does good books, and I think he makes them
attractive. He doesn’t do all good books – nobody does that –
but he has done a couple of good ones lately, and I really think
he’s one of the better small places.
2/
But in the meantime if one of these other things comes
through…I will be delighted of course.
I think that Max Kumin is judging the Princeton things
right now. Dan Hoffman is through.
I saw that you read for the Monday Night. Good for you.
Back in the forties there was a book club for poetry, which
didn’t last very long. I could tell you about it, but it was
doomed. In England, there has been one for years and years and
years, the Poetry Book Society. It comes out of the Arts Council
which is government sponsored. The only way it could happen in
this country is if the Poets and Writers (the Coda people) or the
Academy of American Poets did it. They in a sense have an annual
book, with the Lamont, which they distribute… I think there is
one other book that they annually distribute.
It would be a losing proposition I suppose. The book club
in the forties had five or six members, nation-wide. I was one
of them. Once I met one of the directors, and asked him. Amazing.
But that was a little thing run out of one quarterly magazine…
I seriously think that a national book club would not have
more than two or three hundred members. And everybody would be
quitting all the time, because everybody would get pissed off
about which books were selected.
I’d be all for it anyway of course. But I wouldn’t want
to do it myself.
In a sense, any one person could probably do it, because
it would never get very big. And so if anybody had about $10,000
to lose, I think they could do it, and do it single-handed – maybe
hiring a high school student to stitch up book bags four times a year.
(I suspect it would have to be quarterly rather than monthly.)
Ten thousand dollars would go for ads to start it off, and the
“profits” on the ongoing club would pay for one or two ads or
mailings a year thereafter…but I doubt very much if the initial
ten thousand would ever be earned back.
Want to try it?
Who wrote The Private Life? The title does not ring a bell.
I don’t like Sharon Olds, or not much anyway. I like Linda Gregg –
And I like one or two other people here or there, for that matter!
We had a wonderful time to England. We ate sausages and read
French novels. It was cold, there was a train strike – and it was
lovely. We went to the theater a lot, to the opera once, we looked
at some pictures in museums, some sculpture… We saw Geoffrey Hill.
I saw John Fowles and interviewed him for Esquire. But mostly we
just took it very very easy. And I return here and am delirious
with joy at the old fourteen hour day!
Love as ever, to all of you,
Don |
