The following poems, discussed in the correspondence between Hall and McNair, were also part of a project to present McNair’s new and selected poems from his book The Lovers of the Lost.
Images of these poems in various draft phases from his writing notebooks, transcriptions of the drafts, and the published poems were digitized and assembled online to illustrate McNair’s creative process and to highlight how important revision is to McNair as he writes, draft by draft, down into a poem. A typical poem may take several pages to complete. To see an explanation of the notebook drafts, click here.
Click on the poems below to view scans and transcriptions of the poems in various phases of composition, to complement the conversations about the poems between Hall and McNair:
- Hair on Television
- The Retarded Children Play Baseball
- Waving Goodbye
- Where I Live
- Mina Bell’s Cows
- The Before People
- Mute
- The Last Time Shorty Towers Fetched the Cows
- What It Is
- A Traveler’s Advisory