1978)

Erin Rhodes / Letters Between Poets, Section I /

November 28, 2011

*Diane and daughter Shanna touring a village of potters near Santiago*

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.”

*Wesley McNair outside a kiosk where Chilean students gather*

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.”

*Universidad Catolica de Chile, in Santiago*

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]