Donald Hall | October/November 2014

A notorious poet sells all fifty poems to magazines, does a book with a publisher’s advance, sells out the hardcover, and then the paperback. If someone asks the poet to say the poems aloud, one poetry reading brings in more cash than the magazines and books together.

Instead of money, poetry hopes to create beauty, emotion, intelligence, insight, and pleasure all at once, as well as immortality. It rarely does. Whatever their poems try to do, poets are outraged by rejections and editors. (It’s well known that the smaller the reward, the fiercer the competition.) Turned down six times by the New Yorker, a poet decides, “They don’t like me there.” Does she think that a magazine (which gets a thousand poems a week and publishes two) checks out an index of forbidden names? “No. We don’t like her.” I have a friend who sent a poem to the New Yorker which was rejected by email in two-and-a-half hours. He was apoplectic. Did he expect that an editor, or sub-sub-editor, would spend two-and-a-half hours to decide? Rejections often take two-and-a-half minutes. When people send poems to a small magazine and wait a year for rejection, did the editor read over the poem seventeen-thousand times? Or did he wait until chagrin overcame boredom? “Damn, I’ve got to take care of that pile.”

My comfort with rejection began by accident, by being fourteen and submitting my poems to the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Review of Literature. The poems returned with a printed slip. I was briefly disappointed, then found two more long white envelopes—one the stamped self-addressed one, the other to enclose the same poems—and my juvenile endeavors went out again in the next mail. In minutes I zapped from despair to hope. When I came home from high school, my mother would often greet me cheerfully at the door. “Another rejection today, Donnie.”

It’s helpful for a poet to be an editor when young, though not so young as fourteen. At Exeter and college I started choosing manuscripts for school magazines, and at Oxford I edited four publications at once. Then I became the first poetry editor of the Paris Review. (I knew George Plimpton at college.) I published Geoffrey Hill’s poems for the first time, and Robert Bly’s, and Thom Gunn’s... and in the meantime rejected ten thousand poems and made mistakes. I rejected Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra.” (He told George I wouldn’t know a poem if it buggered me in broad daylight.) Some poems I printed were more humiliating than my dumbest rejections. Still, I learned from editing. There were other ways of writing than the way I had found for myself. I read all literary magazines, scouting the field. I found friends for life, to whom I later showed my own drafts, with whom I argued usefully. The fellowship of the Paris Review—George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron—extended my literary community. At George’s parties, at East 72^nd Street, I met Philip Roth, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, and Kingsley Amis.

A fellow named Boris visited with a black bag, apparently carrying products not found in drugstores.

As you might guess, not every editorial encounter was benign. Poets’ letters arrived for the Paris Review saying, “I am the greatest poet alive and if you don’t print all my poems you are an asshole.” “I am a tenured full professor of English who played offensive tackle in the NFL.” “I am a serial murderer.”  Editors learn not to offer helpful suggestions when they reject a poem. If I hinted that “bouncing baby” might be a cliché, by return mail I heard that I was an idiot, that the metaphor was innovative genius. Bags of poems arrived each month by mail from the office in Paris. Fifty percent I rejected immediately. The first five lines told me that the poem would never do. The better candidates I kept around, reading over and over, sending some back at each rereading. Finally I took maybe one, maybe two. I know I made mistakes. I was arrogant. At the age of twenty-five I felt cheekier about my taste than I have felt in the sixty years after. Probably I was narrower, more dogmatic, and better.

Many years ago I discovered that a good poet, a friend of melancholy temperament, was so devastated by rejection that she could not work on new poems. I argued, but she could not shake her despair. I had an idea. If she would let me, I would send her poems out. But if I used my own name, I would seem to be trying to throw my weight around—as if I thought I had weight. I invented Joey Amaryllis, a literary agent who represented only poets, possibly the one poetry agent in the universe. First, I rented a post office box at Potter Place, New Hampshire, near where I live but with a different zip code. From the American Stationery Company I ordered letterhead and envelopes with the neonate Joey’s address. Writing to editors, Joey was careful to enclose only brisk notes. If Joey told an editor “it’s raining today,” the editor would suspect that Joey was looking for an angle.

With her permission, I submitted my friend’s poems to good magazines, without telling her which ones. When the poems came back, I sent them out again, and when they came back again, I tried again. By agreement I kept quiet when I sent things out, and I never reported a rejection. When an editor took a poem, I spread the joy. Once Joey submitted his client’s poems to the editor of an academic quarterly, a man with whom I had a friendly correspondence. Shortly afterward, I happened to write the editor a letter, and without thinking praised my friend. He wrote back that he had recently received poems by this woman, but that they were submitted by somebody else, “and I never read that sort of thing.” (The poems had not yet returned to Potter Place.) When I wrote the editor back to confess, and to apologize for my duplicity, he said that my friend should send the poems herself. Decades later, she continues to publish in the same quarterly. Joey also submitted her poems to Poetry, which bought several. The editor had printed my own poems but he made it clear that I annoyed him. Even his notes of acceptance were frosty. On the other hand he took a shine to Joey Amaryllis, and wrote him warm letters about Joey’s generosity.

Why did I undertake this caper? I helped a depressed friend and I promoted good poems. How nice of me. But why did I like it so much? I adored being a secret agent. After a couple of years, my friend took over her own marketing and thrived. Joey came in from the cold.

At sixteen, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs.

Writers of course require praise. After I moved from Michigan to New Hampshire, I received a thick brown envelope from a cocktail party friend in Ann Arbor, a man who wanted to write novels but who settled for a job in P.R. The envelope contained a long, long essay clipped from a literary quarterly in which an unfamiliar professor attacked me for everything I had ever written—my poems, my children’s books, a memoir, short stories, even a textbook which the professor’s own university had adopted. The professor said that my textbook was good. In fact it was too good, and he disparaged my book at length for the manner of its excellence. In a note that accompanied the clipping, my old acquaintance said, “I thought you’d be amused.”

Everyone has heard about the Emperor executing the Messenger. The Emperor was right.

My generation assumed that the value of an artist proved itself, not in contemporary fame but in durability. Lately, we have not been hearing much about Robert Lowell, who when he died was at the top of the mountain. We will hear of Lowell again. Will we hear again about his mentor Allen Tate? It can be observed that most poets slide into invisibility, maybe for decades, maybe forever. Andrew Marvell’s resurrection took three hundred years. Biographies or collections of letters draw some attention to the poetry, or away from the writing to the writer. So does the manner of death. More people know the lives of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath than know the poetry. Tennyson’s glory lasted until the 20^th century decided that no Victorian could be a poet. Yeats died in 1939, and his reputation thrived into the 1960s, an unusually long term. Then his grandiloquence disqualified him. (My late wife Jane Kenyon said that she would not buy a used car from this man.) Yeats will revive as Tennyson did, but not my old teacher Archibald MacLeish, who in his lifetime won three Pulitzer Prizes. So did Robert Frost, but the bulk of Pulitzer Prize winners make a pauper’s graveyard. Theodore Roethke, enormously praised in the ’50s, became largely invisible by the ’80s. I think I see his vast shape looming again at the edge of the shadows. Early death was clearly a successful move by John Keats.

Otherwise we attend to our poets when they are alive—to hear them, to praise them, to despise them, to use them. Death usually removes them. I expect my immortality to expire six minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game. One poet revives; another gets deader. Like the Laureate returning from Stockholm, we understand—and we sigh.      

Donald Hall served as the fourteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. The President awarded him the National Medal of the Arts in 2011. His most recent volume of selected poems is White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006.