Thanks for your note, though I’m sorry to hear the dis-
couraging news. It is simply a bad time for publishing a
book. And it may be a bad time forever, with the big publishers
in New York and Boston. I think I told you that my first book
was rejected thirteen times before it was accepted – and that
was a time when publishers were almost looking for new poets,
at least compared to now. Fran’s firing was a real blow to me,
to my optimism about things. I will keep looking and keep
thinking. When I see Jon Galassi – who is the editor at
Houghton Mifflin, but who has an assistant who reads most of
the poems that come in – I will approach him cautiously, and
that might be worth trying again. But any one possibility is
always an improbability. Meanwhile, we will get the poems into
some good magazines, and in the long run I think that will go.
Have a terrific time at Detroit. I spent seventeen years
only forty miles away. And there is a good art museum and a
good ballpark, and otherwise it is a pretty depressing and
depressed place.
