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15 When Neil and I returned to New York in the fall of 1963, I found myself a minor celebrity. Stand Up, Friend, With Me was receiving such good reviews, especially for poetry, that the hardcover edition of 1,000 quickly sold out, with the Gotham Book Mart offering the dwindling copies at five times the cover price. In the spring Grove Press brought out a paperback edition that went through several more printings. But this never impressed Grove, and when I went in to see the editor, Richard Seaver, an intimidatingly handsome man, he left me standing there hangdog like a truant schoolboy before the principal. Once I asked him why he didn’t ever invite me to sit down, when my book had done so well, and he put me in my place by snapping out that I hadn’t earned my share of the overhead. Perhaps it is just as well that I hadn’t succeeded in getting a publisher earlier, since the book ended up the stronger for it, as I added and subtracted material over the years. And by the time the book came out, the airless little poetry world had opened up and my poetry was generally praised for those very qualities that had made it so difficult to find a publisher, its colloquialism and openness, its 140 141 off-beat subject matter. But years of rejection had taken their toll, and even with my new success, I told myself, “I will not be consoled.” However, the unloved little boy in me enjoyed all the attention. But this did not make it easy for Neil. The phone rang constantly, and whenever he answered, it was invariably for me. When we entered a room, he was ignored as people rushed up to me. But he accepted this with good grace, and escaped to his job at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art where he got plenty of attention of his own. One result of the book was that making a living was much easier now, and I never had to temp again. Odd jobs came my way. I was hired to translate a book of Inuit poems for a fifth-grade teaching program about the Eskimos that was being developed in Boston. The editors said they chose me because I was the only poet they found whose poetry could be understood by ten-year-olds. I think most poets enjoy translating, not only as a technical exercise, but also as a way of getting into the head of the foreign poet and transmuting his vision into your own—in this case, I found the Inuit stories familiar, with the same earthy quality as stories my mother told me about the shtetl of her childhood in Poland. Or as my sister Barbara put it, “Ethnic is ethnic.” This Eskimo project along with a project about the Bushmen, funded by the National Science Foundation , went on for years, keeping scholars busy. But both were suddenly terminated, when it was revealed that the CIA was the real source of the unlimited funds behind them, a cold war exercise to keep the scholars of Cambridge out of mischief. My translations were later published as a children’s book, Eskimo Songs and Stories, and still later, a smaller selection as Magic Words. I next was asked by a filmmaker, Francis Thompson, to write the narration for his new documentary To Be Alive, which was shown at the Johnson’s Wax Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair in 1965 and won many prizes including an Academy Award. But my main source of income for the next decade was giving poetry readings at colleges. I set these up myself. Readings were then looked on as honors to be bestowed on the poet, and the fee was called an honorarium, but I knew that English departments had budgets for visiting writers, and didn’t see why I shouldn’t get my share of it. In any case, I wasn’t invited , so, following the shameless practice of actors who send out resumes to producers and agents as I had done myself in my acting days, I wrote to the chairmen of English departments, listed my book and awards—my “credits,” as an actor would call them—and told them I was available. It took a lot of letter writing, but this way I managed to set up small reading tours in different parts of the country two...

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