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20 After Stand Up, Friend, With Me came out in 1963, I’d had exactly the kind of career I wanted. It was a small but satisfying one, where I could handle everything by myself, with a classy publisher, good reception around the country on my reading tours, reviews, fan mail—all the attention I needed. I had finally appeared on the stage of the Kaufman Auditorium of the YMHA Poetry Center, where I’d seen great poets like Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas read their work. I even earned my living as a poet—barely enough to live on, maybe, but enough. When Betty and Alma cast my horoscope, it forecast, correctly, “trouble with publishers,” and in the early seventies, I found myself without a publisher when, after real-estate losses by the owner Barney Rosset, Grove Press was sold. Luckily, my old friend Stanley Moss, wealthy from his spectacular dealing in Old Masters, was starting a publishing house of his own, Sheep Meadow Press, which brought out my next book, A Full Heart. The book went too far for critic M. L. Rosenthal. A lot of the poems dealt with spiritual intuitions and experiences I was having under the influence of Betty 206 207 Deran, and he savaged the book in the New York Times. And with my switch from a major publisher to a small press, my charmed decade ended. More than that, Neil becoming blind changed my life forever. In 1972, an operation for a brain tumor took away most of Neil’s sight, and taking care of him became my primary responsibility, more important than career. It seemed that a cycle had finished. I had lost the illusion that my poetry would change the world, but now I could really feel useful, if only to one person, and not wanting to leave him alone for long and with my dislike of the visiting-poet routine at colleges, I cut way down on giving readings. I still had to support myself, though. By the time Neil had recovered from the operation and went off to a Veterans Administration blind training school, I was dead broke. But luckily I got invited to be poet-in-residence for a term at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I headed south in my VW van. I had taught poetry workshops in colleges before, but Eckerd was my first and only experience living on a college campus and confirmed for me that it was not the life I wanted to lead. Where publishers once supported poetry as a prestige builder, universities were now doing it and the majority of poets ended up teaching. But for me, poetry didn’t belong to academia. After his training, Neil was able to walk around New York City bravely with his white cane and could manage much of the business of life on his own, but he wasn’t much good in the kitchen and there were many other things a pair of eyes was indispensable for, as well as my useful hands that could replace lamp sockets, sweep up broken glass, and untangle his tape player. But eyes or no eyes, he was an expert typist. When he was sighted, he had published half a dozen soft-porn novels, and though he could still write a first draft on the typewriter, he could no longer read back what he wrote and quickly grew discouraged, which led to my working with him on his fiction. It was my introduction to the complexities of prose. I was planning on going to Yaddo again, only a month this time, so, before leaving, I discussed the plot of a novel with him, based on a story he had written in one go—he called them “quick writes”— and helped him outline it chapter by chapter so that he could do “quick writes” of the chapters during my absence. By the time I got back, he had finished a first draft of the novel, and I helped him revise it. The result was The Potency Clinic, a comic coming-out novel, by Bruce Elliot, one of his pseudonyms from his soft-porn days. But though I sent it on the rounds of publishers, none of them was ready for its sassy humor, so in 1978 we published it ourselves in a small edition under the imprint of Alma and Betty’s Bleecker Street Press. I found the experience of being a publisher...

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