:

I lived in Massachusetts for about 3 decades, over the course of which period the state's Arts Foundation awarded cash grants to hundreds of poets—

but of course they didn't give a fucking penny to me.   I found the above in an old file—it's just one of many such annual missives I received from them . . .  I'd love to have the paranoid certainty that a cabal of Boston PoBigs (Pinsky Bidart Warren et al) had ordered the Foundation to blacklist me, but the truth is that the poetry I wrote then (and now) isn't any good, and that's why they rejected me.

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SEE MY NOTE BELOW THE IMAGE:

the top left one there was particularly hurtful to get because Claudia Keelan in her youth had been in a workshop I taught, and I encouraged and praised her work. And I wrote a blurb for her first book. But of course by the time I sent these poems to her magazine Interim, decades had passed and she knew that I had become a pariah, persona non grata, outcast by Ameri-PoBiz, excommunicated from its offices, and she knew that any association with me would harm her career. Or more likely the poems I sent her for Interim were just so bad that she didn't think they deserved any more than an unsigned form rejection slip just like the hundreds of others she sent out that semester.