Dear Margaret: An Epistolary Collaboration

Because I am weighted down with these problems I find that some mornings I cannot face my life so I read a detective story. I read four a day if  I find that my mood does not lift.

I escape from it and in so doing I loose (sic) hundreds of hours that should be placed solving the problems. I feel hopeless and helpless and that it is too much for me.

[Excerpt: Undated letter from Margaret Danner to public relations manager Chandler Owen explaining her needs for a publicist. In the letter, she expounds upon many subjects that she calls “Obstacles.” This entry comes from her section titled “Procrastination.” (Form: Typewritten on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

I have written about moods that do not lift and what becomes of the poet in them. It is too easy to consider the other side. My godparents knew Bill Styron; he forgot his pills (leveling meds) during a visit, which put him in a state because his surest self was in those pills, but they were able to find a doctor to prescribe what he needed to get by. I have been there—placed without my pills when my surest self is in those pills. When I say “surest self” I mean: self that understands the field before me rather than furled into a listless den reading myself out of the light. Margaret, I mean: I engage detective stories, too.

Brandy; La Tricoteuse
I do not intend to begin to drink. I know better. Nor do I intend to taste all of (sic) different drinks I have missed. As it is I only like to drink brandy and that only with Frederick and we talk poems and about life.

[Excerpt: Undated letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

I don’t want to ruin everything by bringing up the worst, but we (all people) are deep into the second year of a pandemic. As I write this, COVID-19 has killed 5,241,868—and counting.

The last worst thing happened in your childhood, the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu. Margaret, I know more than you about worldwide lockdowns. I bought a bar cabinet early in the pandemic. Took me two hours to put it together with an old drill. Then I spent $400 stocking it—scotch, vodka, gin, bitters, vermouths, wine, brandy, and an 8oz bottle of absinthe. I must confess that because millions of people around the world were dying, I intended to drink.

[…] and I become relaxed and feel warm and all that is missing is that I want to be held.

[Excerpt: Undated letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

The first year of the pandemic was a very lonely time for very many people. If you were dating, you broke up. If you were single, you spent even more time with yourself. If  you were married with kids, all of  your people were, all hours of day, underneath you restless. All to prevent the spread of the contagion and, frankly, to stay alive. The greatest sign of the lockdown was the absence of cars on the road, which made it possible to hear the birds across the highway in the park. The birds were the freest thing. And so mocking. People didn’t touch one another, could not embrace, and often, like you, just wanted to be held. The most communal thing people did, from Chicago to Barcelona, was to lean out of their windows and make noise.

They don’t like Poetry that they can’t understand nor people who write it. But all in all I have received many calls and many congratulations etc.

[Excerpt: Undated letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

Metaphor is less prevalent these days. The world’s boundaries are well-defined, and the facts of  living during a pandemic are instructional. Six feet, that’s the rule. Keep six feet between yourself and other people. Wear your face mask in all common spaces.

I try to keep a wide berth between myself and what I do not understand. I do not completely understand the virus. It thrives; this is the elemental truth. As it evolves, so do its names: COVID-19, then Delta and now Omicron.

Thank goodness for the writers who survive. Anthologies are published in which writers communicate novel loneliness and baseline fear with little to no figurative language. As we say, and as you might’ve said: it is what it is.

For example: the first partial lunar eclipse in 600 years is the first partial lunar eclipse in 600 years. Margaret, it is exactly a half-obscured moon. Few people look up for it.

My grandmother had 7 sons and seven daughters. My mother was what I am a one man woman sexually so when my father died my mother took me from Chicago (where I was born with proof) to her mother in Indianapolis Ind. At age of 5.

[Excerpt: September 24, 1966. Letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, black ink.)]

Margaret, there are so many articles written about the single Black woman. You wouldn’t believe how lonely the world would have us.

I’m glad that you found your other and only. One reason for marriage—economic security—isn’t always a motivation anymore. Many Black women live with financial autonomy, and I am one of them. I own a condo, have a retirement account, and invest in the stock market. With regard to certain delights of partnership, there are affordable devices for sexual pleasure that make the orgasm instantaneous and drama-free. Some women live alone and live well.

I am just turning forty and haven’t yet met someone with whom to share my life. What once might’ve been a domestic future is instead a full leaning into my writing life. I am quite liberated. For instance, I lingered in your archives at the University of Chicago knowing I did not have to feed anyone but myself.

Dear Bob, How are you, and equally important Where are you? I called a while back and talked to Irma. I also saw a student of yours who said you were at Princeton? I think it was. So, I don’t know where to reach you.

[Excerpt: June 25, 1975. Letter from Margaret Danner to Robert (Bob) Hayden. (Form: Typewritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, black ink.)]

Margaret, it still happens like this. Between changing jobs, escaping to residencies, and traveling for lectures and readings, poets can be difficult to reach—especially when you love them—or sometimes they just need time to be speechless and meditatively still. I schedule dates weeks in advance when I want time with a friend. Tracy and I will catch up today, but it has been six years since we’ve met in person. Recently, I talked with Camille. Then Jenny. It has been too long since I connected with Tarfia or Aracelis. Jennifer and I keep playing phone tag. From your letters, I see that Robert Hayden was a difficult friend to catch.

One of my uncles, still alive, was “different” from the others. He has your head, your features and ideas like yours. This explains why I loved you so intensely at sight.

[Excerpt: September 24, 1966. Letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, black ink.)]

I felt different from others growing up. I needed to be alone and craved solitude, so much that my family (my mother told me later) thought that I didn’t like them. This was far from true. I loved them fiercely but might not have expressed it. So much happened between my ears that I had to be alone, shuttered in a room, listening. This is how I became a writer—by tending to my thoughts and writing them down.

It is fair to tell you, because you are so exposed in this correspondence, that I am also different as in queer. My desire wilds along the spectrum of women and men. When I told my father I was in my first serious relationship with a woman, the first thing he asked was, “Is she fine?” “Oh my God—” I said, “Yes!”

One would never believe that this w[a]s the place that had gained the reputation of being fantastic   ... The place of which was written[.] Everything has been militariezed [sic] and is meticulously filed and labelled. It is an office like any other office[.] There are no piles of old magazines laying around under which one might discover a priceless letter from Harriet Monroe or Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. There are no Pegasu’s [sic] left. No gold ones, flying face forward, no brass ones side view, no copper ones with aquamrine [sic] eyes. There are no Thurber cuts poppping [sic] up with their impish implications. There is no disorder at Poetry. [N]o dust.

[Excerpt: Undated passage crossed out by two diagonal pencil strokes. (Form: Typewritten on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

Where do you reckon the Poetry Foundation put all the gold Pegasuses? I love that you were looking for remnants. The current building is all glass and clean-lined—you either love it or hate it. I enjoy the space, save that the library seating doesn’t invite lounging. A bit too modern and modular, I think. Your word “militarized” is curious; I suppose you had a romantic notion of how such a historical place should look. Like Shakespeare & Company in Paris—shelves and tables overflowing with books; ancient typewriters scattered about and sagging wingback chairs; dust not everywhere but certainly implied.

I bet there’s a storeroom somewhere with stacks of Poetry proofs going back to 1912, maybe Harriet Monroe’s desk with its time-warped wood, a pair of delicate spectacles.... Margaret, if everything that is fantastic were in disarray, I never would have found your letters.

You spoke of understanding the suicide urge. I do too but I have forever put that thought behind me since you came. Suppose in those dark dark days before you when everything went wrong and friends turned to foes before my eyes I had committed suicide. Look what I would have missed Hoyt.

[Excerpt: Undated letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

I wonder what it is like to never have considered suicide. I would very much like to meet the person who hasn’t. My first mentor killed herself. I dreamt of her dying the night before and was writing a poem about the dream when I got the phone call. Then I made calls of my own. A phone tree to say “she has died” and the other words no one wants to hear.

I focus on living so much now that I pay extra for cancer insurance. There has been a fair amount of cancer in my family—breast, colon, prostate, pancreatic. It turns out that insurance is a great help when you are trying not to die. My premiums keep going up, and I keep paying.

Dear Margaret, Just a note to say that I’ve not written sooner owing to the fact that I have been under great pressures, of one kind and another, have been working like a fiend, and therefore have simply not been up to a letter. I owe a spate of letters and am trying to catch up on correspondence tonight.

[Excerpt: April 5, 1964. Letter from Robert (Bob) Hayden to Margaret Danner. (Form: Typewritten on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, black ink.)]

I don’t want anyone to think your letter box empty; Hayden did write when he found the time!

I used to keep up written correspondence for over a year with Krista then Nicole. Long letters about our lives through the post. And why didn’t I keep them? I was going through my minimalist period and considered even paper to be too much to save. Silly, silly me. I’ve thought to strike up writing letters again, but haven’t decided to whom. I have to find someone who has the time for reading and writing letters to me.

The wonder of you. I can’t believe that you really exist—that such a person as you exists—

[Excerpt: Undated letter from Margaret Danner to Hoyt Fuller. (Form: Handwritten in cursive on 8.5 x 11 plain paper, blue ink.)]

I have spent several days writing to you. My honesty is a response to your honesty. I tried to write what you call “hair-down letters,” casual things that just talk. And I’ve said it before—I mostly want to talk. Now you and I have this: a collaboration.

Yours,          

CM