I just read an interview with you in the Fall 1997 issue of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets. I sympathized very much with what you said—it’s no secret that I have been impressed with your views and your writings since I first met you 22 years ago, on that wintry day at the Library of Congress when I and my eleven fellow writers from Germany were introduced by our State Department hosts to the Consultant in Poetry. I especially liked your answer to the interviewer’s question about "the poet’s relationship to the political," when you cite the presence of "unimpeachable representatives of the liberal conscience" (you, Styron, and Arthur Miller) at the National Medal of the Arts dinner at the White House in 1993; I witnessed that momentous event myself, as you know.

I also saw in American Poet that you are now, after many years of service, Academy Chancellor Emeritus. Your "retirement" prompted me to take a look at the updated list of the twelve chancellors—and what I saw did not make me happy. Already in 1994 when, on the occasion of the Academy’s 60th anniversary, Rita hosted you and the other chancellors at the Library of Congress, I had noticed that the composition of your board was not only very male dominated (I believe there was one token woman at the time) but showed an absolute lack of minority representation. Furthermore, I was told there had never been a non-white chancellor in the Academy. I found this appalling and said so privately; however, as the Poet Laureate’s husband I decided not to follow my impulses and do what should have been done a long time ago: Confront the Academy publicly with its apparent arrogance and, yes, racism.

Today, upon revisiting this issue, I see that the intervening years have brought no change, although there has been plenty of opportunity when chancellors retired. Such exclusionism is beyond appalling—it is disgusting. Since reading your interview, Stanley, I have asked myself how a life-long champion of "the liberal conscience" could have been so insensitive that he went along with this unabashed country club mentality for all those years, even after most country clubs had been integrated. Please don’t tell me that minority poets regularly received tasty crumbs from the Academy’s table of fellowships, prizes and readings; I am talking about the twelve massas running the house, and I am curious: Did the "Whites Only" question ever come up among the chancellors? If no, how self-centered and otherworldly can twelve poets be in one room? If yes, what kind of inane, pseudo-intellectual Jim Crow arguments were brought forth to keep this bastion of rarefied wordsmiths free from the "dark forces"? It can’t be that there were no qualified minority poets, can it?

I admit that I am partial in this affair—two decades in the United States and of married life with a Black poet have sharpened my sensibilities considerably in matters of race. Believe me, Rita has not "put me up to this" in any way. I came to my own conclusions, and they demand that I speak up. I’ve watched the racial lunacies in this country, including the condescending attitudes of quite a few white poets and writers, from close range — first staring at the crude surface of American race relations as a European outsider, then, as part of my process of "Americanization," gaining closer and closer insights into the insidious complications that give racial obsessions their sick spin.

To preclude the assumption that my anger might be related to a desire to see Rita become chancellor of the Academy, let me state that she has no such aspirations. There are, and have always been, others whose qualifications are beyond doubt and who, under decent circumstances, should have long found themselves elected. There were Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, to name just a few. And there are African American poets today who bring with them quality of work, national reputation and cooperative spirit to make them excellent candidates — I think of Michael Harper, for example. The abolition of white supremacist attitudes among the chancellors of the Academy of American Poets is long overdue.