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11/21/2002: "Always be polite when writing rejection letters"

At times, there have been discussions on the fine art of writing rejection letters, and how one has to juggle it with tact and diplomacy. There are those who wonder why one should be polite with slush, and now we have a VERY good reason. From the Chicago Tribune: \\ In the early 1970s, an unsolicited poem arrived in the Chicago office of Poetry, a small, influential but typically financially strapped literary magazine. It was from a Mrs. Guernsey Van Riper Jr. of Indianapolis. Joe Parisi, the editor, thought it good but not up to the standards of a monthly known for running the works of titans of 20th Century poetry, including William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. Perhaps it was Parisi's handwritten rejection note. Or similar rejection notes he'd send over the years to the same woman, whom he has to this day never met or even spoken with. But, along the way, Mrs. Van Riper grew to have affection for the publication, the kind that may change the state of poetry in America. Van Riper, who later divorced and switched back to her maiden name of Ruth Lilly, is the last surviving great-grandchild of Col. Eli Lilly, founder of Eli Lilly and Co., the pharmaceutical giant. At 87, she is a very low-profile, ailing billionaire-philanthropist who will now alter the 700-square-foot world of the four-person magazine housed in the basement of Chicago's Newberry Library. Lilly will stratospherically increase her own previous donations to Poetry by giving it well in excess of $100 million over the next 30 years, with no strings attached.\\