One of Donald Hall's lesser known creations was a character named Joseph Amaryllis. He had personalized stationery, a post office box in Andover and a checking account. He was, of all things, an agent for young poets - an undercover agent, as Hall recalls him with a chuckle.

Joey Amaryllis was connected. He knew the editors of the important poetry magazines and literary journals, and he knew better than the young poets he represented how to engage the editors' attention. His task, as he saw it, was to rescue his clients from the despair of rejection letters by getting their poems into print.

Joey was, of course, an alias for Hall himself. At least one of the poets who will read with Hall on Monday night - we won't tell which one - benefited from Joey's powers of persuasion.

The reading is the kickoff of Concord Reads Donald Hall. Onstage with Hall will be four major American poets who are friends of his: Maxine Kumin, Wesley McNair and Cynthia Huntington, all of whom he has known for three decades or more, and Robert Bly, whom he met when they were students at Harvard in 1948.

As Hall described them during an

interview last week, his friendships with these poets vary in depth and duration, but the Amaryllis ruse, while exceptional, is illustrative. Though competitive by nature, poets are brothers and sisters in arms against an indifferent and sometimes hostile world. Editors who would bar the gates to young poets are fair game in what Hall, borrowing a phrase from Kumin, calls "the po biz." He even remembers with delight how an editor who disliked Donald Hall thought Joey Amaryllis was a prince of a fellow.

For the most part, Hall and the other poets share an old-fashioned virtual friendship. That is, they know each other almost exclusively through letters. Hall graduated to a fax machine a few years ago, which has accelerated his exchanges with friends and colleagues, but he is not an e-mailer. He and Bly have the longest and most voluminous correspondence, running to perhaps 20,000 letters.

Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country in 1973, two years before Hall moved to New Hampshire. She lives on a farm in Warner's Mink Hills, and they met shortly after he arrived. Ever since, they have maintained what Hall calls "a nice easy friendship."

Huntington is New Hampshire's poet laureate, an honor Kumin and Hall held before her. She sometimes appears with Hall in "Peeling Poems" events in which each poet chooses a poem, reads and analyzes it, then turns to the other poets on the panel for their thoughts. In fact, they are scheduled to be in one on Sunday afternoon at 3 at the Silver Cultural Arts Center at Plymouth State University.

Hall dates his friendship with Huntington to the early '70s, when he was a professor at the University of Michigan and she was a student, though not his student. He did see and admire some of her early poems. Now he calls her "a sharp reader," and he sends her his poems for comment.

This is standard procedure for Hall, who has exchanged drafts with Bly for half a century and with McNair for perhaps half that time. Hall does not regularly share his work with Kumin, but he remembers sending her an early version of one of his best poems, "Names of Horses." As anyone familiar with her poetry and essays knows, Kumin is a horse lover.

McNair met Hall in the mid-'70s. McNair was teaching at Colby-Sawyer College at the time, and two local journalists, the Rayno twins, brought him for a visit to Eagle Pond Farm. McNair sheepishly left a packet of poems for Hall to read, and Hall winced at the thought. For any established poet, being asked to read the manuscripts of aspiring poets is an occupational hazard, emphasis on the hazard.

"I didn't want to pick them up,"Hall said of McNair's offerings. "They're never any good."

McNair proved to be an exception, and Hall has watched with pleasure as McNair's confidence and career as a poet have blossomed.

Bly is perhaps Hall's oldest friend. The last time they appeared together on the Audi stage, they kissed. (What will they do for an encore?)

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