My favorite moments in the Tanning profile:

"By then [the 1980s], the most important people in her life were poets. Mainly, they were new friends--[Richard] Howard and [W.S.] Merwin and J.D. McClatchy and Harry Mathews and Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich. They had come to replace the artists in her own circle...and to her mind they formed a much more amiable and gratifying circle, one that belonged entirely to her."

[...]

"A few years into her career as a poet, Tanning sold six or seven fairly valuable Ernsts and used the money to endow a prize through the Academy of American Poets...Her prize, awarded every year to an American poet, amounts to the most generous poetry prize in the world. (It began at a hundred thousand dollars and in now up to a hundred and fifty thousand.) W.S. Merwin got the first Tanning Prize...and Adrienne Rich the third."

Calling Foetry...

The runner-up quote:

"It seemed to her then that poets were purer than other people--purer certainly than the artists she'd known. And, unlike those artists, some were actually strapped for cash."