blueprints

About River of Words | 87
Poets laureate travel, if they choose. Invitations come in. A meeting of
the regional arts councils in the state of Nebraska was being convened by
the governor to survey the condition of arts funding in the new political
environment for public radio stations and museums and theaters and dance
companies and orchestras. (Some of the freshmen in the new Congress had
also announced their intention of abolishing the National Endowment for
the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.) They were
looking for a guest speaker, and an invitation arrived at the poet laureate’s
office. I was finding that my job was to be an unofficial (or semi-official)
spokesperson for the American arts. (After the talk, I was made an admiral
in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska.) Another conference on the
same subject was convened by Governor Christine Whitman in New Jersey,
and that took me near enough to New York to arrange a meeting with
Marion Gilliam. In the meantime, I received a phone call from Charles
Halpern, who introduced himself as the director of the Nathan Cummings
Foundation. The Nathan Cummings Foundation, I was to discover, was a
philanthropy set up by the family that marketed Sara Lee cheesecakes and
other frozen desserts; it was dedicated to Jewish culture, social justice,
health issues, and ecological innovation. Charles Halpern said that he’d
heard that I might need help with a project. To this day, I don’t know who
called him, but I know that a number of people had been out prospecting.
I described the project to him and mentioned—for a budget—how much
money I had hoped to get and had not gotten from the Library. He said he
thought the gathering was a very good idea and that the foundation could
probably do a little better than the amount I had mentioned and he’d get
back to me.
So, when I met with Marion Gilliam and Laurie Lane-Zucker for tea
in a beautifully furnished apartment on the Upper East Side on an early
October afternoon, brownstones and fallen sycamore leaves and the crisp
smell of the litter of leaves in Central Park funneling down the avenues, the
conference was basically paid for. Marion and Laurie listened to my story
and talked about the aims of the Orion Institute and the troop of barnstorming
environmental writers they had organized and said they thought
they could bring them to Washington, that we could assemble a list of writers
to invite together, that it would be desirable to have money to get the
word out to grassroots environmental educators around the country, and
that they could perhaps—they would get back to me after they talked to