blueprints

About River of Words | 103
ticide manufacturers, and chemical companies, designed to teach the children
what a wonderful and responsible job these companies were doing
for the fruited plain, the purple mountains’ majesty, and for charismatic
fauna such as whales and polar bears. ROW did not want to seem to be
the environmental movement’s equivalent, and International Rivers was a
no-holds-barred advocacy organization. It had been enormously generous—and
farseeing—in supporting the program, but ROW needed to
stand on its own. We applied for our own nonprofit status and spun off
into an uncertain future. Once we became a separate entity, I was to learn,
we needed a board. Pamela Michael became director of River of Words. I
became a board member, and several International Rivers board members
joined me, together with members of the committee that had helped put
the program together, among them Amy Thomas and Malcolm Margolin.
At the age of fifty-six, I learned how to read
a financial statement.
I had during these years left the poet laureate’s office and joined the
board of International Rivers, so I had some notion of what a board did,
and my education in the way that this part of the world is put together—by
the volunteer work of citizens committed to social and cultural change—
continued. At the age of fifty-six, I learned how to read a financial statement.
It wasn’t a skill I brought to the board, but I needed to be able to follow
the conversation. The timing of this setting out wasn’t particularly
fortuitous. The Dodge Foundation grants had come to an end. We had lost
the overhead—rent, computers, office furniture, telephones, health insurance,
accounting and auditing functions—provided by IR, and at that
moment the dot.com bubble burst and the California and national economies
spun into recession. But that first board meeting—of friends and
acquaintances who were sacrificing their time to sign onto this work—was
very moving to me. Malcolm Margolin was the director of a press. Amy
Thomas, a businessperson, owned and managed three very popular Berkeley
bookstores. One of our board members was a homemaker raising three
children, another was an attorney, another was the director of an environmental
fund. They were there, having set kids to homework, because they