But before I get back to that afternoon drive, I want to get back to my office at City Hall, my
position as “Writer-in-Residence" fully funded by a City government concerned with community
enrichment. Again, I was the only one then, for eight wonderful years in Rochester, with no
precedent in America, and, despite the incredible effects of the programs we began - featured
on NBC’s The Today Show, NPR’s Weekend Edition, The U.S. Congressional Quarterly’s
Governing Magazine, and Associated Press features - there has been no full-time fully funded
city government hands-on writer-in-residence since that time. I’m not talking about a
ceremonial state “poet-in-residence,” like my friend the late Bob Dana of Iowa who said to me
at dinner some years ago that he’d been poet-in-residence in Iowa for so long he wasn’t sure if
the state knew if he were still alive! Yes, there are a lot of “ceremonial” positions - but those
positions very rarely touch the lives of ordinary people, and it’s my belief (which, by the way,
has made me an outcast in “Writers’ Circles” for the last twenty years, they are meant to be
that way. Let me explain.
Where are all the “writers and poets” in America, those insightful individuals with a flair for
effective communication? There’s a lot of them out there, many now sanctioned as such by
attending graduate college writing programs - 250 or 300 programs, as many as 4000 or more
“new writers” in those programs every year! Does this translate into a more enlightened
populace? Well, we know the answer to that, don’t we: fewer readers, fewer critical-thinkers,
fewer people who can write their own stories or self-expressions, and more and more
individuals who respond to the overwhelming “story-substitutes” that set the mind-frame of
America - T.V. commercials, sit-coms, capsulated news briefs, MTV, and political commentary
that tries to extract the emotions so pent up in a culture lacking the means of legitimate selfexpression.
A few of these graduate program writers end up teaching in those writing programs, some
of course as directors. If we back up for a moment, get some distance in order to observe
objectively how socio/economic/educational systems work in this country, since we can’t just
eliminate artistic or literary achievements in America without becoming suspect, we find a way
to simultaneously celebrate and marginalize them, treat them as important but insignificant in
the real world. I’ve heard professors call poetry, for instance, “ditties,” and they meant it. The
reason, perhaps, that literature retains its place in our respectful cumculums, is because it
seems so utterly impotent as far its immediacy, its significance to our everyday world. That is
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