Re: writing up proposal

Dear Jeffrey,

Larry has told me that you and a friend would like to contribute to my project (hallelujah and thank you a million times, Jeffrey) and that I ought to write up a proposal asking for 500,000. This is wonderful. If this comes to pass, the best way for that money to come, I think, is as a gift to Poetry in America, an initiative at EdLabs at Harvard University. This will give me discretion over its disbursement to HarvardX and WGBH, but this will be absolutely be a Harvard gift that will count as Campaign success and from which Harvard will take some (but not as much)overhead.. So far the best finance people I've met are at EdLabs and they are happy to manage these funds for me. There are other ways to give me this money that leave Harvard out, but my understanding is that your friend would like this to be a Harvard gift.

Here's a draft of what I'd like to do with that money.

I'd like 500,000 to do post-production and distribution of a whole historical period of American poetry (1914-1945 is what I'm thinking--Modernism) and including three episodes of tv.

The raw materials for that period include interviews with Bill Clinton (including footage not yet used by WGBH), Peter Gallison, Walter Isaacson, Lena Dunham, Woody Allen (whose lawyers didn't like our release a while ago, but we're hoping will soften over time), Harrison Ford (still a maybe), Robert Polito, Sarah Kay, Al Filreis, Rafael Campo, Susan Howe, kids from Nantucket High School, kids from Brookline High School, Alfre Woodard, Jane Pickering, Jay Parini, Ray Dalio, Leon Wieseltier, Richard Dawkins and others; and footage shot in Harlem, Greenwich Village, midtown, Chicago, London (if I have the money to hire a crew there; don't now), at museums including the Fogg, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Frost's house in Ripton Vermont and more.

This allows the donor to give to a big Harvard Campaign priority, Teaching and Learning, by supporting Poetry in America, allowing me to produce the crucial segment of the online course with the highest (TV quality) production values and so also supplying higher quality video to WGBH as a way also to cut their costs.

Currently, HarvardX skimps (on lighting, for instance--see the Bill Clinton interview) and while WGBH ladles money raised by others into everything. I have been pounding away at my friends at WGBH and I know that WGBH producer will work with HarvardX if they can give him footage of the right quality.. That is, we'll use HarvardX as the backlot for WGBH so as to squeeze three episodes out for 250.

This proposal does not include experiments in schools or the curricular development into courses for teachers that you've seen in other (million dollar_) proposals. But the courses for teachers can't happen before the footage is developed, and these courses will have as their centerpiece the WGBH episodes, and so this funding will make all the rest possible.

I can polish this narrative and or edit it, if there are things you think I have wrong.

And I can attach a draft budget based on real Harvard numbers (what my Harvard video editor, producer, media manager cost) as well as a draft WGBH budget I'll now go an negotiate with them. Or we can do that at a second stage.

Let me know what you think? And when are we reading Whitman together. Why don't we set a date for Feb when Poetry in America 3: Whitman is running online and we could screen a little video and then have a discussion around your table with you and some friends?

Lisa

I think the proposal for 500k is optimistic but can't hurt.

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Okay. Shall I attach budget? Edit the above and send it. Send it to whom? Lisa

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Elisa New
Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature
Harvard University
148 Barker Center
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA
02138
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