a budget

Dear Jeffrey,

As promised, attached is a draft budget I've worked on with the finance director and director of EdLabs, the Harvard research center with which Poetry in America is now affiliated and from which I'm applying for the Templeton. I met some Templeton people this weekend, and they are being very kind and receptive. Pm meeting with John Seel of Templeton on the 21st to talk about this project.

As EdLabs gets millions of dollars a year in grants, they were very strict with me, going through the project multiple times to help me arrive at the right number to ask for. I am not being asked for a budget at this point (and what I'm sending you is not in any way final) but it makes me say what I say with confidence. It's based on 18th months work of a fairly small team (some harvard employees who get benefits etc, some minimal Edlabs admin support, and some contractors when we can get away with it) and it presumes that Pm not paid except for some summer salary. I have not been paid anything for any of this work. I am using lots of younger film crew who cost a third of what WGBH costs. This team would be working to produce a for- credit graduate course for teachers for nationwide distribution. But I do think that the whole project needs 2 TV quality classroom-ready episodes for students to anchor the many shorter video pieces. Templeton could probably help me to get the WGBH costs down by raising questions about them..

As you'll see, this budget is roughly 750,000 for basic production and distribution, but then it adds 750,000 as a research component (another 750,000 to test and refine the materials in two large school systems with control groups of kids) plus the WGBH episodes.

With those, it's up to 2 mill. I'm asking Templeton for 1.5, having asked NEH to support the TV at 1.

This is not, as was surely clear, my area of expertise, so I'd be glad to hear whether you like these numbers better.

More my speed!. here's the newest piece to come out of Poetry in America. I read the poem, "Shirt" to the hundreds at the Nantucket Project this week and then showed the film attached at the end, a rereading of the poem The final film to come out of this will be expanded from the 4 minutes here, include conversation with Pinsky and with someone else and will have the same format, more or less, as the Clinton episode.

Shirt

BY ROBERT PINSKY

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break

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Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning." Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers

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To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its dean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

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