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(The agency had created international concern about the widespread decline of reading in the United States with our influential 2004 study Reading at Risk. Most important, once the program got underway, literary reading in the United States increased for the first time in three decades.At this time, the Arts Endowment was busy launching the Big Read, a campaign designed to promote literary reading. My staff and I made an inventory of the homes of American poets that had survived and were open to the public. I not only thought about how few literary sites had been preserved in the United States, but also how oblivious most Americans were of the local sites that had been conserved and maintained, usually at great expense and effort, in their own communities. Perhaps because in 1973 the building had been slated “for removal” (a demolition permit actually had been issued), I was reminded daily of the vulnerability of America’s cultural heritage and recalled my fundraising experiences in Carmel. Some years later, I found myself in Washington, D.C., leading the National Endowment for the Arts, which is located in the Old Post Office, a magnificent Romanesque Revival edifice-second in height only to the Washington Monument- whose iconic stone clock-tower overlooks Pennsylvania Avenue.
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The dilemma of saving our history and the best of its physical legacy is a national issue, but probably nowhere is it more pressing than in California, a state that always has preferred to live in the future tense and which from Hollywood to Silicon Valley has been the center of the new ethos of disposable culture and rapid obsolescence. The experience, however, started me thinking about the growing challenges we face in trying to preserve the past in today’s frenetic, novelty-obsessed, electronic culture. postage stamp.Eventually, we succeeded in raising the necessary funds, and Tor House survives as an exemplary public trust. Californians are notoriously indifferent to-and therefore ignorant of-their own remarkable history, even when it occurred down the street and involved a man who had been featured on the cover of Time and commemorated on a U.S. Yet I was slightly surprised at the nearly universal ignorance about Jeffers, though I might have expected it. I considered Jeffers a major American writer and the finest poet ever to emerge on the West Coast. Mine was hardly an unsympathetic assignment. My real job was to explain to wealthy and well-educated Carmel residents, many of whom had lived in the small seaside “village” for decades, who Robinson Jeffers was. What could be easier than to rally sophisticated Carmelites to save one of their leading landmarks?At the first benefit, I realized that my task was not primarily to ask for money or extol the cultural benefits of saving Tor House. Carmel was one of the richest towns in the United States, and it proudly celebrated itself as an arts community. Tor House, with its accompanying Hawk Tower, was a unique and strikingly beautiful home that had been built mostly by the writer himself on a spectacular point overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The home of a great American writer needed to be safeguarded for posterity by raising a significant but not enormous amount of money. Some local literati organized a campaign and a few out-of-town authors, including myself, were asked to help.The challenge seemed quite simple. Although a foundation had been created in 1978, it was a small volunteer group of limited resources. The family wanted to preserve the famed stone house, tower, and gardens, but they lacked the financial means. The poet’s son Donnan had died some years earlier, leaving a widow and a mortgage. California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, and Jack HicksĪ little more than fifteen years ago, I joined a small group in Carmel that was raising money to save Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House.