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VICKI STURGEON: The following edition of the Poet's Perspective is presented as it was broadcast over KRSW's regional magazine, Home for the Weekend. The Poet's Perspective was funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission.

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HELEN HINTON: I went over to listen to a poetry in the park, and I saw children there when I was a child. This never would have happened. There would never have been anything to make it happen.

And I doubt whether-- well, we went to the library. It might have happened, but here were these youngsters. It was at the noon hour. They brown bagged it there. They had a couple of poets. Joe was there.

And it was another-- he had a played a very good ragtime piano. I had the piano on the back of the truck. There were, I should say, 20 children pretty representative of not just a few in town, but pretty representative. Completely fascinated by what was going on and participating.

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KIM HUDSON: That was Olivia, Minnesota resident Helen Hinton, talking about one of the times that the Poetry Out Loud Tour visited her town. The Poetry Out Loud Tour is partially supported with tax funds distributed by the Minnesota State Arts Board.

And it seems safe to say that without such funds and activities such as the one Helen Hinton describes might never have taken place, which brings us to the main topic for our program this morning, Public Funding for the Arts.

Good morning. I'm Kim Hudson with Vicki Sturgeon. And our program this morning is made possible in part with funds provided by the Western Bank and Trust and the Otto Bremer Foundation of Saint Paul.

We'll examine the question of public funding for the arts from the poet's perspective of Joe and Nancy Paddock. We'll talk with Charlotte Carver, director of the South Dakota State Arts Council. And we'll even slip in some examples of the latest Poetry Out Loud Tours recorded here in Worthington. All that and more in just a moment here on Home for the Weekend. So do stay tuned.

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1965 was a watershed year for the arts in this country. It was then that Congress created the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, parent of the National Endowments, and passed legislation enabling each state to set up an agency to disburse federal funds for arts activities.

In the past dozen years, there has been a phenomenal increase in public funds available for the arts. And the end does not appear to be in sight. Indeed, the current occupant of the White House is thought to be at least as sympathetic to the arts as any previous president.

And the arts community is hopeful that President Carter's enthusiasm may translate into more federal dollars flowing into arts activities around the country. Government involvement in the arts is not wholly uncontroversial.

An article by Tom Bethel in the August 1977 issue of Harper's Magazine was highly critical of federal funding for the arts, calling it "A fairly blatant attempt to restore or at least preserve European conceptions of culture that are either obsolete in the sense that you can now listen to Beethoven quite comfortably at home nowadays without joining the Kennedy Center crowd or else, frankly, elitist." End quote.

And recently, the Sioux Falls Argus leader carried an editorial attacking public funding for the arts saying for the arts to be self-sustaining or to derive what backing they can from non-governmental sectors is wholly in keeping with the spirit of the free enterprise system.

Artists in any field who receive a subsidy from a public Treasury enjoy an unfair competitive advantage over their less fortunately situated contemporaries. Give all artistic endeavor a free hand, said the Argus leader, but insist that it take its own chances in the marketplace.

On our program this morning, however, we'll be hearing from people from our region who are convinced of the value of public funding for the arts. Take, for example, Joe and Nancy Paddock, regional poets and residents who live in Olivia, Minnesota. Joe says that public funding for the Arts has had a major impact on his career as a poet.

SPEAKER 1: Like most artists, I was very alienated. I really sensed that the culture wasn't particularly interested. So there were small network groups of, quote, "elite people" that appreciated arts, and the rest didn't.

And those were the people I related to. Upon receiving public funding as opposed to private funding, I think had I received a grant from say a foundation to go off somewhere and just write, I would have repeated the sort of writing I did before, a writing, which was valuable to me and was appreciated by a lot of people I feel that were into poetry.

I wasn't writing anything that really related to people very well. Upon receiving this particular type grant to go out and work with people, obviously the pressure was on me to bring something to them.

That was both satisfactory as art, as I see it. And also something that would relate with people. I did not want to go out there and turn people off. And I think that that's one of the things that we can talk about in terms of public funding is that I don't think public money should be going into art that will turn people off or turn people away from art because they need art very badly.

And I think that most artists are alienated-- very alienated and are doing an art. It probably won't appeal to very many people. It is elitist oriented. So I think public funding is going to inevitably make a populist art form.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, I think Poetry Out Loud is one of the examples of that. A few years ago, when John Mirsky and Carolyn Rasmussen thought up the idea to send poets out into rural areas, Well, when I first heard about it, I kind of laughed.

I didn't know how it would work to send troops of poets around to read because the readings in Minneapolis weren't that large. And it just seemed kind of like a weird idea. And it gradually grew into a really popular thing because the poets learned to find poetry that would talk to people. And if there hadn't been funding for this, it never could have gone.

SPEAKER 2: Hit the road to leave the dailies behind, where poems disappear, die in labor, deaf to the pen's mouth to mouth resuscitation. The hero hits the road, doesn't wave goodbye, leaves no notes of instruction to the children, admonitions to be good, pleadings, to try and understand why he is doing this.

Never feels the need to explain his actions, never feels guilt, acts without regret. But I cannot leave, for even were I to go to the ends of the earth, he would follow me. Even though I were to descend to the bottom of the ocean and be swallowed by the whale, he is there, the father, the pointing finger, the sudden siren, the policeman calling me to the curb at 2:00 AM saying, ma'am, have you any idea why we have stopped you?

Do you realize what you have done? Do you understand why we have pulled you over? The unpaid phone bill for too many calls in the middle of the night. The letter never written to my aunt before she died of a heart attack in a little hotel room in Norway.

The papers of students lying unread in the dark of my briefcase. My back turned to him in bed, dreaming of the radio, pushed into his bathwater. I look up feigning innocence. No, I do not, sir. He is not going to get me.

I will not give in. I will lie and lie before I give in, before I cry out again, as I did that night at Bible camp, kneeling at the pew with all the other high school girls. The evangelist's hand moving across our hair, the evangelist dropping the Holy Spirit on the soft hair of all those kneeling, ecstatic girls reaching over in the rowboat to hand me a water lily, kisses full on my earthly lips, the horror and joy of fleshly desire.

The ecstatic moment and the dure religion of Jesus. Yes, I am guilty. I have sinned. Father, forgive me. You may have me. Here is my body. It is given for you. I have written checks with insufficient funds. Have sat alone in rooms writing when I should have sunk my hands deep into him or garden dirt or bread dough.

I have moved my guilty hands across the pages of blank books. The little teeth of the fountain pen casting hard shadows across the white flesh of the page. You have a perfect driving record. We'll let you go this time. It would be a shame to spoil that, wouldn't it, ma'am? Yes, sir. Yes.

SPEAKER 1: The readings that went on around Minneapolis, you'd go there and you'd read to a peer group, usually of other poets. And everyone would sit there and occasionally, there'd be a kind of a groan or a laugh or something like that that was sort of sardonic. But you never got a strong emotional response.

Poetry Out Loud now, for instance, some of the Olivia readings and the sheep shed, people are just torn the house down with laughter and stomp their feet and whistled and shouted and stuff like that. I mean, they really work.

And when these poets go back and start reading again in the cities, I think that inevitably, even though there has been resistance among, as what I consider a more elitist group of poets to the sort of thing the Poetry Out Loud does, they're going to come back and be more effective readers, and are going to start getting a wilder response, a more enthusiastic response from the urban audiences, too.

NANCY PADDOCK: I can remember a reading that Poetry Out Loud did at Cornland, USA, where we were in a warehouse room that was off of the main demonstration craft area. And the audience didn't have to stay. And you had to work so hard to hold that audience.

Well, we had a ragtime piano player and a clown to bring them in. But when you started reading poems, you really had to work to make them stay because they'd slip through your fingers like water through a sieve. And that kind of experience is kind of shocking.

SPEAKER 1: I was involved with the first year of tours with Poetry Out Loud. I went up into the Moorhead region at that time. And we did not know how to reach the people. I think that's the honest way to put it.

We chose the poems of our contemporary writers, people like James Wright, I think, and some of Gary Snyder's work, et cetera, that we thought would probably be most likely to reach the people.

And it missed the mark considerably. And everybody went back and wrote Poetry Out Loud poems afterwards. I probably was caught up in it as much as anyone. And I really-- it's the region I came from.

And I really kind of sunk into the folklore of the region, and it's kind of given me a direction. I don't know if it's good for everyone to do the same thing. But for me why I really feel that it's made me three or four times more a populist poet than I was when I went into public funding for the arts.

KIM HUDSON: I didn't realize that had happened, the number of those poems had been written specifically for those audiences.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, they came afterwards, I would say.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, as with any poem, you write it for yourself first. But when you realize that you're going to be or trying to reach an audience that you don't know that well or haven't reached, or maybe you know the audience, but you haven't got anything, it does make you want to try.

And the same thing happened to me. I was writing basically nature poetry and coming out to the country to live in Olivia, I started getting interested in different things too. And so it wasn't just that I wanted to reach the audience, but you're changed by where you live.

And so the experience of having this grant money that Joe had and partaking of it sort of indirectly made me write different kinds of poetry. And I think I grew too because of that.

SPEAKER 1: I don't think artists who don't have the opportunity to rub up against a real audience that is not an audience of other artists. But what could be defined as a real audience, a public audience really don't understand how distant they are from being understood, how their value systems are so different.

And I won't say that obviously it isn't probably the best thing for a serious artist to do in the main, to go out and try to please the popular audience. I mean, there is a dialogue going on, but I think tht the audience portion of the dialogue has been ignored.

And that public funding that brings artists out into active involvement in communities and into the countryside and into nature, whatever ways. We worked with the Department of natural Resources in relation to this sort of thing.

And that is we rub up against a lot more, I think, of the real world, not just our internal world. I think a lot of writers think that their sex life may be is enough to write on the rest of their life. And they're sort of bored by other things until they actually have to deal with them, engage themselves with them.

KIM HUDSON: What I hear you saying is that perhaps one of the good things about public money is that normally there's an accountability that goes with that, at least. You do have to show that you're reaching audiences normally. People don't like to give away public money simply to allow an artist to satisfy his individual whim.

SPEAKER 1: There is, of course, direct grant money to artists where they just receive money to go ahead and work somewhere. And I think that they will, of course, just go on and do what they have been doing maybe more intensely, unless perhaps they have done something like poetry out loud or some other audience related activity somewhere along the line.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, I think that's all right. If an artist is freed for a year or whatever length of time it is to really go in and develop his or her creativity. And the idea of the funding basically is to foster creativity of all kinds.

SPEAKER 1: Well, I think, too, you know, that we should create a preserve for young artists during their development stages where they do just exactly what they want to do. And all the direct grants that the National Endowment is giving out now, for instance, don't ask for any particular project direction.

They just you send in some poems and you want a grant to support this kind of writing sort of thing. And they've been very broad in their perspective. They've really tried to understand where you were at, and then work from that way. And they've touched a lot of beginning poets and writers and a lot of the established people that just have continuing problems of survival.

So I think that the direct grant, without asking lots of questions or asking for a project, I think is an important means to sustaining art in the community without influencing what it's going to turn out to be.

NANCY PADDOCK: I think that there is certainly precedents for this too. I mean, artists have always had patrons of one sort or another. But the trouble with having a private patron is that you very well might be expected to do certain things, where if it's a public patron, then for that period of time, you are given the freedom to really develop your art.

It's really hard to be an artist and have any kind of job because you're drained by the time you get home. And there are a few who've managed that have been doctors or insurance men or one thing or another and have still managed to be creative. But it is really very difficult.

SPEAKER 1: Well, I think it's a tricky thing. I mean, it seems to me there's a real tension between what I think is at least felt to be a need for accountability for the expenditure of public funds in all areas, not just art, but in all areas.

And that need for the freedom for the artist to produce in the way that he sees fit. Because certainly if you write an application for a grant for a health project, you're expected to show right down to the penny how the money is to be spent and what the product will be. Art's a little bit different. And I can see where some people would have a little trouble getting a handle on that.

NANCY PADDOCK: You don't know what the product is going to be. That's part of what it's about is finding out as you start to write a poem, usually you don't know what that poem is going to be. And the poem is a process of discovery, something that you didn't know.

SPEAKER 3: And after they get run over about 10 or 20 times and bake in the sun, they get real flat and dry. And then you can stop in the road and pick them up and sail them into the fields. That's called cat sailing.

I love the county roads at night when the moon is full. Just as spring starts pushing this and that thing up and up, and everything living wants to love a little and live a little more. You know what I mean.

But for the record, that includes apple trees, box elder bugs, hogs, green worms, bluegrass skunks. Oh, yes, people. It's a good time to sell life insurance and protection for the stuff you collect inside.

But it's night that's best alone in the car that propels itself by exploding trees and dinosaurs a million years old. And here and there, you find a squashed cat. A tom on his way to that farm by smell.

A female in heat surprised once and for all. But both dead as a Frisbee. And inorganic as a college degree. You stop by the side of the road. You pick that mortarboard feline up by its side and sail it into the small grain crops just coming up.

You are thrilled the way its smooth fur catches the light of the moon. The stillness when it lands. The exhilaration you feel having made something dead pass through the air like an unidentified flying object.

Back in the car. Back down the road, going home to wait for summer and fall and winter again. Then spring, then summer, then fall, then winter. That's the way it goes, one after the other. It's a lovely system invented by somebody with a sense of rhythm and no eye for detail.

NANCY PADDOCK: I was reading an interview with Gary Snyder, a poet in California, in the East West Magazine the other day, and he's a apparently just joined the California Arts Council and working closely with Governor Brown.

And Robert Bly apparently didn't think he should join this group because you're possibly too much of a danger of having funding the arts in a centralized way, that this might influence them, make aesthetic decisions for people that they could make for themselves. And this sort of thing.

But Snyder said that all the mass production of our culture is really subsidized by a fossil fuel subsidy from the past. And that it's all energy intensive, everything in our culture. But the arts are labor intensive because you can't mass produce hand-thrown pots, you can't mass produce violin music or anything like that.

And so he said that because art and higher cultural forms are preserves of the human spirit, national parks of the mind, which is one of his things that he got that from Levi Strauss, I guess.

He said that we have to keep them going with public support until the time that this fossil fuel subsidy is withdrawn from industrialism. And then the arts can compete in a free market economy, which seems like a strange way of talking about the arts. But he said it's like preserving an endangered species.

And I guess that made me think that it is like medicine for a sick culture because we've been so utilitarian, like Joe was saying earlier, that you find people reaching midlife who've been very technical or very much into one thing and never looked at anything else.

And suddenly they find that they have to change their whole life. I know of one man who started making Lutes and another man that became a scrimshaw artist. And there are various things that people finally realize that there's another side to their life that they have never paid attention to. And usually, it's creative.

SPEAKER 1: I have a hunch that maybe that in on an unconscious level, this might be what's happening with this whole thing of public funding for the arts in the United States and in Minnesota, that there is a felt need, and that unconsciously the culture is searching for it too, and that the artist does it.

As one aspect, the person who drops out and becomes an artist, one part of himself is taken over. Well, in terms of the larger culture, the artists are parallel to that part of the individual. And they're doing it for the entire culture. And I think it's important-- healing, I think, is an important part of what the artist does.

KIM HUDSON: When you put it in the context of health, that does make it kind of interesting because I think most people don't have a great deal of problem with spending public monies on programs which are designed to preserve or enhance the general public well-being, certainly the physical health of the population. But I don't think most people see arts in quite that way.

SPEAKER 1: I don't think so either. And I think it makes it very hard for an artist, for me at least. I mean, I find myself finding a sort of communication gap or breakdown when I get into this area.

I mean, it seems very apparent to me that it's something that's awfully needed in this culture right now, that almost everything that's wrong with it can be diagnosed along these lines. And yet so many other people are just a blank that they have to solve the problem with more science, more production, more utilization of land and all this sort of thing.

And that is you're going to overpower the problem with more of the problem. And that's something that it seems very clear to me. And yet I find again and again that other people just do not agree or do not see this at all.

SPEAKER 4: I listerned to a poem that appeared in the Organic Gardening Magazine This month in the August issue. It's called Minnesota Farmers Speaks. I remember distinctly when I wrote it, I was watching TV, and a farmer's farm had been wiped out by a tornado.

And hotshot from the TV station had gone out to interview him, I suppose. I don't know if that's a big assignment or not. But it was a typical thing. They got him on camera and he put the microphone in his face and said, how do you feel?

And Minnesota farmers are real good at that sort of thing. They just-- they shrug, you know, well, I don't know, you know. He's talking in here. I like a good laugh. He's in the basement with his family. And he's thinking back on the previous winter when they had the worst blizzard of the century.

I like a good laugh. Last winter, my only milk cow stood all through the blizzard or head to the wind. When I touched her eyes, they stayed open. And when I brushed her side, she fell straight over and hard to the ground.

Now my barn is halfway to the neighbors, cross fields, flattened by hail, electric wires crossed in the yard like spaghetti. The combine and planner twisted into one machine. The windmill blade stuck for good in the top of my only tree. The family standing with me in pajamas at the basement window, listening to other people's troubles on the battery radio.

I tell them about last April, long after the blizzard, when I found one hog in his warm cave of snow, skinny, blind, barely able to walk. How he ate out of my hand even after his strength came back. It could be worse. I still have a place to build on and plenty of lumber to begin.

KIM HUDSON: We talked a little bit about from the public point of view, some of the possible criticisms or dangers inherent in public funding. The danger that it becomes, it perpetuates an elitist kind of an art.

But from the artist's point of view, it does seem to me that there needs to be some concern that, for example, people will start doing things because the money is there rather than because there is an audience there or because they feel a real need or urge to do them.

SPEAKER 1: I think that's a danger. I have a hunch that the artists have become imbalanced the other direction at this particular time, though, that they've been alienated so entirely and so completely for so long that again, they are cut off from the culture, which they should be nourishing and in the same way the culture should be creating some nourishment in return for them.

And my feeling about Robert Bly is in terms of this, that we're constantly using Robert Bly's ideas in describing our program and explaining things to people in relation to art. We never use his poems. We don't feel that they really relate to people out here, you know, where he came from, which is very interesting and strange.

And I think he's one of the most important poets in the world today. I don't feel that he relates to the people in the community, which he is rooted in. And he's talked a lot about routes too.

I mean, I think he understands these things as well as anybody. And so I think that Robert's complaint to Gary Snyder, again, might be a blind side for him. I mean, it's one thing that maybe he could improve himself.

It's an area through which he could improve himself. But I think, on the other hand, getting back to your original point, yeah, I think there is a danger of getting bought up, getting swept along. I find myself thinking, yeah, I could get such and such a grant by applying to do such and such.

And I think that's, that's a real danger. I think it's especially a danger with young artists. I don't feel it's a big deal in my own mind so much because I spent 15 years writing alone for nothing. And so I think what I'm trying to learn to do is the other side again.

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, I think there's a movement in arts funding that is trying to have a more populist approach. And that's going to take some time, because in the past, the Arts Board had a much more long hair definition of art everywhere, not just Minnesota.

And what was art was decided by them really. And there was a lot of danger in that. But now, of course, governor perpich holds the Ukrainian Easter egg in his hand and says this is art and certainly it is.

And I think that there is an attempt to say that art isn't just the nine major institutions in the Twin Cities and Duluth that get $700,000 a year. Art is everything that people do, and it's part of our everyday life.

Well, like Snyder said, that creativity is the birthright of everybody. And that the traditional role of the artist as special genius should be played down. And we should be more sensitive to the community rules and possibilities of artists working on many levels of professionalism, not just the ones that can make a living of it, but people who are sort of amateurs that do other things for a living.

SPEAKER 1: I felt that this was very important in the Olivier project, that what I was mostly trying to do was to not lay myself as artists upon them, but be kind of a medium to draw the creativity, the latent creativity that's in everyone out. And some poems written by a few people, people like Pat Kelly of Olivia ended up being a professional quality.

On the other hand, an awful lot of kids poems were done and an awful lot of old people's poems that were done that in no way could be considered professional, but which gave probably the individual creator as much excitement in process as a professional writer can get out of it.

And that is there's as much gain from wherever they started from in terms of their creative life. In writing one of those poems, as there is in a professional writer's writing.

SPEAKER 5: And John said, well, what do you mean flying corncob? He's not crazy. Why it's Fancy Farm South of Minnesota. I've known him all my life. She said look at his hat. So she looked and it was a DeKalb hat.

And you remember what's on a DeKalb hat? A corncob with a wing growing out of it. Of course, if you grow up in Western Minnesota, you see so many seed corn hats and everyone wears them. I did too, until I got a haircut for the Poetry Out Loud Tour.

But you don't pay any attention to them, but they really tell you all sorts of things. So here's my poem about seed corn hats. Keep in mind the DeKalb image.

In Minneota, Minnesota the farmers wear their emblems on their hats like heraldry. You can tell a man's character, his lineage, his politics from his seed corn, his hog feed, his fertilizer.

Only a Republican would Teflon his beans, while the Democrat might Nixon is hogs. But the aristocrats fly through the air on golden corncobs, whose emblazoned wings flutter like cottonwood leaves on a still day.

HELEN HINTON: Now one of the things that has meant a great deal to me after my husband died, I was at-- I was in deeply grief stricken for one thing. And for another thing, I found that I also had financial problems that seemed more than could be coped with.

And about that time, the Art Center started. And the Art Center wasn't much. It was to people who knew just a little bit more than we did. And we knew nothing about painting or anything else. And I found that it was good for blood pressure. It got me thinking about something else and troubles and problems of which I had more than enough.

KIM HUDSON: That's Helen Hinton of Olivia, Minnesota, from an interview with Vickie Sturgeon in which she talked, among other things, about the importance of art in her life. And she told Vickie that if she could live another lifetime, the arts would play an even more important role for her.

HELEN HINTON: I think that I would do what is being done and sometimes is criticized as frivolous. I think that I would study painting. It couldn't be music because I think I have a tin ear.

But I would, early on in life, I would study something in the fine arts. I have done in my academic work, I did study writing so that I have that. And I would advise it for everyone.

And we have always read in the family, but I am minded of-- I've been thinking about it a great deal. I demonstrated at the first arts and crafts show at Bloomquist near here.

And there was a painter I had never met before. Entirely self-taught. A young woman, Rose Taylor from Marietta, is a very small town, just about on the Dakota border. We got to talking at-- we were in there with-- there was a craft show and we had pictures of the three painters.

And she said what she was up against in this town. Somebody said to her, you can't eat it and you can't wear it, speaking of pictures, painting. You can't eat it and you can't wear it. What good is it? And I have been trying to answer that to find it. I know what good it is. It's the making of a gracious and a full life.

It's something that you can continue to do without that void that is left after you've left your profession, if that is what you've chosen, as I did, or after your family has been successfully raised and you're back where you were before the family was there. I would have more of the things, which would fill a life and let me grow after the necessary things were done.

SPEAKER 5: I grew up in a town where it was all Icelanders, Norwegians, and Belgians, and everybody still spoke the languages when I was a kid. There's a little badly pronounced Icelandic in this poem.

But it's about an Icelandic woman had come to see me and I had taken her out to a bar in Taunton, and she was a good-looking woman and my uncle was down there and he was a little bit tight. And he gets a little nervous when there are good-looking girls around. He's about 70 years old. So this is what the poem is about.

She and I are in a noisy bar full of farmers on a Saturday night.

One of them born of Icelanders and almost totally drunk now is awestruck at this beautiful woman and comes to talk to her.

He is embarrassed in his drunkenness and says everything wrong.

Hey, who is this one. Half the time you got some black-haired Finn who never says a word. She whispers to him, speak some Icelandic to me. You can think of nothing but a vulgar old song that men sing when their horses pull them home half conscious in the back of a wagon.

The horse plods down the road and the invisible broken voice rises from the floor of the wagon in the darkness. [NON-ENGLISH]. I was so drunk I couldn't tell day from night. It is the voice of his father 60 years ago. When the yellow-haired woman laughs again, he hears the laughter of his mother putting the horses away. He gets a sheepish look on his face and just grunts a little.

HELEN HINTON: That thing that you said about process is really the point, because the process of being creative is very closely related to the whole universe, what it's doing all the time. And making new stars and old ones are dying and making new life all the time.

And energy changing into matter and back into energy and all of that. And it's something that's deeply rooted in us. It's what everyone needs to do. And when people let that die in themselves, I think that they become less than they could be.

I've talked to so many people who say, I could never do that. I could never write a poem or I could never sing anything. I wouldn't dare. And they feel that art belongs to these professionals who sort of taken it over.

And that's just a tragedy. Because even if a person can't sing, they have to sing. And pretty soon they'll be able to sing. And even if you can't write a poem, you can write down what you feel. And then it's there. And you've gotten that even if you read it later and don't like it, the process of doing it is fun.

KIM HUDSON: I think I heard Steven sell saying this when he was talking about modern or about the granting process they'd be going through that they're going to have to start thinking more probably about process than about product.

And that when they grant something to a new community theater in a small town in Western Minnesota say, they aren't going to be able to expect that group to be up to, say, theater in the rounds.

But the process is going to be just as important in that town. Maybe more because it's a new thing than the process of producing a higher quality play at theater in the round.

SPEAKER 7: I haven't read this on this tour and I always do, and other tours. It's always difficult, but I'll read it anyway. It's the one I've written at the time of my wife's first death-- first death, first wife's death after Mary being married for 31 years. And it's called Keepsake.

I ate her berry jam today. And threw the empty jar away. I saw her toothbrush hanging there and tossed it far I not where. Today I found her favorite shoes and gave them to a friend to use. Tonight I took with me a bear the love she gave the day we went. And cried myself to troubled sleep. And vowed that part of her I'd keep.

CHARLOTTE CARVER: We're pioneer territory in the arts as well as in a lot of other things. And the public funding has-- I hate to keep using the word seed, but that's really what it's done. It's created an awareness of the arts that was not here before.

There was-- we've had a history of community concert series. We've had the orchestras. But there has never been the adequate support for growth in programs. Most of them have just barely survived.

And I think now we're seeing a whole new trend toward a concern for improved quality, improved opportunities. And certainly broader audiences. And the incredible story of public funding is the fact that people are willing to put up their own dollars at home in order to receive 50% or less match from the endowment grant. So if the public were not willing to support the program, it would not be here.

KIM HUDSON: And what has this meant in terms of activities?

CHARLOTTE CARVER: As I was telling you, in '68, we were doing three programs. And we have just completed our fiscal 77 report. And just to give you an indication of what happened just this past year, we had 131 projects and we had over 1,000 events as a part of those projects, an attendance figure of over 411,000 people, and we reached 99 different towns. So it's all over the state right now.

KIM HUDSON: So if those people were actually unduplicated, you'd be reaching about half the population of the state of South Dakota?

CHARLOTTE CARVER: Right. In fact, our attendance figures on several things-- the Memorial Arts Center in Brookings, the art at the fair, the State Fair in Huron, which is going on right now, will all bring our attendance figure way over the 600,000 population of South Dakota.

KIM HUDSON: That's Charlotte Carver, Director of the South Dakota Arts Council. I spoke with her in her Sioux Falls office earlier this week. South Dakota is a dramatic example of the increase in arts funding and activity since the mid '60s.

In 1968, the South Dakota Arts Council made its first funding request for $10,000. During the current fiscal year, the council will administer a federal grant of $215,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

And as Charlotte Carver mentioned, the increase in federal funds has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in local matching funds. And the state of South Dakota, too, has gotten into the act.

CHARLOTTE CARVER: The state of South Dakota last year gave $108,000 to maintain the office, and $20,000 of that went directly toward program grants, which assisted with our endowment funding.

We hope that we can increase the state obligation because I think every time you get money more directly to the people, your program is stronger. And that's why I'm so such an advocate of the matching funds grants, because I feel that as long as people have a commitment to it, it is not a give away program.

KIM HUDSON: Was the state involved in funding for the arts prior to the federal program?

CHARLOTTE CARVER: No, not at all. No. This was, in fact, I think it was two years the agency was in operation without state funding. So it's come a long way state wise also.

KIM HUDSON: I wonder whether as an arts administrator, you sometimes run up against problems with people who believe that public funds or government simply shouldn't be involved in funding programs of this kind.

CHARLOTTE CARVER: Well, I think anyone who is dealing with public funds runs up against people who are anti-public funds. But my argument has always been that to those people who are generally conservative on any use of public funding is that when all of our services are supported by individuals, then I'm sure the arts will be too.

But it's very difficult for people to operate their schools without public funds. And it's equally difficult to run arts organizations.

KIM HUDSON: Then we come, of course, to that old argument about elitism and the people who will say that, yes, but public schools reach absolutely everybody at every level, whereas the arts are somehow intended for a much smaller audience, and that audience ought to pay its own way.

CHARLOTTE CARVER: You're ruffling my feathers. I would say 80% of our funding would go to the grass roots organizations. In fact, really in South Dakota, it is not a major problem because we really don't have that many elitist organizations.

There are some of our finest organizations are ones that offer tremendous services to anybody who who'd like to come. There are the symphony concerts where, fortunately, there's enough private funding that the tickets don't cost $15 to get in.

But the same Symphony Orchestra will offer free public school concerts. A lot of that private money goes to helping a lot of people who aren't sitting in the auditorium. So I don't really feel in a state like South Dakota, elitism is a problem.

KIM HUDSON: When you talk about 99 communities that have been involved, too, you must be talking about some awfully small communities.

CHARLOTTE CARVER: You bet. In fact, it's staggering to see how small some of them are. In fact, I just had a call yesterday from our friends of old time music project, which had done a concert at camp crook in the West River territory. It was a town of a 180 people. And they had three times the town's population at the concert. This happens fairly, fairly regularly. We have a lot of small towns.

KIM HUDSON: What would you consider your greatest success story during the years that the Arts Council has been in existence?

CHARLOTTE CARVER: Well, we like to think there are lots of them. We've had some fascinating programs. The one that comes to mind is one that was council instigated, which is really quite unique. Our council is primarily a responding organization.

People submit their applications to the council, and then the council funds it and gives it all the support they can, but it's usually the organization's project. However, one of our projects that I consider highly visible and very effective was the hometown art project plan for youth, which we called Happy.

We sent professional artists into the small towns in the summertime and they gave free painting classes. And there, that was really at the level where it reached towns with population of 500 people.

It ended up with some art that's hanging in our front office that I wouldn't be ashamed to hang anywhere. In fact, it was taken to the White House conference on children and youth as an exemplary project. And many of the pieces are now hanging in the state Capitol.

So that was a prize winner. Right now, we have a project that's very exciting. It's called the Visiting Arts Project. And really, it's run in a very similar manner to Happy. It's a project where we have 11 craftspeople who go into communities for week long residencies, which is not a new concept, I know, but it's new to us.

And, for example, we have one senior citizens home in the state that has booked a craftsperson once a week for the whole year, a different craftsperson. So they're getting an exposure to the whole various disciplines of the crafts. It's been very acceptable. People have liked it.

KIM HUDSON: What are the limits on all this?

CHARLOTTE CARVER: Well, I think you have to realize is that there's no-- you'll never reach a plateau in arts delivery or in support for the arts. I don't foresee that ever happening. There's always more to be done. There have been, you know, for centuries, that's been the case.

And it seems to me if those of us and I include you because I feel that radio and television are very important arts resources, that though you may think you've reached the plateau in funding, if the needs and the desires of the people are great enough, there will be funding to support those needs. I don't see a plateau hitting.

KIM HUDSON: The trick is to discover and tap those needs.

CHARLOTTE CARVER: Right. If you don't go down a blind alley and if you can look at the things that are coming up about every three years, we've maintained a 10-year plan, if you will. And 1980 is going to be the end of the 10-year plan.

So already, we're starting to think we've reached all these goals that we assigned that were necessary. And now where are we going to go in '80? And there are a lot of places to go. It's just determining which one should be your next priority.

But the needs are there and the people want what the arts have to offer. And I think we're living in an age right now where life enrichment is a very vital thing. And people are realizing the role that the arts play in that life enrichment.

So I don't foresee coming to a plateau and then all of us can sit back and say we've accomplished these miracles. Now we can sit back and relax. I don't think that's going to happen. Sorry.

KIM HUDSON: If the arts were not funded publicly, what do you think art would become?

SPEAKER 1: I think what it has been in this country up until the last 15 or 20 years. And maybe it's been important. The universities have kind of been culture storehouses, I think. The libraries and the museums.

NANCY PADDOCK: Like the dark ages, the monasteries were.

SPEAKER 1: In a way, yeah. And there was a culture that existed. It wasn't something it immediately took on the tone and the quality of those institutions that preserved it, I think, and became highly intellectual and esoteric.

And the archetypes were sort of ignored as they-- they were the assumed springboards what you left, what you jumped off from, and then moved into Baroque curlicues around them or something like that.

And I think these things haven't really tended to move people very much, but they have maintained and kept it all intact. And I think it's moving back out into the culture now very fast since the '60s.

KIM HUDSON: Do you think then that artists would tend to move back into the ivory tower rather than into the mainstream of mass culture?

SPEAKER 1: I think so, yes.

NANCY PADDOCK: You have to, because the mainstream of mass culture is somehow so sterile that that's one of the things that's alienated artists. There isn't enough to feed your soul in the mass culture. It's basically consumer-oriented. It's basically trying to sell you your death, as James Wright says.

And that you have to find something more. And so you turn inside of yourself. And if you can't do that, if there's no way to do that in a so-called legitimate way, in other words, that there's funding for it, that there's a place that's set up by society that say this is valuable, we're going to give you money for this.

We're going to let you be supported while you're doing this because we think it's important, then you tend to get alienated from the culture. You tend to reject it even more than you would otherwise. And then the only place where a person could go is to the university.

SPEAKER 1: I think, though, that there isn't enough to feed your soul outside the main culture either. And I think that's the decision I had arrived at myself in my personal life that I had to break out. And at about that time, it was wonderful, synchronistic event. All of a sudden it was there for me just about at the time I made the decision that it had to be there.

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KIM HUDSON: Joe and Nancy Paddock giving the poet's perspective on public funding for the arts. Also on this morning's program, you heard Charlotte Carver, Director of the South Dakota arts council, and Olivia resident Helen Hinton. The poets who read were in order. Phoebe Hanson, Howard Moore, Bill Holm and Roy Moore. They were recorded during the Poetry out Loud Tour in Worthington, Minnesota.

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VICKI STURGEON: You've been listening to the poet's perspective, a series of nine programs funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. The program featured Southwest Minnesota regional poets Joe and Nancy Paddock. And the series was produced in the Worthington studios of Minnesota Public Radio station KRSW. Staff members at KRSW responsible for the project were Kim and Judy Hodgson. And I'm Vicki Sturgeon.