In the Office of Temporary Assistance

In the mid-1980s poet Alice Fulton, from Troy, NY, wrote about the vanished glory of her stamping grounds, named for the fabled ancient city near Athens. Today’s Trojan Wars have more to do with battling poverty than doing Homeric deeds of valor on the battlefield. Today’s “Trojan Women” is not a 2600-year-old tragedy by Euripides about widows whose husbands were killed in war. On the contrary, today’s story involves women, often single mothers, who face homelessness and a slavery unknown to the ancient Greeks.

Susan B.A. Somers-Willet’s prose-poem script for this intense radio dialogue relies on a female office worker asking a sequence of standard questions to a 25-year-old mother, Billie Jean Hill, who has lost her job and is seeking financial assistance. Again and again, the office worker, in polished bureaucratic English, repeats the refrain, “Did you know?” while her client mutters an interior monologue of answers in the dialect of the street.

For example, the woman behind the desk asks, “Do you or anyone who lives with you have cash on hand?” To which the client silently answers, “Who would actually tell ‘em that?”

If Somers-Willet’s poem sounds surreal, the scary reality is that every single question in her poem is drawn verbatim from the forms and flyers at the New York State Office of Temporary Assistance. The fact is, we “don’t know” the formulaic questions asked by staff members working to dole out “TA,” temporary assistance. We don’t know what kind of Kafkaesque rigmarole goes on in these offices, and we need to know these things.

This stellar piece was done as a multimedia event involving photographs as well as interviews and poetry in connection with one of America’s topnotch literary magazines, The Virginia Quarterly Review.

So far this piece has been licensed by three radio stations. It deserves to be licensed by at least thirty stations.