April 29, 2011. Diary of a Billsticker – Camden, New Jersey, USA

I was carrying poem posters by Janet Frame, Frankie McMillan, Tusiata Avia, Chris Knox, Lawrence Arabia and Robert Creeley. I love these poets and I feel some kind of uplift being in their company even though they are on paper.

Camden, New Jersey is only about five minutes from Philadelphia across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. The city is about the size of Gisborne in New Zealand. When you come across the bridge you are hit immediately by the fact that this is a city in enormous difficulty. The unemployment rate is somewhere between thirty and forty percent. The high school dropout rate is somewhere around sixty percent. Camden has one of the highest crime rates of any city in America.

About six months ago, half of Camden's police force was laid off due to budget difficulties. A few months after this, they were all rehired. Three of Camden's last four mayors have been convicted of felonies.

The Campbell Soup Company used to manufacture its soup in Camden, but that operation has since closed down and moved. Camden used to have heavy manufacturing industry, but most of that has gone too. For every wrap of Heroin sold on the Broadway in Camden there is a new building going up in Shanghai. It's that bad.

And yet, as Charles Dickens might have said, there are some very fine people in Camden. I met quite a few of them. There are people working very hard to make their community better. I love those people.

I put up about 80 poetry posters in Camden. People were genuinely interested in the poems. Several people stopped me to talk about poetry. This gives me a lot of heart.

Keep the Faith,
Jim Wilson