Hello ATC!
Please forgive the change in my schedule. I haven't
been listening to your show for quite some time now. Imagine my shock
when I ran my semi-annual vanity google ("Today's News Poem") and
discovered that your show ran a series on news poetry and didn't ask me,
the great dean of news poetry, for a contribution! While my magazine
Toylit doesn't have the exposure ATC does, it did have over ten thousand
unique readers in the last year, which I suppose means that my news
poems are the most read poems of the genre. This is probably due to my
having dedicated a whole 365 days in 2010 to writing a news poem a day,
despite having minimal media coverage (despite my pleas). Unfortunately,
I do not finance my activities through university sinecures, so I am
often left with the remaining scraps of mainstream poetic
attention--despite being published in such prestigious publications such
as The Exile and The Nervous Breakdown. This is where ATC comes in to
play: you, who have decided you are interested in News Poetry can look
at the whole year of 2010 and see that I wrote a news poem every single
day. Furthermore, you can see that after a hiatus, I am still the only
publisher of news poetry on the web. I have a Duotrope listing and have
been interviewed by the editors there. I write a news poem a week,
without fail. I think if you would like to rectify your omission, you
might want to consider me for a future show (or as an addendum piece to
the prior series). You can examine my voluminous C.V. here:
http://toylit.blogspot.com
It gets even better--as you can see, I am the only poet on the
internet who has been able to get a regular readership of news poetry by
my own efforts. Not only could I write you a news poem the same day as a
news story, but I could write several. Imagine! You could be patron of
poets much as newspapers were once patrons to cartoonists. I want you to
seriously consider this offer, for I love poetry far more than I love
my pride which your series so seriously wounded. I admit it would gall
me if you adopt my suggestion and then ignore me, but that is only
because I am the antenna through which poetry transmits--and every
antenna thinks himself special.
Sincerely,
Khakjaan Wessington
ps: When I tried sending you this email, I got this reply:
atc@npr.org
Your message wasn't delivered because of security policies. Microsoft
Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please provide
the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
Blah blah blah, our computers think you're a spammer, so your words will never even reach a human, because our computers blacklisted you.
Petition All Things Considered to invite Khakjaan Wessington to do News in Verse! You saw their email (prior paragraph, right?), now bug their Twitter account. I don't ask you to play my personal army very often, but if you're here reading Today's News Poem then you want more poetry in news. Dammit! That's my meme! Don't let NPR swipe it! Here's their Twitter: https://twitter.com/npratc
Follow us on Twitter @Khakjaan
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