NewsLetterPoem

Weft Saturday mornings is giving me mixed reactions. I am not sure I can keep up with Estabrook. I feel like I'm just causing trouble. Like the poem that seemed to rub Sandra the wrong way, or when Carl read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot and I responded with "...and now here's a poem by a living woman." I don't properly appreciate the canon. But I hope to keep being a part of the Illinois Labor Hour. Bill cracks me up. He read some eastern philosophy and played Rush. I think he likes me. He calls me "Bill." I resisted the temptation to call him "William." He let me read some poetry. It was fun. I'm a seasoned Weftie, so I don't mind a panicking person shoving scripts into my hand a minute after the program has begun. What would you think if some week I brought the ukelele and a few Guthrie labor songs to sing?

I've never admitted this to you before, but I don't always enjoy protests. I feel like a really successful protest - one with huge numbers of people at it - will render me superfluous. That is why I started writing newspoems and taping them in public places (and men's rooms) and putting them inside News-Gazettes in newspaper machines: the idea that something weird and private, like a poem in your newspaper, something that you have no witnesses for nor any immediate way of dismissing, might make you think. Newspoetry is now online, and that has changed things. Because the medium of the web renders all its content superfluous. And because I suddenly find myself writing about local politics to a potentially international audience.

During the various Gulf Wars, I made stickers and left them all over. I mailed them to San Diego, Providence, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and Cincinnati. They were by turns overt (U.S. OUT OF IRAQ) and subtle (BOMB THE PENTAGON FOR NOT ADMITTING U.S. WEAPONS INSPECTORS)(LET'S GET RID OF THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN INDIANA FIRST, AND THEN GET RID OF THE WEAPONS THAT POSE NO THREAT TO US). In Manhattan, we put stickers all over advertisements at bus stops to protest the relentless images of scrawny fashion models. Once, Rick and Rishi and I had a poetry raid on County Market, and, posing as shoppers, we taped poetry everywhere inside the store. I think I am effective as a surreptitious propagandist. Can you think of any good targets? What do you think? How are you?