Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion is his usual "Two for Tuesday" prompt:
1. Write a lucky poem and/or . . .
2. Write an unlucky poem. Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: write “a poem based on a news article. Frankly, I understand why you might be avoiding the news lately, but this is a good opportunity to find some ‘weird’ and poetical news stories for inspiration.”
Here's my news article: "Trump has ‘small financial interest’ in hydroxychloroquine manufacturer" by Dawn Onley in The Grio, April 7, 2020. Trump has been aggressively pushing hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug against COVID-19, in opposition to his medical advisers' recommendations. Onley writes, “Now, there may be a financial reason Trump is well, trumping, the Malaria drug so hard.” Turns out “Trump has a ‘small financial interest’ in French pharmaceutical firm, Sanofi, which produces Plaquenil, the brand-name of hydroxychloroquine.” While “Trump’s Sanofi holdings are small [it] is unclear how these holdings would change if the drug was widely used globally to COVID-19 cases.” And it seems also that “several senior executives connected to Trump stand to profit, along with the president, if hydroxychloroquine is approved as a treatment for COVID-19.”
Hydroxychloroquine Tanka
Aren’t we lucky Trump
has friends and money in big
pharma? No, we’re not.
So he can make a few bucks
he’ll cash in millions of us.
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Alan's poem today deals with the prompts by discussing news in general rather than a specific article.
The Cliché about News
Once I came to understand the ambiguity
of the saying, “No news is good news,”
I thought of Thoreau’s rejection
of all news as gossip, that the same things happen
but only to different people
and remembered that only sometimes
have I been in the targeted group,
usually because of my youth
or my having grown up in financial straits.
I knew the difference between news
and propaganda, between Perry White
and J. Jonah Jameson,
since I was a boy buying illegal comics
with the front covers torn off
and sold in bundles at the local grocery.
My next-door neighbor believed
pro wrestling is real
but that the moon landing
that my mother made sure I saw
was filmed in a Texas studio.
Reporters brought down Nixon,
even if they weren’t as handsome
as the guys who played them in the movies.
I knew Reagan was an actor
and Poppy was a bad one,
that W was a goofball frat boy,
I was foolish enough to be optimistic
and heard “hope,” the candidate that came
from “hope,” the candidate who called
for us to “keep hope alive,” and I believed
that a country that had shaken off
its racism would also shake off it sexism,
but it had not,
selecting instead of the smartest kid in the room
the privileged bully,
the product of expert reality TV editing
that could take a conman
whose comportment falls
between a profound misunderstanding
of the latter-day Rat Pack
and the emulation
of the first half of Goodfellas
and make him seem like a savvy, decisive businessman
for the media-based prosperity gospel
held by single- and double-issue voters.
There is no news here. My small town
would elect local radio announcers
for mayor; my home state will make
a SEC football coach its next US Senator.
The bad actor. The empowered family.
The privileged frat boy talking tough
and throwing his supporters under the bus.
—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
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