[Newspoetry] Letter from Your Editor

[Joe Futrelle]

Newspoets,

	It has been quite a month here at newspoetry.com.  I assure
you that the scandal which has dogged my tenure is but a "bump in the
road", as a certain presidential candidate so poetically put in
recently, and we can all put that behind us.  Please.  I'd like to
virtually thank all of January's e-poetry content-providers.  We
received several poems from a new correspondent in Atlanta;
Whitestone's second poem appeared today.  William even wrote an eerie
poem about jellyfish and a politically-tinged power outage.  And Mark
Enslin developed the new poetic form -- we said it couldn't be done --
the 12-character haiku.  Not to mention Sam Markewich's
"semi-multi-level-esque haiku in the wicked stupid style".  Your Aunt
Barbara made some Sanka-related predictions and Paul Kotheimer issued
his first four Precepts for a Better Millenium.  And this is just a
few of the highlights.

     But it's what's under the hood that's really different this
millenium.  Newspoetry.com's hard-working, unpaid, frazzled,
Jolt-chugging, programmer with Cheeto-oranged hands and carpal tunnel
developed a system for editing and scheduling poems which drives a new
index tool which provides automatically-updated indexes for title,
author, and subject.  Just click on the index links on the first page
and you'll see what I mean.  I developed a new logo by swiping the
word "News" from the New York Times front page -- don't tell anyone.
I added drop caps and inset text.  And I added some portraits; I can
always use more of those.

       So listen.  Keep those newspoems coming.  There's poetry in
them thar news stories, and I'm counting on yew all to find it.

     Oh and by the way I was *on* the TV news tonight on channel 3.
The story was about the proposed NCSA building.  They didn't use my
quote about how the north campus is overdeveloped.  It was a stretch.
Instead they quoted Larry Smarr saying that we needed to stay
"high-tech".  Pretty deep, Larr.  I guess I should write a newspoem
about it, practice what I preach for a God Damn GDC Change.

Joseph M. Futrelle
Editor-in-shirtsleeves-
wearing-suspenders-and-a-hat-
with-a-"press"-card-in-it-
a-cigar-dangling-from-his-
mouth-barking-orders-into-
two-phones-simultaneously-
forehead-beaded-with-sweat