Man, I'm gonna be glad when we can afford to have a cool office in a loft off Main street next to OJC and have a pool table and subscriptions to like, five daily newspapers, with a suite of desktop web publishing equipment excluding all Microsoft products except Word 95, before they started planting code in every political poem to make it easier to imprison the writer. Just kidding Bill ; )

 

Also - bad news - I've been ordered to take this muppet off the title page. He is filing suit against us for defamation of character. Law on the internet is kind of fuzzy, but this is a very succesful muppet who has hired a powerful team of lawyers: Gonzo & Fozzie. They sent a bunch of chickens over to the office to make a lot of noise and intimidate me. I don't think he likes my verse or something.

Meanwhile, I went ahead and filed us as a not-for-loss corporation, so this means we all need to fill out tax forms - 4Q2s. By the way, while our IPO is on the table, I'd like you all to stop writing about politics. Try to stick to how pretty spring is (except in Kosovo). Stuff like that. Don't write poetry about evil arms contractors and monopolists on whom you would like to personally spit, such as AT&T or Barnes & Noble. Speaking of which, I had lunch with my good friend Bill Gates and I think I may have talked him into considering building Newspoetry 1999 into the Windows 2000 platform. Things are uncertain but promising. Now that you've all recieved a few shares, you must be curious to know whether their value has risen above zero yet. I'll let you know if that ever happens, otherwise, if you guys want to pay me to get rid of your shares then we can work something out. But you should hurry. 

By the way, I've got a great idea. Just kidding. But it makes me less ashamed to be an American to know that stuff like this goes on here. Especially in Illinois. Downstate. The Heartland. East central. The Dublin of Champaign County. The Center of Art and Culture in America. Urbana. From an ancient word having to do with "urban." Look it up. 

Thanks for writing! 
 - William 

P.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky visited the University of Cincinatti. Cincinnati correspondent Dirk Stratton said: "I drove Pinsky to the airport and I gave him one of the two Newspoetry cards I had and urged him to read the website and contribute if he felt so inclined. he took the card, put it in his wallet, and said he would check out your site. he takes his laureate job very seriously so I expect he will, if he hasn't already: check your server for hits from Boston: one of them will be our man in Washington, Bob "Dante-Lips" Pinsky."