Geez, I'd kill for a Poets House here in Wisconsin... highly doubtful, of course, but one can dream.

I've been ingesting a pretty solid diet of poetry of late and a shrine such as Poets House would be quite a wonderful retreat.

Interestingly enough, in this world of mass marketed paperbacks, e-books, and mega-monolithic-motion-pictures based off toys and funny books, poetry may be the last outpost the written word, in its purest form, has anymore.

C'mon, if the Waffle House can franchise, why not the Poets House???

Hey, Jeff, a few years back, Poetry magazine got a $100M gift from a member of the Eli Lily family upon her death. The New Yorker magazine asked my friend (and poet) Kurt Brown what Poetry should do with the gift. We were joking about his response when I suggested they start a National Poetry League. Build poetry stadiums, have teams from different cities: The San Francisco Stanzas, the Houston Haiku, etc.

Unbelievably, I just found the New Yorker article in their archives here.