What rhymes with 'Daisuke'?
Would you like to be a poet laureate? There are some openings, locally.
Boston has fine-tuned its search for the Hub's first-ever official poet and is now accepting applications on the website cityofboston .gov. You have to be 21 years old, a Boston resident, and - oh, yes! - a poet. But don't worry; if the Red Sox win the World Series, you won't have to churn out heroic couplets. "We don't want someone to publish poetry on demand," explains mayoral aide Alice Hennessey, a member of the laureate selection panel, which hopes to make its choice by Jan. 1.
What the P.L. will do is flog poesy in the schools and function "as a literary ambassador" at civic events. Thanks to the Boston Consulting Group, which made a donation in the name of its longtime employee Sandra Moose (she has been chair of the Boston Public Library Foundation) there is a modest stipend: $2,000, with an additional $3,000 budgeted for programming. So don't have a cow if a pothole breaks your axle (again) this winter. No road repair money went into frivolous versifying.
Coincidentally, Cambridge is also looking for a "Poet Populist," its hippy-dippy version of the same idea. The People's Republic will shell out $1,000 a year for the Chosen One, who will have to demonstrate "a strong desire to build community through poetry." Alas, they stopped taking nominations three weeks ago and hope to stage an inauguration in early November.
How good are my sources on Parnassus? I'm told that Cambridge received about 15 nominations, including such well known - in PoetryWorld, that is - names as Gail Mazur, Diana Ter-Hovhannisian, Richard Cambridge, Irene Koronas, Deborah Priestly, and Philip Burnham. As for Boston, I have a long list of local poets who for reasons of busy-ness or residency will probably not be the city's first poet laureate: Rosanna Warren, Robert Pinsky, Lloyd Schwartz, Henri Cole, Danielle Georges, Daniel Tobin, Tino Villanueva and Joe Bergin, who had this idea in the first place.
"It will be an exciting and challenging gig," says poet Charles Coe, who has taken himself out of the Boston running because he works for the Massachusetts Cultural Council. "It will take somebody who doesn't have a thick skin, because there will be a lot of 'Why didn't they choose me?' The poetry community is very balkanized."
Free Plug, I: Here is an interesting news hook. Last month, the Chicago Sun-Times claimed to have found among Senator Barack Obama's diverse forebears a common ancestor with George Bush.
Another of Obama's curious ancestors features in a new book "The Naked Quaker: True Crimes and Controversies From the Courts of Colonial New England," by Diane Rapaport of Lexington. Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Singletary, a 17th-century Plymouth resident also known as Jonathan Dunham, was something of a wildcat. Probably a freelance Quaker or Baptist minister, he showed up in 1683 court records for "drawing away another mans wife . . . against her husband's consent." With yet another woman in tow, he burned down another man's house, killed his dog, and nearly killed his children. The Plymouth authorities whipped him and then banished him to New Jersey, where I suppose, then and now, this kind of conduct isn't necessarily frowned upon.
Free Plug, II: Good grief, everything is online . . . I noticed with some bemusement that the Appalachian Mountain Club has just published a Web version of its venerable White Mountain Guide, almost always the heaviest item in the backpack of anyone traversing the Whites. Access to the online guide costs $15 a year, $12 for AMC members like me.
I figured this meant I could traipse among the White Mountain huts with just a (borrowed) BlackBerry in my hand, accessing the digital guide when I needed to figure out where I was. Not exactly. It's hard to pick up cellphone or wireless signals in the high country. So the AMC suggests you print out your itinerary on your home computer before you hit the trail. "We would always advise people to have the maps and potentially even the guidebook with them as well, in case you have to have a plan B," explains AMC spokeswoman Laura Hurley.
So much for weight-shedding. Heck, you might as well take the Sunday newspaper up there with you. Print rules!
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
