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October 29, 2003
Bush Inducted into Prestigious Poets Hall of Fame Wins Ezra Pound Prize after Debate over Comma Placement After a sometimes acrimonious debate that lasted until near midnight, the Sheboygan, Wisconsin Dead Poets Society voted last night to induct President Bush into its Hall of Fame and award him the Ezra Pound Meter Prize. The group plans to present the awards next weekend when Bush travels through Wisconsin on a presidential campaign fundraising trip. The debate, in the basement recreation room at the home of society president Yacob Grenkowski, was not about whether to induct the President into the Hall of Fame. That question passed unanimously within moments of being proposed. The acrimony came instead over whether to award Bush the prestigious and much coveted Pound Prize. While some poets wait a lifetime for such recognition, the President only had to wait a month. The awards are for the poem he penned to First Lady Laura Bush while she was in Europe without him at the end of September attending a book festival in Moscow and visiting France. While her husband looked on, Mrs. Bush read the poem at an evening gala October 3 that kicked off the National Book Festival in Washington. The poem begins: Roses are red "It's rare to see someone in the White House with the sensitivity necessary to write good poetry," said Grenkowski, who is known for his "Ode to a Big Lake", a celebration of Lake Michigan. "We wanted to recognize President Bush for his talent and hopefully encourage him to write more poetry while in office." Grenkowlsi said debate over the Pound Prize centered on the third line of the poem, which reads, "Oh my, lump in the bed" and whether the President had inserted the comma after the word "oh" or after the word "my." "Several of us got the poem off the Internet and one version had the comma after 'oh' and another had it after 'my'," Grenkowski explained. "If the President used the comma after 'my,' then that's quite brilliant and worthy of the Pound Meter Prize. If the comma was after 'oh' it's good but doesn't rise to the level of Pound." Grenkowski said part of the group wanted to put off a decision for a day or two while someone telephoned the White House for clarification about comma placement. "We finally decided against that because no one seemed to be free to take on the job," he said. Ultimately, the comma-after--my group prevailed. "It sounded like it got pretty heated," said Karolina Grenkowski, Yacob's wife. "I was jumping back and forth between Letterman and Leno because I wanted to hear Letterman's Top Ten, but Leno had Beyonce on and I just love that girl's music." Mrs. Grenkowski said that In the midst of the channel hopping, she heard a crash, the sound of breaking glass. "That happens every couple of years," she said. "Johnny Rogers gets over stimulated and throws a beer bottle at the wall. Then I could hear somebody sweeping up glass." Rogers gained notoriety in the 1980s after his "Bread in Oven" was read on the floor of the Wisconsin House of Representatives during debate over repeal of a decades old tax on each loaf of bread. The tax was repealed and Rogers' sensitive poem was cited as a an important factor that swayed the vote toward repeal. The Bush poem in its entirety: Copyright William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions |
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