By Bruce B. Brugmann
Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer and Deadline Poet for the Nation, has always been a good friend of the Guardian and the alternative press.
At our founding convention of the alternative press in l978 in Seattle, Trillin popped up to do a story for the New Yorker.
Since we had no dinner speaker, we asked Trillin to drop his reporter stance long enough to give the keynote speech at our final dinner. He did and it was a good one. HIs piece in the New Yorker was one of the most best and most prescient stories ever done on the alternative press. It drew heavily on his experience on the campus daily at Yale University, where he went to college, and on his knowledge of Henry Luce of Time magazine fame, who had been an earlier graduate of the Yale campus daily. In short, Trillin got the point of the alternative press as an important business model as well as a journalistic model and wrote it up beautifully in New Yorker style. It’s time he returned to the alternative press and updated his piece.
Meanwhile, he has developed a most enjoyable persona in the Nation magazine: “Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet.” He turns out a splendid timely poem for each issue, on deadline. Here’s his latest in the current Feb. 23 edition of the Nation:
INCENTIVES
The Wall Street ways are mighty funny:
A bonus comes for losing money.
About this rule they’re quite devout
No wonder they need bailing out.