Did you guys see what that crazy Ruth Lilly did? For those who don't know who she is, she is the heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune. She's been known to do some crazy shit, but this takes the cake.
She gave ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS to Poetry Magazine. Now I'm all for supporting the arts, but I think this is excessive. ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!!! Poetry Magazine pays $2 a line for poetry. I can only hope that at least they will start paying a little more to poets, who never made much money anyway. And perhaps Poetry magazine can do some nice things like giving away copies of the magazine to schools and hiring poets to speak and read to groups who might not normally have the opportunity. Starting creative writing programs in the schools might be nice. Contests for kids, grants to poets. Those are the things that better start happening. Because ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS is a fuckload of dough.
Maybe 20 million would have been enough. Then the rest could go to pay the hospital bills of folks who have had their health destroyed by questionable drugs that have raced through the FDA approval process via payoffs and other various scams and then heavily marketed on TV and in magazines as the best thing since sliced bread.
