I have no doubt my new pals at the Dorothy Parker Society will get on this and mobilize the martini militia:

The Academy of American Poets, which promotes the virtues of American verse in schools, libraries and on the internet, has come up with a novel way of raising funds: it wants its users to adopt a poet. A single poet costs $30, $50 bags you a pair, $70 gets you three and $100 secures you five, a real bargain. However, you don't actually get to meet the writer (which is just as well, as many of them are dead) but your name, city and state will be listed on your chosen poet's page. Emily Dickinson, for example, has so far attracted 21 admirers yet Dorothy Parker has, at the time of writing, not one supporter. Anyone who can compose the following, however, gets my vote: "Three be the things I shall never attain: / Envy; content; and sufficient champagne." Further details can be found at www.poets.org.

They should really add some cheaper poets, like my friends and me. If 100 unknown poets get sponsored at a buck a throw, they bring in as much as the faculty of a well-regarded MFA program! The Academy could run photos of the tears welling up in the big eyes of a forgotten language poet, in the style of ads by Feed the Children and co. that shame the viewer by comparing the price of a cup of coffee (and that's plain deli coffee, not your caramel macchiato frivolity) to the worth of a human life. Adopt Parker (who donated every dime to the NAACP when she died, by the way) and a dozen of your favorite Frequency readers, and you'll feel really good and thrifty, too, what with all that nasty expensive coffee you didn't drink. Also, in the case of the sub-minor poets, you would be free to meet us. We are not, at press time, dead.

Literary Life [Telegraph; see on the same page a truly chilling note on a Scottish bookseller who's been burning his surplus. Ugh.]