The Cleveland classical radio station WCLV made me do it, twenty years ago.
In the month preceding Valentine’s Day in 1997, they kept reading a love poem by a British poet laureate and asking: “Can you write something that good?” Now, I don’t believe in competition in the arts, but they were offering some nice prizes, so I thought, what the heck—I’ll give it a try. It seemed like a nice excuse to pick up the quill again.
Well, to make a long story short, if you tuned in to WCLV at about 6:30 p.m. on February 14, 1997, you would have heard my name announced as the first-prize winner in the newfangled “internet” category (for those who tune in to the station via the worldwide web). Then you would have heard about 15 seconds of silence. Technical difficulty. But after another bit of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, you would have been treated to the burnished tones of Robert Conrad reading my little pome:
The other winning poems were recited by an actor who happened to be in Cleveland around this time (I seem to recall it was David Birney, who had ties to the city). For some reason, the winning entries submitted via the internet were not ready for the actor to record, so they were read by the radio voice of the Cleveland Orchestra, which suited me just fine.
