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File Under Sonnet
After a hiatus of more than 40 years, the Library of Congress has again established a national poetry award. When the library bestowed its Bollingen Prize on Ezra Pound in 1948, the furor over Pound's suitability (his pro-Axis broadcasts during World War II led to an indictment for treason) persuaded Congress to ban the library from making future awards. But a love story has given Congress a change of heart. When they were file clerks at the Library of Congress in the 1930s, Rebekah Johnson (LBJ's sister) and her future husband, O.P. Bobbitt, used to exchange notes and poems. After Rebekah's death in 1978, her husband and son endowed the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry fund and convinced Congress to allow the Library of Congress to bestow the $10,000 award every two years, beginning this October. Romancing the Drone
In its quest to publish as many celebrity books as possible, Carol Publishing has come up with a winner: Bad Dates: Celebrities (and Other Talented Types) Reveal Their Worst Nights Out, by Carole Markin. The book is a collection of romantic woes from the likes of Ted Danson, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Meg Ryan, and Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, whose handsome date passed out at the table: ''After a minimum of polite conversation, the big hunk keeled over and went to sleep on the tablecloth, somehow avoiding his double vodka martini on the descent. If he hadn't started to snore, I would've thought he'd had a heart attack.'' Texas treasurer Ann Richards reports the following adolescent nightmare: ''We got to the dance and I was stepping all over the dress and the boy. After about an hour we got into a line to get some punch and I promptly threw up all over the dress, the boy, the girl in front of me, AND the marble floor...!''
Empire of the Sum
The nancially embattled Donald Trump warns that his second book, Trump: Surviving at the Top, may need some revisions: ''We may have to end certain chapters with a question mark. We may have to end the whole book with a question mark.'' But Random House doesn't think so: it's rushing the book into $ print by August, instead of October as originally scheduled.
