(I have so many things to write about that I’m just throwing up my arms and posting about the most trivial thing to come my way today; this is about my misreading of one word from an article in The Economist issue of 7/4/26). The item “American power: Strength in numbers: An empirical look at America on its 250th birthday reveals a country that is mighty — but becoming less dominant” begins with a compressed history of the American economy, from 1820 on. Then (with my misreading bold-faced): Fuelled by war, colonisation and the industrial revolution, the British Empire overtook China as the world’s largest economy around 1840, when the first opium war between the countries was under way. … The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and brutal deployment of slave labour meant that the country produced most of the world’s cotton by the 1850s. America expanded, often violently, westward, gaining natural resources that would be the envy of the world. Sprawling forests supplied timber for rapid construction. Well-positioned poets and the sweeping Mississippi river provided routes for export. … Much as I love the idea of well-positioned poets providing economic heft — I am something of a poet myself — the actual text was of course about well-positioned ports, not poets. I just have poetry on the brain. • *port>poet**. But then I was moved to contemplate a world in which the port has given way to the poet. Some citations from PoetWorld; no doubt you can find others: (any poet in a storm (We were hoping for Walt Whitman, but hell, we’ll take any poet in a storm, and Brian Bilston is indeed entertaining in hard times) the poet of entry (Baudelaire is the poet of entry into French symbolism) poet side of a ship (Emily Dickinson stuck to the poet side on the writers’ cruise, avoiding the novelists) poet wine stain (The Thursday Verse group were notoriously messy drinkers — the tablecloths were dotted with poet wine stains) the poet of CityName (Antonio López, the San Mateo County Poet Laureate, serves as the poet of Redwood City) poethole (John Ciardi wrote about the poethole in his life; all of his neighbors wanted to know what his was for) (You might want to check out the Ciardi hole poem.) Meanwhile, pleasure in small things. This entry was posted on July 12, 2026 at 9:52 am and is filed under Errors (https://arnoldzwicky.org/category/errors/), Misreadings (https://arnoldzwicky.org/category/errors/misreadings-errors/), My life (https://arnoldzwicky.org/category/my-life/), Poetry (https://arnoldzwicky.org/category/poetry/). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 (https://arnoldzwicky.org/2026/07/12/well-positioned-poets/feed/) feed. You can leave a response (https://arnoldzwicky.org/2026/07/12/well-positioned-poets/#respond), or trackback (https://arnoldzwicky.org/2026/07/12/well-positioned-poets/trackback/) from your own site.