MONEY IS NOT WEALTH

NEW (and very OLD): Sondra A. O'Neale, Emory University: Poet Phillis Wheatley, 1753-1784; First Black Author To Be Published, In The Colonies That Were To Become The USA (Poetry Magazine; posted here February 23, 2026)
[Click the above link; then click again on "Author Phillis Wheatley" - the first of this feature's 23 (!) major links.]
Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. Educated and enslaved in the household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems, and paraded before the new republic's political leadership and the old empire's aristocracy, Wheatley was the abolitionists' illustrative testimony that blacks could be both artistic and intellectual. Her name was a household word among literate colonists, and her achievements a catalyst for the fledgling anti-slavery movement.
[To learn more about Phillis Wheatley and her works, just click on more of the 23 links in this major resource. And/or read "The Age Of Phillis", by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers . Phillis Wheatley is one of the three women that the City of Boston honored in 2003 with the Boston Women's Memorial, a set of statues on Commonwealth Avenue between Fairfield and Gloucuster.]
NEW: Art Silverman and Neda Ulaby: Tom Lehrer, Influential Musical Satirist, Dies At 97 (NPR, July 27, 2025)
Tom Lehrer, a popular musical satirist who rose to fame in the 1950s and '60s before returning to a career teaching math, has died at age 97. Lehrer died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass.
He was remembered across the entertainment industry on Sunday, including by "Weird Al" Yankovic, who called Lehrer a "living musical hero" in a social-media post on Sunday.
When Lehrer wasn't teaching college-level math, he was sitting at a piano making people laugh - and worry - about the world. When Tom Lehrer wanted to ridicule and attack something, he did it from the inside. He would falsely embrace what he detested. His targets included politics, nuclear destruction, and even social harmony.
Born in 1928, he was raised in New York City's Upper East Side, where he took piano lessons as a child - according to a 1981 Harvard Crimson profile. He attended Horace Mann High School before going to Harvard, where he wrote "Fight Fiercely, Harvard!" (1945), his first-recorded song, at 17 years old.
"Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" (1967)
"Vatican Rag" (1965)
"Who's Next To Get The Bomb?" (1965)
and many more. Tom revoked the copyrights on all his songs in 2000. Thank you, Tom!

The Space-Child's Mother Goose, poems by Frederick Winsor. (The Atlantic, December 1956)"
Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she's unable to postulate How.
[A wonderful book for space-children of all ages. Well, after the Stone Age.]

NEW: IOCA Songfest (1948 and 1955, edited by Dick and Beth Best)

NEW: Tom Lehrer: Lobochevsky (1950?)
There's more, much more!:
Tom Lehrer - EPIC Song Compilation (60-min. podcast; Musical Comedy, April 3, 2023)
Tom Lehrer is best known for his satirical songs from Cold-War-era America. Though many of his songs are sixty years old, they still hold up to this day. Lehrer is celebrating his 95th birthday this month, so in honor of the joyful occasion, here is a compilation of many of his greatest songs!
Scroll down in that link to the Comment by "@Rosekittie24" and its Replies, for a clickable song index!

Four Prominent Bastards, poem by Ogden Nash. This was, the story went, "written by Ogden Nash for a Gridiron Club dinner ca. 1941", and was broadcast on Armed Service Radio by mistake. It's been published as "A Ballad to be Sung By Four Prominent Love Children" and other names. In fact, Nash first wrote it for the Dutch Treat Club in 1933 (See it in full, in this Digital Tradition mirror).
I remember pappy's telling me, "Boy, rapin' is a crime
Unless you rape the voters, a million at a time."

??, poem by ?? (learned from Kelly Beller? about 1950; since forgotten):
The road 'twixt Uterus and Hell,
   Is twice as private as a padded cell.

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?