Not only is this National Poetry Month, but April 18 is New York City’s 11th annual Poem in Your Pocket Day, where New Yorkers are encouraged to write their own poem or borrow one from their favorite poet. All you need to do to participate is carry a poem and share with your friends, family, classmates and colleagues on April 18.

Since 2010, Metro has partnered with the mayor’s office to promote this special day by hosting the #NYCPoetweet Twitter poetry contest — and we publish an original poem from the mayor himself in the paper. From April 1 to April 8, New Yorkers tweeted us their best original rhymes, verses and haikus using #NYCpoetweet (winners can be found here.)

Below is Bloomberg’s introduction and his original poem. What do you think? Let us know in the comments — does Bloomberg have a second career coming up after retiring from the mayor’s office?

New York City is full of poetry. There’s a unique cadence created by our rumbling trains, bustling sidewalks, relaxing parks and, most of all, by the voices of 8.4 million people who call our city home. New York poets have been organizing that music into language that touches our hearts and fires our imaginations since at least the days of Clement Clarke Moore and Walt Whitman. Today, through Poem in Your Pocket Day, we celebrate poets in the five boroughs and around the world. I’ll be carrying a poem with me, and I hope you will too.

Literature and the arts a vital part of our city’s cultural life, and they also play an enormous role in our economy. Print publishing alone is a $5 billion industry, employing nearly 50,000 people, or 1.5 percent of our total private sector workforce. New York City is home to approximately 1,100 publishing businesses. That includes 300 book publishers, 500 magazines and 200 newspapers. Those numbers do not include Internet publishing in New York, where employment has doubled in just the past five years.

To ensure that New York’s literary future is as bright as our past, our Department of Education has made instilling a joy of reading in our 1.1 million New York City school children a top priority. Strong reading and language skills are essential not only for future writers and poets, but for everyone who wants to follow their dreams and fulfill their potential.

Poem in Your Pocket Day is not just for poets.  In fact, it’s designed to encourage all of us non-poets take a moment to read a few lines of a favorite poem or discover a new one.  Or – even better yet – read a poem with your children or grandchildren, and help inspire them to understand that poetry is all around us, especially in a place as a diverse and exciting as New York City. 

ARTISTIC FREEDOM
By Michael R. Bloomberg

April is the cruelest month, I’ve heard a poet say

But not for me because there’s Poem in Your Pocket Day
Each year, I get to publish my new verse – it’s quite a perk
Too bad reporters always ask me to describe my work

Oh who knows?

Here goes…

My stuff’s not like Dickinson – or Gertrude Stein
I’m not a new Longfellow, though he’s just fine
I don’t write like Whitman, I don’t rhyme like Pope
I don’t sound like Ezra Pound (or so I hope)

My work’s not like Chaucer or Baldwin or Hughes
My poems aren’t like Emerson’s or Angelou’s
I’m not Robert Frost – though we share a few traits
And I am not Keats (which does not rhyme with Yeats)

My style isn’t Wordsworth – that’s not what it is
Nor is it like Browning (not Robert or Liz)
It’s not Dr. Seuss. It’s not Mother Goose.
I just can’t describe it – I have no excuse

But hey!
That’s okay….

I’m Bloomberg!
Not Ginsberg or Sandburg, you see
I shouldn’t be T.S.
i can’t be e.e.
I won’t ever rhyme like Muhammad Ali

I’m me
In NYC
So I’m free
To be anything I want to be

And that is the note I’ll end upon
New York New York!
Write on, write on!

The post Read Mayor Bloomberg’s Poem in your Pocket entry appeared first on Metro.us.

During a 60 Minutes profile of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey last night, Lara Logan expressed surprise at the news that Dorsey wants to be mayor of New York City.

But as New York Magazine’s Daily Intel and Gothamist have pointed out, that’s not really news.

Dorsey’s political ambitions were referenced in a Forbes profile last year, as well as a 2011 Vanity Fair article.

As a child, Dorsey was apparently “fascinated by cities and what makes them tick,” and has repeatedly discussed his love of the “chaotic” atmosphere of New York City, which he mentioned again with Logan last night.

Dorsey has previously talked about Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a fellow billionaire, as a role model, highlighting the mayor’s corporate background in technology and start-ups.

Bloomberg has expressed admiration for Dorsey as well.

“Few people have been as successful at innovating—and implementing—as Jack Dorsey,” Bloomberg told Forbes. “Could a tech entrepreneur really be elected mayor? That question is so 2001.”

Logan brought up the question of how Dorsey might choose to communicate with voters, and Dorsey confessed to an aversion to “face-to-face communication.”

“I guess my natural state would be through mediation of letters or through tests, all those mediums, I definitely find ease with,” Dorsey said. “Do I feel like I’m an expert in having a normal conversation face-to-face? Absolutely not. That’s just not my natural state.”

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has begun campaigning for mayoral candidate Joe Lhota, penning a fundraising letter that praised him for standing up “to the destructive policies of tax-and-spend politicians who put New York and America in peril.”

Lhota, who worked as a deputy mayor under Giuliani and later headed the MTA, is considered the frontrunner to win the Republican nomination. He would then face off against Christine Quinn or whoever else comes out of the Democratic primary.

“Make no mistake,” Giuliani said Saturday in his letter. “If you don’t think the city can slip back to its unmanageable, ungovernable ways, just listen to Joe’s Democratic opponents.”

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Republican mayoral hopeful John Catsimatidis released the first 30-second radio ad of the 2013 mayoral campaign this week to some tepid reviews, with the New York Times describing it as “a scrappy, somewhat corny… stilted exchange.”

In the ad, a male voice inquires as to whether his companion knows who Catsimatidis is.

A female voice replies, “You mean the immigrant who came here with nothing, grew up poor in Harlem, and is a successful independent businessmen?”

The male voice proceeds to praise Catsimatidis as a “common sense guy” and promise that as mayor “he won’t owe anyone anything” because he’s “not a career politician.”

The ad ends with the woman asking her companion to repeat his pronunciation of the candidate’s name.

The candidate also recently conducted a robocall in which, Capital New York noted, he repeated his own name four times.

A recent Qunnipiac poll found that 86 percent of all voters haven’t heard enough about Catsimatidis to form an opinion.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

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With his time in office winding down, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has reportedly set his sights on London for future endeavors.

The New York Times reported Friday that a city block-size complex called Bloomberg Place will be constructed in London by 2016, complete with two towers connected by sky bridges, pedestrian plazas and perhaps branches of New York restaurants.

The site will be the European home of the mayor’s company and charity, according to the Times.

Bloomberg has also reportedly financed a major art gallery expansion in London, held lavish parties at his home there, regularly dined with politicians and celebrities, and donated to electoral campaigns.

The post Bloomberg finds London calling appeared first on Metro.us.

As mayor from 1978 to 1989, the forceful, quick-witted Koch, with his trademark phrase “How’m I Doing?,” was a polarizing figure and the city’s constant promoter.

Koch died at about 2 a.m. (0700 GMT) at New York-Presbyterian hospital, the spokesman for Koch said.

Koch was credited with lifting New York from crushing economic crises to a level of prosperity that was the envy of other U.S. cities. Under his leadership, the city regained its fiscal footing and undertook a building renaissance.

But his three terms in office were also marked by racial tensions, corruption among many of his political cronies, the rise in AIDS and HIV, homelessness and a high crime rate. In 1989, he lost the Democratic nomination for what would have been a record fourth term as mayor

The post Former New York mayor Ed Koch dies at 88 appeared first on Metro.us.

Does he approve of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg? Yes and no. He has “nothing against him,” but continues to be outspoken against his changing term limits.

“All the Bloomberg supporters look at me and say, ‘What do you got against Bloomberg?’” he said. “Well, I don’t have anything against Bloomberg, but there are term limits. The whole point is, whether you liked him or didn’t like him, he’s got to go.”

Does that mean he is running for mayor? Possibly, but not in 2013. Why not? For one, “30 Rock” prevents him. For another, he plans on going to school.

When he does run for office, is he afraid of the skeletons in his closet? That includes his ugly divorce from Kim Basinger, a nasty voicemail about his daughter Ireland and his often-newsworthy brothers.
It seems he is not. He remained confident that he would be able to weather criticism of his past behavior.

Of the people?

Baldwin says that living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would help his campaign because it’s “more middle class.” Really?
   
“It is more real,” Baldwin told the Times. “There’s old people, it’s ethnic and it’s economically mixed. I am more comfortable living where it seems more middle class, and I have lived there deliberately.”

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