I tried to enter this but it took so long I lost the will to live.

Donald Trump, Donald Trump, he’s our President.
Donald Trump, Donald Trump, God knows what he meant.
He’s on the trail, and bound to fail.
Mugwump Trump, lardy lump, he’s a chump.

They have a list of something like 160 reader favorites. Susan has at least one on that list and I have a couple as well. But one or two others that I entered have not appeared even on the long list (even though I receive emails telling me they'd been approved).

Roger, given the hundreds of poems that they were posting at a time, I suspect that yours were all posted, but lost in the avalanche. I posted two, and one of them I barely saw before it sank way to the bottom of the new postings. I saw three of yours on the readers' picks.

Susan

I had some good news and bad news just now. I got an email from Kristoff's assistant saying that they want to use one of my poems in his column this Thursday. The bad news is that they wanted me to confirm that it had never been published before (a stipulation I don't recall them making when they announced the contest) and I am unable to do so since the one they picked was in The Spectator in March 2016.

Why on earth do they care? If some readers take offense at the winners of the NYT Trump poetry contest, I'm pretty sure it won't be because they've seen one of the entries in print elsewhere.

Well, maybe they won't care after all. I'll have to wait to see the column to find out.

I heard that they are considering one of my poems for the Thursday issue, too. Mine wasn't previously published, if that is a problem.

Susan

That's great, Susan. I'm sure they wouldn't bother contacting you if they weren't fully intended to use your poem. Since you don't have a prior publication problem like I do, I'd be surprised not to find you in the NY Times tomorrow.

Woohoo! Susan gets the last word: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/o...erse.html?_r=0

Elegant and very much to the point. Congratulations, Susan.