Miami Herald Holds Basketball Poetry Contest, With a "Royal" Subject

The Cleveland Cavaliers lost a star player this year to the sultry climes of Miami, and the Florida city's largest newspaper is looking for a poetic way to usher in the Heat's new signee. Until this Friday at 6 PM, the Miami Herald is running its one-off LeBron James poetry contest to "welcome (or not)" King James to the court.

"Are you so happy (or depressed) that LeBron James has arrived in Miami that you can't find the words?" the Herald asks, offering as a reward for those elusive words the opportunity for the winner to read his or her poem on WLRN Miami Herald News, as well as two tickets to a Miami Heat game. The King's bard will also receive passes to the finale event of O, Miami: A Contemporary Poetry Festival, which will occur for the first time next April.

Submit any number of poems via the online form, each piece being no more than six lines, in honor of James's new jersey number, in any style or form. The director of the new poetry festival, P. Scott Cunningham, will choose six finalists who will be announced on October 26 on WLRN Miami Herald News and online, on the day of the season's opening game.

For a taste of the possibilities of sport and glory in verse, check out NBC Miami's LeBron James poem picks from a couple of esteemed basketball blogs. And for a more dramatic rendering of James's poetry in motion, see the video below.

Figure K

11. Working from mybook_final.doc and using the Select Objects tool, select the box in the upper-left corner by clicking on it, then select Edit > Cut, then Edit > Paste Special. Select Picture and click OK (fig. K).

Figure J

10. Save this version of the document as mybook_original.doc. Then resave the document as mybook_final.doc. In order to flip the top four boxes as shown in figure J, you’ll need to convert the text boxes to pictures, which means your text should be final, as you won’t be able to edit it after the boxes are converted.

Figure I

9. Remove the lines around the boxes by holding down Shift and clicking on all the boxes; double click on the outer edge of one of them, which will bring up the Format Text Box menu; under the Colors tab, select Color > No line. Click OK (fig. I).

Figure H

8. Select the four boxes by holding down the Shift key and clicking on each one. Copy and paste the boxes. Drag them to the top of the page, abutting the edges of the bottom boxes, so that your document is divided into eight squares. Insert your text by placing the cursor in each box in the order shown in figure H.

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