Potentially, a SteveHennicon!

A poetry friend (Matthew E. Henry) tweeted that he likes to search his own name in twitter without the “E” and then watch theology nerds do battle over his namesake, a 17th/18th century theologian who wrote a massive commentary on the Bible. Matthew confessed – and I confess too – I think we should all confess. We should all admit to googling ourselves. Because we know we do. Which brings me to the main point of this post:

            There needs to be a SteveHennicon.

            There are many google-able Steve Henns, particularly if you google the name without attaching “poet” or “poetry” to it, but I intend to focus on myself and 3 other Steve Henns, all of whom, if we joined forces and powers and twitter followers, could unite, sort of like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and attract all kinds of attention from the public, maybe at a thing like a Comicon, but not: a SteveHennicon.

            Steve Henn is a former NPR tech reporter who used to appear on Marketplace a lot, and tweets at the handle @HennsEggs.

            Steve Henn is also a magician in the UK with, I think, a weekly show.

            Finally, there’s another Steve Henn (Stephen?) who teaches high school English. I don’t keep up on him too carefully, because this one creeps me out, but I think he taught at a Catholic School in St. Louis for a while, and now he might be somewhere else.

            Obviously, the four of us combined might have barely enough of a fan base to be an attractive composite of Steve Henns for a SteveHennicon, if we lean heavily on the NPR reporter’s media savvy, and if the magician is at least as compelling as I am when doing a live show, and if the teacher is a regular “O! Captain! My Captain!” like I sometimes permit myself to imagine myself to be.

There could be magic shows, poetry shows. There could be panel discussions. Friends and others adjacent to the lives and worlds of each Steve Henn could host their own workshops. My friend Nate White, for example, might lead a group through a live reading of “The Book of Nate,” an actual chapbook I wrote about him. Or Kai Ryssdal from MarketPlace could show up and talk about his insider experiences with @HennsEggs. Or the magician could pretend to free a dove from a cage while actually smashing a different dove, like Hugh Jackman does in The Prestige.

            Let’s get creative with it. This could be a lot of fun. I’ll have books for sale, of course. If you know anybody great at organizing this kind of thing, hit me up in the twitter DMs, let’s talk. My handle is @MrSteveEngHenn over in that universe. I am not especially popular among the twitter poetry people . . . but I could be popular among the Steve Henn people, who are out there, like Swamp Things, or a legion of fanpeoples, waiting, covered in disposable income, to surface.