"Shortly after we arrived in Tarawa, there appeared in the back pages of newspapers around the world a small item regarding Kiribati. The instigator of this tiny tempest in the human-interest media was the English magazine Punch, which published a story about a twenty-one-year-old man from Northampton, UK, named Dan Wilson, who in a cheeky display of tactless ambition, sent a letter addressed to 'The Government, Kiribati,' offering himself for the job of poet laureate. In his letter, Wilson stressed his range - 'I can write poems about anything you want; happy poems, sad poems, songs, anything' - and noted that for a remuneration package he wished for nothing more than a hut overlooking a lagoon. Also enclosed was a sample poem, a three-stanza ditty that began: 'I'd like to live in Kiribati/I feel it's the country for me/writing poems for all the people/under a coconut tree.'
The letter, as one would hope, was delivered to the head of government, President Teburoro Tito, who was sufficiently moved to extend an invitation to Wilson to live the simple, literary life in Kiribati, hut included. That Kiribati is pronounced Kir-ee-bas, which undermines the rhythmic structure of the poem, mattered not, since even in Kiribati it is understood that poems no longer have to rhyme."
~ J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals
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