Fear of libel is publishing`s latest wind-chill factor YOU DON`T KNOW me. Not like you know Bill Wilson (Address Unknown). He penned the classic "Poo River" which ranked sixth in This Magazine`s venomous verse competition and achieved anthological immortality in Key Porter`s book Barbed Lyres. I and my little verses, on the other hand, have merely slithered back into the primordial ooze of bilious anonymity. All we have left is a letter from This Magazine dated July 20, 1990: "Congratulations! Your poem ... has won an honorable mention..." A money prize would have been preferable; a rebate on my $ 10 entry fee would have been nice. But having made it into the contest`s eminently publishable top dirty dozen was at least an improvement over my 129th-place finish in the Ottawa marathon several years ago. Or so I thought. I didn`t realize that contest procedure was first to congratulate the "winners" in writing and only then to toe-test their brats in the black waters of libel chill. A perverse 9 1/2 weeks later, on September 25, This Magazine phoned me with the unwelcome news. Looking back now - it seems inconceivable - a venomous assault on a news achor`s receding hairline had survived the test. In fact, it won. Somehow, a timely and venomous send-up of John Turner bum-patting his way to a 1984 electoral hum`s rush survived. It placed second, just like John. So why on earth did they squelch my gentle ribbing of one Professor Rushton in "September 1990: Return of the Native..."? Well, we do know the gentleman in question is a litigator. And 1 did put obviously bogus words in Rushton`s mouth in verse one. 1 suppose he might have taken exception to the implication that he speaks only in limerick verse. Otherwise, certainly with the cosmetic removal of quotation marks and substitution of third for first person just to be sure, it`s almost impossible to imagine Rushton subjecting himself to further ridicule by taking a limerick - albeit an epic limerick - to court. But ... brrrr ... feel that draught wafting in from the legal eagles. In half an hour, I de-libelized the poem. Or so I thought. The lines still scanned and the substance remained intact, but gone were the quotes and all direct reference to Rushton or his university. I phoned This Magazine`s managing editor, who agreed to have their libel lawyer take a look at the revised version. This surprised me because I didn`t really believe that a book due to be published a month later could still he changed. I just wanted to make the point that had they not taken two months to revoke their congratulations, a few trivial alterations would have made it unnecessary. I wasn`t surprised to receive, a few weeks before the launch party, word that my revisions hadn`t eased their libel worries. This final ruling was scrawled on the flip-side of a conditional invite to the launch party I would have to pay full admission. Talk about a return ticket to the primordial ooze. I was busy that night. All this is but a minor personal irritation. Far worse is the national cowering at the feet of Conrad Black and his litigating ilk. Its reductio ad absurdum is the situation at Saturday Night, or more accurately, Black Night, or should we make that Good Night, magazine. Its hands-off proprietor usurps five pages in September to air his disagreement with the editor John Fraser on Canada`s post-Meech future. This so-called shoot-out allotted two and a half times more space to the "proprietorial" than to the editorial. Worse, the proprietor digresses from his standard repertoire of pomposities to make an outright pitch for Canada`s joining the United States. That`s not how his article begins or ends, but nobody who reads all the way through could fail to notice that this is the prospect that really gets his crank turning. Here we have the country`s only national middle- to high-brow magazine of "politics, business and the arts," and its owner wants us to become U.S. citizens. As a Canadian, I find that extraordinarily embarrassing. There must have been reams of angry letters to the editor; it would be even more embarrassing if there weren`t. Unbelievably, not the merest peep of reader response to Black`s U.S. proposal appeared in subsequent issues of Saturday Night magazine. Did Black suppress their publication? Surely not; no self-respecting editor would sit still for that. More likely, the readers who found Black`s proposal next to traitorous suppressed their own impulses. Is a press baron who would shut down both freedom of the press and the nationhood of his own country capable of going after a Saturday Night letter-to-the-editor writer? A ridiculous hypothesis. But evidently, no one wanted to put it to the test. Brrr. No wonder venomous verse competitions in this country harvest harmless teasings of balding anchormen.