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Poetry from Daily Life: How did these sonnets and stanzas end up in the Sunday paper?

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Poetry from Daily Life: How did these sonnets and stanzas end up in the Sunday paper?

My guest this week on “Poetry from Daily Life” is Amos Bridges, who lives in Springfield, Missouri. I’m especially happy to hear from Amos because he’s the editor-in-chief for the Springfield News-Leader and doubles as editor for this weekly column. It was he who made this all possible and has supported my efforts every step of the way. Amos says that becoming a writer was really a product of being a big reader as a kid. In grade school at Sequiota Elementary, “I had a reputation for writing book reports that were almost long as the book,” he says. As for newspaper work, Amos says it’s the precision of the language that he enjoys on a daily basis. “You want each sentence to pack a punch but you’ve got to be able to back it up with facts. The search for the best, most accurate word activates the creative and logical sides of my brain in a way that not a lot of other things do.” A unique fact about Amos? “I don’t keep whisky in my desk drawer, but my favorite coffee mug is a beer stein.” ~David L. Harrison

It was a Tuesday when Missouri Poet Laureate David Harrison emailed me about an idea he had for a poetry column.

“I’ve thought about this some,” he wrote — which, if you know David, meant the “idea” was more than halfway to a plan — as he pitched a column written by a revolving cast of fellow poets laureate and other writers.

The timing was fortuitous. Tuesdays are the day I’m supposed to start working on the next Sunday’s Opinion section. When the submissions are all about politics, I usually find an excuse to put it off to Wednesday. I seized on David’s email like a lifeline.

As David noted in his pitch, columns about poetry are rare in newspapers these days. That wasn’t always the case. Poetry and other creative writing used to feature regularly in periodicals. Longtime News-Leader editor Dale Freeman, known as “The Ozarker,” was fond of including poems in the columns he penned for the paper. When Freeman died in 2021, we republished a number of them, including this one (which is timely, once again, as the Missouri legislature begins a new session this week):

❖❖❖

It’s Fun Time

Once Again Right Up

There in River City

The Missouri Gen. Ass.

By our determination

Is already starting to act

Like its abbreviation.

❖❖❖

Watchdog journalism — holding the powerful to account, and ensuring the public knows what government and other institutions are doing — has been the cornerstone of my career as a reporter and editor, but I’m a fan of having a little fun, too. I once wrote about my love for gas station meatloaf (if you know, you know) and worked a reference to my youngest sister’s first speeding ticket into another column.

I wrote back and told David I was sold. I sent a few ideas for a title that might serve as a unifying theme and he chose one he liked best: “Poetry from Daily Life.” Two days later he emailed to say he had the first 10 contributors lined up. Three days after that the number was up to 32 and a week after his first email, we had a month’s worth of columns written and ready for editing. Here we are at column No. 61, with a plan to take us to the start of the next school year.

One of the things I have enjoyed over the past year and change is seeing how each author finds poetry in the world around them. I was a creative writing major before I entered journalism and I’ve always thought that, while all writing isn’t poetry, good writing of any sort can be poetic.

As some of our guest columnists have noted, poetry stems from ancient oral traditions humans used to pass along knowledge in the days before Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia. Rhythm and rhyme are baked into our brains. Alliteration (using a series of words with similar sounds) works as well to grab our attention in a newspaper article as it does in a couplet — one of my first and most favorite assignments for the News-Leader started with this sentence: “When he heard about a skeleton in the building at Grand Avenue and Pine Street, Tom Whittaker figured he’d find a fake.” “Skeleton” does a lot of work in that sentence, but “figured he’d find a fake” sets the hook far more memorably than saying he “thought it might not be real.”

Writing headlines isn’t all that different from haiku. Catching a great quote — one that explains a lot with few words and gives the reader a sense of who’s speaking — can feel like discovering a lost Shakespearean sonnet. Tell me this quotation, from a researcher talking about the therapeutic effects of psychedelic mushrooms, isn’t poetry: “Most treatments kind of slowly nudge the brain in a better direction, but psychedelics are a snowstorm,” he said. “… You have these well-trodden tracks in the snow, and then a blizzard comes along and shakes everything up and allows for new connections, new pathways, and it does that quickly.”

Poetry, too, can be a snowstorm, or a salve on a painful day. In a Sunday newspaper, it may just be a needed break from the politics in the Opinion section. Whether or not these columns have inspired you to write poetry of your own, I hope they’ve at least helped readers see the poetic side of life. History happens every day — we might as well use good words to describe it.

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