It’s Poetry Friday. I hope you like my new logo for my weekly post.
I’ve been browsing through some of my older poems, published or unpublished. One of the wonderful things about being a poet, is that, if you write regularly you have hundreds and hundreds of poems, of different lengths and styles and structures and topics and even of different quality. But when I opened the poem I am going to share today, one particular thing struck me. I’ll let you read it, and then I’ll tell you what I wondered.
The Newspaper
The newspaper
has comics
and horoscopes
births
and deaths
sport
TV
weather and
advertisements
kids pages
and competitions
lost and found
jobs
public notices
and news.
(Poem Copyright Sally Murphy.)
Did you wonder the same thing I did? The thing that struck me is, that although this poem was written only 9 years ago, it might be a poem which many may young readers would not relate to. Why? Because printed newspapers are becoming less a part of everyday life, and a consequence of this is that even some of the subjects I mention might not be the newspaper a child might observe. And, though this thought came later, a lot of the ‘news’ in the newspaper is not new at all – because we have so much access to almost-instant news through the internet and television.
And then of course I wondered if poems really do become outdated. When I was a child, I read poems about things that were not part of the contemporary world – nursies and counterpanes in R. L. Stevenson’s poetry, for example. But what I loved anyway was the structures and the words. I loved the word counterpane long before I understood what one was! And of course there is poetry that goes back way way way before that.
What ‘old’ poems do you still connect with? I’d love to hear.
Today’s Poetry Friday roundup is hosted by Jama at Alphabet Soup. Head over there to see what other poetry goodness is on offer around the blogosphere today.
