I think I finally know what I want to be when I grow up: a news poet. I was once a journalist for daily newspapers and did a fair amount of crime reporting. I loved it: it was a job that never got tired or boring and every day was different.
And I’ve been a poet since the fifth grade when my English teacher Mrs. Heath introduced me to the form of haiku. I became a serious poet at the age of 26 when our very own Elizabeth Stark of the BWW taught me how to write a pantoum.
I haven’t looked back since then, and now I’m at work on a couple of novels, and have written a number of short stories, and of course, I’ve been chipping away at my poems. I’ve been fortunate to have several poems published in various reviews over the years.
But thanks to NPR, I now know exactly what my goal is: News Poet. NPR has had several News Poets thus far, including Tracy K. Smith and Kevin Young, and most recently Monica Youn, who spent several hours in a newsroom and then was asked to write a poem reflecting something about the day’s events.
Ms. Youn is a lawyer and a poet and her most recent collection of poems was a National Book Award finalist in 2010. She based her poem on a news story about a blind activist in China who fled house arrest in China. Check out the piece in “All Things Considered.”
What struck a chord with me especially was that Ms. Youn distilled her thoughts into a very powerful and compact villanelle. I’d love to stay and wax on about this but I’ve got to go….formulate a plan to petition NPR to become a news poet!
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and is working on a couple of novels.