Newsroom poetry

Finding inspiration from the daily miracle of putting out a newspaper, journalist and poet David Tucker finds creative characters to write about in and out of the newsroom

by David Tucker

I write poems about newsrooms for the most basic reason: I spend half my life there. Way too much of it, but that is another story.

Actually I write poems about a lot of things: love, family, dreams, weather, death, my cats and the slow news of ordinary life.

But newsrooms offer irresistible material. How the paper gets out each day still amazes me. You have this massive beast of an operation — reporters and editors, technicians and truck drivers, researchers and salesmen all working against a relentless stream of deadlines to tell the story of a single day.

There are few other places where you can work in the language with such intensity. Colleges are festooned with writing workshops, but the newsroom is workshop for real, and its rush to deadline can become a creative process as maddening as trying to sew a parachute before hitting the ground. Despite what some of my colleagues say, I find no shortage of characters to write about in the modern newsroom: profane, bullying city editors (we have those), volatile reporters (to drive the editors crazy) and photographers (who resemble guerrilla warriors).

But it’s not just the high drama of the newsroom that makes me write poems about it. Mostly, I think, its the words I keep hearing there everyday.

Consider this story. On a cold night last February, fire swept through a rundown apartment building on Newark’s south side, killing two sisters, one six the other 11, who had been left alone in their third-floor apartment. The father was charged with neglect for leaving the children unwatched but that was only part of what proved to be a complicated tragedy. It soon became clear that the building itself was a civic outrage — dirty, foul-smelling, rat-infested and often without heat.

Residents reported the building had been cold most of the winter, forcing them to use space heaters, which many felt may have caused the fire. Preliminary records work by Star-Ledger reporters also disclosed that the owner of the building had been cited numerous times for failure to supply heat, yet the city had never brought him to court; repeated code citations were ignored and the abuses piled up.

Reporting the story soon became difficult. The city government, presided over by a mayor running for his fifth term, refused to supply records which would allow reporters to document the true extent of the city’s lack of oversight of this building and of others owned by Newark slumlords. The paper’s lawyers are threatening to take the city to court but such battles can take months to resolve.

Reporting was also slowed by a lack of detailed eyewitness accounts; residents of the building have now scattered into other slum dwellings in the city and are hard to find.

Then one night in mid-April, we got a small break. Through exhaustive street work, reporter Russell Ben-Ali located a man who had lived on the second floor underneath the apartment where the children died. He told us about life in the building and its many problems. Then he told us something totally unexpected.

I happened to be standing near Russell’s terminal during the telephone interview when he typed these words: “I could hear the little girls running back and forth above. They were screaming. I thought they were getting a beating. That’s before we knew there was a fire. My wife and I, we still have nightmares. Those little feet, I still hear them.”

Words, an image, to make everything else stop.

When I sit down each morning to write poetry before I go to work, I am not deliberately searching for a newsroom theme or any theme.

I am just looking for a way into a poem. I start out by taking a deep breath and writing notes about the weather, about dreams, about nonsense — trying to overhear my own jumbled thoughts. I play with sounds and images and most of the time don’t know where I am going. More gets written and tossed aside than gets saved; poems 10 years old are still not finished and may never be. Most of what goes onto the screen is junk-dead-end anecdotes, cliches and passive sentimental crap.

But sometimes something different gets through, some combination of sound and image that makes for an original line and you always know it when you see it. There is a sudden clarity in the image and the words make music. Just one good line can get you started. And I would gladly settle for one good line a day.

Reporting is like that. Reporters bang their heads against walls for days, weeks. They wade through junk information and deceit and go up against officials who won’t give up public records. They search the streets for poor tenants who have been lost in the city’s chaos on the slight chance that one of them might know something about what happened the night of a fire.

Then late one night a lost tenant is found and the reporter, sitting in a nearly empty city room takes the man’s words down over the telephone typing with increasing amazement. The words bring a horrible new fact to a story that needs to be told. Someone heard the little girls dying.

“Those little feet,” the man said. “I still remember them.”

Words like that, spare, haunting and musical. You don’t hear words like that just anywhere. But I know two places where you do.