Poet of the Newsroom

By: Barbara Bedway If you're a poet committed to making a living by writing, the opportunity to work in language with the intensity offered by a daily newspaper can be an ideal fit. For the last 30 years, David Tucker, a 58-year-old assistant managing editor at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., has been writing poems about what he calls "the slow news of ordinary life" ? and the life of newsrooms ? and publishing them in literary magazines.

This month as Houghton Mifflin publishes Tucker's collection of poems, Late for Work (his first book with a mainstream publisher), his parallel lives are converging. Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky has observed that Tucker writes "with a reporter's respect for information and a poet's awareness of the undisclosed."

In the poem Morning Edition, for example, Tucker describes copy editors leaning over their keyboards "like racers on motorcycles." Another poem in the book, And This Just In, sketches, among other things, "A watchman humming in the parking lot/at Broad and Market/we have that/with a sidebar on the bronze glass of a whiskey bottle cracking into cheap jewels/under his boots. "

Tucker, who essentially blew his cover in the newsroom when he began entering and winning contests for his poetry, says he decided a few years ago that it was time to seek a wider audience: "Part of the art of writing poetry is getting it to the reader. I'm a compulsive revisionist anyway, but just taking that step ? the last stages of getting a manuscript ready to send out ? you do things that add another dimension to the way you write. I think it adds another level of precision."

In 2005 he won the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize presented by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which includes $1,000 and publication by Houghton Mifflin. The contest judge was poet Philip Levine, who in a recent New York Times profile of Tucker praised his ability to "aestheticize his own work." Tucker wryly notes that "a couple of reporters started saying to me, 'I'm going to send my story to you, and it's well aestheticized.' They were all going to send me e-mails with haikus, but fortunately that didn't happen."

Before coming to the Star-Ledger in 1977, Tucker served as city editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was part of the team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of Gov. James E. McGreevy's resignation. His tenacious belief that "reporting is a kind of writing, and it's got to be as exhaustive as we can make it ? it's all about the hunt" is reflected in his poem City Editor Looking for News, which is dedicated to former Inquirer Editor Jim Naughton, with whom Tucker worked.

Tucker's own love of newspapers and language took root in Tennessee, where he and his brothers were raised on a hardscrabble farm. "One of the big deals was the Sunday paper, a spectacular event in our household," he recalls. "My dad spread it all over this little shack." The family later moved to nearby Linden, a small town served by two newspapers: The Tennesseean and the Banner; his father read them both.

Tucker studied at the University of Michigan with poets Robert Hayden and Donald Hall before attending the School of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he got his first job as a stringer for UPI. He believes writing poetry before coming to journalism offered a unique advantage: "It helped me understand something about news writing; there is something about the quickness of poetry and the need to be quick in journalism."

He emphasizes to reporters something Hall imparted to his students: that revision is a way of life. "It applies to any kind of writing, and I try to get reporters to buy into it," he notes. "You've got to work at a story, but play with it at the same time. Treat revision as just another chance to write."

While acknowledging that "you can quickly run out the string comparing journalism to poetry," he does believe that finding your way into a story or a poem can be a similar process. "Stories have beats, they do have a kind of rhythm. If a story needs work, I'm usually looking for that part of the story where a reporter has kind of calmed down, and language is more relaxed. A lot of it is listening, trying to hear and see language that's natural and quick and has a cadence to it."

Tucker's poem The Dancer was chosen by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for his American Life In Poetry Project, which every week posts on its site (www.americanlifeinpoetry. org) a poem with a brief introduction by Kooser, that newspapers can publish for free. Tucker's poem will be offered on June 8. The potential readership of 10 million "staggered" him, he says.

Of course, poets don't face deadlines unless they're self-imposed ? and Tucker, who can take years to finish a poem, has learned to accommodate both currents of time. A day "goes by in a blur," he says. "Journalists are trying to slow it down, for the reader. Poets are trying to stop it forever, if they can."