Newspaper poetry enters new age on the Iowa City editorial page: rhyming sirloin with Des Moines.

About two-and-one-half years ago I attempted to help revive the languishing practice of newspaper poetry by establishing a regular Poetic License feature in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

As home to the University of Iowa's famous Writers' Workshop, Iowa City is an ideal location for such a feature. The city already sponsors an annual Poetry in Public project in which city staff selects local poems to post on placards on city buses, kiosks, and buildings. And I've been able to work regularly with Mike Chasar, a University of Iowa scholar of poetry and popular culture, and have printed more than fifty of his poems as well as several guest columns on poetry in the news.

Chasar's involvement has inspired a number of other local poets and would-be poets to break all the rules of poetry they learned in school and to begin submitting their own attempts at political, topical, timely verse.

Few of these poems are written for the ages, but many provide needed commentary on the local and national news of the day. And featuring topical poems regularly in the paper also has opened the possibility for printing longer, more thoughtful poetic responses to local tragedies and other sensitive news stories.

Newspaper poetry history

Until about fifty years ago--when universities began instituting writers' workshops--poetry was a standard feature in newspapers. But most editors decided to ban poetry altogether for any combination of the following reasons:

Too much time: Poets were too hard to work with because they didn't like their word choice being changed to fit AP style. Plus the poetic lines didn't always fit within one column.

Too hard to read: Poetry required such specialized training and such an educated audience that it no longer could appeal to a newspaper's general readership.

Too hickish: As editors were taught in school that they should dislike or disdain any poetry that they could actually understand, locally produced poetry became identified with small community weeklies and newsletters.

Too dangerous: A goal of good newspaper writing is to eliminate ambiguity and unintended interpretations. Yet poetry often relies upon linguistic shifts and multiple meanings to get its point across. When printing poetry, editors risk losing control of how people read and how people understand what appears on the page.

In recent years, poetry in newspapers has been somewhat boosted by former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry project (www.americanlifeinpoetry.org). But as much as Kooser's project helps carve out a space for poetry in newspapers, it simply takes poems that have been vetted by the literary establishment and allows them to be boxed and showcased on pages throughout the nation.

Good bad poetry

With Poetic License, I've been more interested in encouraging local readers to comment poetically and interactively on contemporary events. I've sought out poets and poems that haven't been vetted by the literary establishment, and I've proudly printed some poems that, in fact, should make aestheticians cringe.

I'm looking for what Mike Chasar and I call "good bad poetry"--borrowing George Orwell's definition of "good bad fiction" These are poems that revel in their own doggerel status, that hurl ham-fisted rhymes to make a point and that often embrace a pointed political position. They are poems more on par with the deadline poetry of Calvin Trillin in The Nation or William H. von Dreele in the National Review--or even the limericks on NPR's news quiz, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"--than anything offered in Kooser's weekly column.

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We want poets who are creative and shameless enough to rhyme "Des Moines" with "sirloin" as one poet did when lambasting how much money the university pays its football coach in "Lines on the Occasion of Kirk Ferentz's Salary Hike" We're looking for poets who can contrast a local Girls Gone Wild bus accident, presidential signing statements, and the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict by ending each stanza with the word "sticky," as Chasar himself pulled off in "Variations on a Line by Lance Armstrong"--a poem that tweaked the Iowa press corps for its starry-eyed coverage of Armstrong's first year riding in the Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.

We're looking for poems that:

* Use accessible language in a witty fashion

* Play with the rhyme and meter in a way that only reinforces their importance

* Stake out a specific, arguable, easily comprehensible position

* Provide a satisfying rhetorical twist at the end to make the poem seem worthwhile. (Our first unsolicited poem, for example, was a sonnet that ended, "Your feature's title is 'Poetic License, but, come on, admit, / You should have called it: 'Poetic Learner's Permit.'")

More than humorous verse

Most of the Poetic License submissions would fit into the humorous verse categories of poetic anthologies, but the form also does allow for commentary on more serious and even tragic themes.

I've printed poetic responses to local tragedies--including a tornado ripping through our downtown, the recent Iowa floods, as well as two incidents of fathers killing themselves or their family members.

For Memorial Day 2007, I printed illustrated versions of three war-related poems from Iowa Writers' Workshop professor emeritus Marvin Bell's "Mars Being Red."

And before the Iowa Caucuses, I had so many political submissions that I printed an entire page of nothing but endorsement poems.

Of course, at those times, a poet sometimes risks producing a "bad good poem" rather than a "good bad poem." But, especially in tense and sensitive times, poetry allows writers to get away with saying things they couldn't put into a letter or a column.

Every once in a while, a poet approaches a topic in a way that can't be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a good political cartoon. That's what Peter Small, a regular contributor, found when he started writing about his experiences as a volunteer interpreter for several of the Spanish-speaking families affected by the now infamous May 12 raid of Agriprocessors meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa.

Small couldn't be as flippant as he was when he mocked shock jock Don Imus's racially insensitive remarks or when he poetically proposed that the Iowa Caucuses should take place on Halloween with voters required to dress up as the candidates they support.

After Small spoke with several people directly affected by the raid, after he heard their words in one language and struggled to find the right words to convey their meaning in another, the University of Iowa law school graduate couldn't get past how the words took on such different meanings when used in different religious and legal contexts.

The result was a powerful, complicated, religiously themed poem that filled half a page. The poem was made comprehensible to most readers because I placed it alongside a 400-word commentary column from me as well as a 600-word column in which three members of the local Jewish community called for a process that would ensure such plants produce meat in a manner consistent with both kosher law and ethical work practices.

The poem also helped culminate several pages' worth of solicited guest columns that analyzed the Postville raid in terms of workers' rights, immigration law, social services, and meat packing history. It worked because it complemented, rather than replaced, the more traditional features of the page.

The poetic future

More than 2 1/2 years into this project of printing locally produced "good bad poems," I still receive a number of "bad good poems" that seem inappropriate--too literary, too nonsensically lyrical--for the opinion page of a daily newspaper. And I still receive far too many "bad bad poems" that altogether fail to fit within even the vaguely defined genre constraints of newspaper poetry. (Some we can improve through sympathetic editing; most we return without explanation.)

But I find the time spent on this project to be worthwhile. Not only have I cultivated a stable of dozens of local poets who otherwise might not be engaged with the newspaper, I also have boosted the amount of local content appearing on the page and, by illustrating the poems, have added another visual option to my layout toolbox.

And word about Poetic License is spreading. Mike Chasar has an article in the September issue of Poets and Writers magazine titled, "Writing Good Bad Poetry." As Chasar encourages more poets to consider submitting some of their timely, accessible work to newspapers, I hope editors will be more open to consider actually sharing those poems with their readers.

Jeff Charis-Carlson is the opinion editor at the Iowa City PressCitizen. Email opinion@ press-citizen.com