Eberhart latest example of journalist turned poet

• By DANNY HEITMAN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Apr 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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BROKEN TIME
By John Mark Eberhart
The Mid-America Press, $10

Within American letters, there’s a small but abiding tradition of newspaper journalists who moonlight as poets.

Before he firmly established his fame, Carl Sandburg worked as a film reviewer at a Chicago daily. In Charlotte, N.C., Dannye Romine Powell is known not only as a favorite columnist of The Observer, but the author of two well-received books of verse, The Ecstasy of Regret and At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home.

David Tucker is both an editor at the Newark Star-Ledger and the man behind the acclaimed poetry collections Late for Work and Days When Nothing Happens.

That some of the nation’s best poets hail from newsrooms shouldn’t be too surprising, since both writing traditions depend on concision, narrative urgency and, first and foremost, a sharp eye for what is transitory.

Such a sensibility informs the poems of Broken Time, the latest collection from John Mark Eberhart. Eberhart will be familiar to a number of Baton Rouge readers for his work as an environmental reporter and music reviewer in the 1980s for the now-defunct State-Times.

These days, Eberhart works as the book editor of The Kansas City Star, but he is also a master of conversational verse, as evidenced by his previous collection, Night Watch.

What reviewer G.W. Clift said of Night Watch is also worth keeping in mind while reading Broken Time: “In part because the language of these poems is our language, the poems read quickly, and one is tempted to race on without considering the sophisticated observations being made in simple words.”

While Eberhart the book editor is erudite and endlessly well-read, his poetry isn’t bookish. In fact, the cultural references of his poems hail mostly from music, that other wellspring of poetry, rather than figures of literature.

The collection includes a sly valentine for Bonnie Raitt, a portrait of composer Charles Ives, and a tribute to bluesman Willie Johnson, whose wild rhythms ran “like children playing in the dark down by the creek.”

Of Ives, Eberhart writes: “They called him the Yankee maverick. / He was a tree, falling into his / own musical forest, but it didn’t / vex him that no one might ever hear.”

Chuck Berry, Ornette Coleman, Pat Metheny and Bob Dylan inspire other poems in the collection.

Broken Time takes its title from a jazz term for “a way of playing in which the beat is not stated explicitly.”