Popular Poems About Reading

"... a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste." - R Austin Freeman, "The Art of the Detective Story"

I try for taste, you understand,
and read sonnets,
collect novels that reap plaudits.
I accept manna from God's hand.

But often my taste reflects the dark mass
of office girls and workshop boys,
and so I fly like Lucifer, alas,
to folk fiction and pulpy joys.

Elysia's bookshelves...

you bounce around like I don’t know what
and declare that everything’s
changing and you have to keep moving to keep up
and I just want to sit down

nobody under fifty reads wodehouse,
they have their own
worlds apart, we are, but mine has always required a quick
snifter or two