Poem in The Age

My poem Walt Whitman Service Area appeared in The Age today, although you might be forgiven for missing it, even if you are an avid reader of the A2 section – the poem seems to have been shrunk to a smaller font – possibly to make room for everything else on the page:

Still, who am I to complain? This makes three poems for me in The Age now – perhaps making me some kind of poetic “regular”, although I won’t be going too far with that kind of talk.

Here’s the poem in close-up:

I wrote the poem in July 2005, after travelling between New York City and Washington DC by bus and seeing a sign on the New Jersey Turnpike pointing to the “Walt Whitman Service Area”, which turned out to be a kind of petrol station/fast food franchise/pit-stop area. There were several other service areas along the turnpike named after famous people, however I can’t recall who they were.

Incidentally, “The Turnpike Down” is a song by The Lemonheads, off their It’s a Shame About Ray mini-album.