Rhyme and Punishment

Rhyme and punishment in Maine police logs

The Maine Public Broadcasting Network talks to John Nolan, the 17-year veteran of the Glasgow, Scotland police force who now edits The Rochester Times and writes the local police logs (in verse).

His logs have been running for 22 years to a mostly appreciative audience. Besides his rhyming skills and humor, its his keen observations of what the crimes tell us about our ordinary friends and neighbors that really grip his audience.

Nolan makes sure to pump up his vocabulary. Windows are smashed, not broken. Music isn’t turned up, it’s cranked. And he loves his puns. “On Winter Street a lady pushes a gentleman through a window to air a grievance.”

The line makes you smile until you think about what actually happened. Was it sexual assault? Was it a break-in?

Not everyone in his community thinks that crime should be treated so lightly, but then they are conflating the act of committing something to poetry with not taking it seriously. There’s a darkness and “gallows humor” in the lightest of Nolan’s light verse.

“I think you’ve got to almost take a sympathetic view of the other side of things. You know, if you can soar up above it a little bit and look down at the whole human condition you can make it a little bit more sympathetic, I think.”

Nolan expresses that with powerful sentences that capture moments in still life. “5:47 p.m. With only a crescent moon, teens fight under a street light.”

-quoted from www.poetryfoundation.org/