“A Dear Telephone”

Jackson Oscar created “A Dear Telephone” from John Mills’ Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son (1922). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Jackson Oscar writes:

When I first skimmed Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son, the slightly varying, almost incongruously personal salutations struck me, eventually leading me to create a poem featuring them and expanding upon the feelings I found expressed in them. To construct the poem, I read through the book, scribbling words and phrases that I found either linguistically unique or generally useful. I then culled and scrambled them, marrying sterile and passionate words until I had a poem that contrasts the dramatic, unexpected changes of our current lives and communication situation with the inevitable, gradual changes in life that every person goes through.