“Dear Youth”

Christine Veasey created “Dear Youth” 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, Christine Veasey writes:

In my process for found poems, I grab words and phrases that fit the theme I begin with in mind. As this specific poem was evolving, I was thinking of the uptick in shootings in my area related to gang violence and how difficult it is for youth to separate from that in real life even with simulations like Grand Theft Auto of which I heard talk of an immersive VR headset version being released. I feel that this sort of time-travel is possible when reading through any book, but that it was specifically intended in Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son. We are all the children of the authors we read, and John Mills was brilliant in knowing that someone from the future would read through his work some day and apply it to their own space and time. I was just lucky enough to have caught a glimpse of that intention.