Comic Books + Poetry + NPR = "Funny Books"

The Writer's Almanac is a daily radio show hosted by Garrison Keillor. Each day GK (nice initials!) reads brief biographies of literary figures as well as a poem. Today's installment included a poem I'd not known before, "Funny Books" by Robert Morgan. It's a nostalgic look at the writer's atom-age childhood love of that most forbidden of all fruit, comic books. Here's a brief taste:

                                      I crouched
in almost dark and swilled the words
that soared in their balloons and bulbs
of grainy breath into my pulse,
into the stratosphere of my
imagination, reaching Mach
and orbit speed, escape velocity
just at the edge of Sputnik's age,
in stained glass windows of the page.

To read the rest of the poem, click here. Or you can listen to Keillor's dulcet tones here.