Poetry about a sitcom may not be something you expect to find in literary circles, and furthermore, you may not expect for it to be good.
New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird upturned both of those assumptions with a poem published recently in The Spinoff titled “Monica,”after Courtney Cox’s character from the 1990s TV show “Friends.” The poem spins from lambasting the character to serious musings on the fleeting nature of love and relationships and back again.
“There is such a narrow window / For happiness in this life,” she writes, “And if the past is anything to go by / Everything is about to go slowly but inevitably wrong / In a non-confrontational, but ultimately disappointing way.”
Bird spoke to WABE from Radio New Zealand in Wellington about the use of humor in her writing and finding her voice. Her book, “Hera Lindsay Bird,” comes out on Victoria University Press on July 14.
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