In the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon is on record saying, "I myself make no distinction between 'light' verse and—what?—heavy verse."Muldoon was speaking about Roger Angell's year-end poem "Greetings, Friends", one of the last remaining instantiations of the Carrier's Address—a retrospective ditty distributed by tip-seeking newspaper boys in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
If you want to see examples of Carriers' Addresses done up the old-school way—long, rhyming, stand-alone recaps of the year's events oftentimes penned and printed by newsboys themselves—check out the amazing collection maintained by the Brown University Center for Digital Initiatives.
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