To write a mirror

JOHN TOBIN is Boston's unofficial city councilor of cool ideas. His latest proposal is that Boston should have a poet laureate.

"Poetry is really a news story," Tobin says of how moments are captured in verse.

Tobin has been steeping in poems. He recalls memorizing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Children's Hour" and reciting it in grade school. Last year, Tobin was asked to read poetry -- his own or someone else's previously published work -- at an event in Jamaica Plain. He read Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," ("I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree. . . . ") to more than 120 people. Tobin has also been talking to Joe Bergin, a member of an organization of carpenter-poets featured in a Globe story by Bella English.

Tobin's conclusion: a poet laureate could add literary depth to the changing city, writing to celebrate events or mark solemn occasions.

Rocks are already being thrown.

"Rub a dub dub. . . / Get me out the Hub!" wrote Yikes73 on a Boston.com bulletin board seeking reactions to Tobin's proposal.

"More proof the Boston City Council is completely useless," opined mcsteve20.

But Boston should have its own poet -- a modern-day Walt Whitman who writes with a pen full of passion about the city as it ages and modernizes, grows, and grows more crowded. Like Rome, Paris, and New York, cities are built of legend and literature as well as bricks and mortar.

Practically speaking, Tobin would like to see the poet laureate have a stipend to cover costs. Private funders should also step up to provide a modest salary that would enable a laureate to work on comprehensive projects. Tobin envisions one-year appointments, so that over time many poets might hold the job.

There are challenges and risks. Tobin says a committee should select the laureate, and this could lead to huge fights about what poetry is and who genuine poets are. And poet laureates themselves can be controversial. Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's poet laureate, stuck his finger in the public eye with a political poem that was labeled anti-Semitic by some.

Tobin welcomes controversy. And Boston is tough enough to withstand being poked in its moral ribs by poetry.

"Maybe a kid will see it and say, 'Someday I'd like to be poet laureate,' " Tobin said. He recalls his school days when students who wrote poetry did so at home to avoid the wrath of bullies.

In addition to being news, poetry's words and images can be storage facilities, saving personal details and that often perishable commodity, feelings.

So let Boston have a poet laureate, who writes a mirror made of meter, metaphor, and rhyme, and shows the city its greater self.