Writer says he hopes to amuse, inspire people to find 'poetry in the ordinary'

When poet Richard Newman set out to write a sonnet about a monster, he had no idea the subject would become addictive. One monster sonnet turned into many more until Newman realized he needed to write about something else.\n"I actually had to make myself stop writing monster sonnets," Newman said.\nNewman will give a free poetry reading at 8 p.m. tonight in room A201 of the Lee Norvelle Theatre & Drama Center. He will read from his books, "Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets!" and "Borrowed Towns," as well as introduce new poems.\nFor Newman, who grew up in Evansville, anything can be subject matter. While many of his poems are reflective of his childhood spent in southern Indiana, he writes of things as varied as spare change in the pocket or his backyard. \n"If you have a little bit of imagination and a love for the things that surround you, you'll find that poetry is all around," Newman said.\nWhen Newman first got to college, his plan was to become a fiction writer. But after a professor told him he was terrible at it, he decided to try something else and turned to poetry. He said he liked that he could begin a story and have it end just 14 lines later.\n"Poetry is much shorter. It fits with my attention span," Newman said. \nMuch of Newman's work is humorous with an underlying layer of sadness. He aims to walk that line between humor and sorrow when writing his poems, he said.\nRichard Cecil, a professor in the creative writing department at IU, is one of Newman's former teachers.\n"When I got ("Borrowed Towns") in my hands, it was the best book of poems I'd read all year," Cecil said. "Yes, it's funny, but it's also deeply sad. But it's the kind of sadness you're forced to grin at."\nCecil calls Newman "a formal, funny, Phillip Larkin/Robert Frost-loving, aesthetically eye-to-eye friend in the art."\nSenior Lena Rae Burkett read "Borrowed Towns" in her poetry class. What she liked best about the book was how honest it was, she said. \n"He uses formal forms to write about informal topics and uses humor to bring in more serious topics," Burkett said. "He has this great control over language."\nNewman is the editor of River Styx, an award-winning magazine that publishes poetry, fiction and essays. His poems have been featured by poet Ted Kooser in his nationally syndicated poetry column, "American Life in Poetry," and selected by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins for "The Best American Poetry 2006." Newman also teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.\nAt tonight's reading, Newman said he hopes to hear laughter from the audience.\n"I hope that people will find my poems humorous," he said. "But then I also hope to open someone's world up and show them that they can write about anything. Even the most ordinary things can become poetry"