Newspaper asks poets and novelists to cover the news for the day
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz gave its reporters the day off and asked novelists and poets to report the news for a special edition in honor of Hebrew Book Week. The results were lovely:
Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: "Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points.... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again...." The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: "I didn't watch TV yesterday." And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled "Summer Sonnet." ("Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons' pencil case.") News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won't be soaring anytime soon, and that "hot" is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who's to say these articles aren't factual?Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News (via Kottke)
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human news, what a concept.
I approve and would comment at more length, but my ice cream is melting. Prost prost, Kamerads!
I welcome our new poet overlords?
D. Byrd Publishes First Book!
After a lifetime of struggle and toil, senior vixen D. Byrd offers "Dastrologic Abstraction" to the public. Funny, fascinating, exhilarating. See more p.5
For all 8 people who still read print?
A poetry section would be a wonderful addition to the daily newspaper. Letting the poets do their interpretive dance performace across the front page? Taking it a little too far, if you ask me.
Freaking brilliant. The news often changes little and is a bit dry. Rather see this method of spicing it up than celebrity gossip.
While this was a clever idea, I'm glad this wasn't my newspaper of choice.
When I want news, I read a newspaper. I don't read my newspaper(s) to be a subject in an experiment on artistic self-indulgence.
I am also tired of BB's bizarre compulsion to undermine newspapers, relishing in any piece of information that can be negatively construed.
I read in Poets & Writers (at least I think it was Poets & Writers) once about a guy who instituted a poetry section in his local newspaper. He was a poet of some note (though I forget his name, so he can't have been of that much note), and every week he would write a poem about current events. The only one I remember was about a tornado hitting the town - and then some political limericks that the editor rejected for being too vicious, I think? The poems weren't very good, but he acknowledged that and said it wasn't really the point.
Anyway, this is awesome.
It's been done before too, see
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ilej/image1.pl?item=page&seq=1&size=1&id=gm.1735.x.x.5.x.x.u71
The Gentleman's Magazine, December 1735
Its good that some of us realize that the figurative and the factual are not mutually exclusive.
Proof positive that journalism degrees are largely overrated.
I wish someone in the U.S. would do this quaterly. Maybe around the holidays?
The best news writing I read tends to do this already, especially for magazine-style profiles, long narrative stories, or occasionally a good old-fashioned article.
I don't think it's a silly experiment at all. But it's funny; it's a subjective style of writing the news, as opposed to the objective and dry facts-based reporting. Being subjective, both stylistically and conceptually, is definitely something that the internet's much better at than newsprint.
Rock!
Lauren O, that Poets & Writers article you're remembering was in the November/December 2008 issue and it was written by Mike Chasar, who wrote for a newspaper in Iowa City.
Wow, a post tangentially mentioning Israel which doesn't devolve into a 100-comment thread about how evil Israel is? Is this a BoingBoing first?
(Not that I'm making any particular value judgments about how evil Israel is, because doing so would just cause said thread to happen.)