Poetry From Journalism Exercise

The news is chaotic and constant these days, but this week we bring you an exercise that can help you harness it for your poetry this week- straight from one of our 2024 Life
As Rehearsal For the Poem classes: 

If you have never written a poem from a book or newspaper article, it is high time you did. The needs of the anthropocene are relentless and, as poets, we need to witness, document and communicate the potentcy of the times in which we live. We also need to tell it slant in the news that stays news and achieve a deeper level of consciousness than the first rough draft of history to which journalism aspires.

The method was expertly laid out by Joanne Kyger in her book on H.P. Blavatsky. (See this exercise!) She was a fan of Ed Sanders and he chewed through history like Si’sEyul and left the gorgeous castings of America: A History in Verse.

Then start with a newspaper article. Read it, follow links in the story to get versed in the background of it and pick phrases, or images, that stand out to you and try to keep the “maximum information, minimum amount of syllables” that Allen Ginsberg encouraged. (Ridding your poem of as many conjunctions and gerunds as possible & please no adverbs!) Something outrageous can work as long as you keep your emotional distance and let the horror speak for itself via imagery. The poetry may come in the set-up of poignant points. What you leave out is often as important as what goes in, right? What are the salient aspects of the story and how to render them poetically?

And if you’re interested in other materials or signing up for the Fall session of Life As Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology, you can find out more here: https://paulenelson.com/life-as-rehearsal-for-the-poem-larfp-and-poetics-as-cosmology-2025/.