Published 14-02-2025
Copyright (c) 2020 Andrew Calcutt
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This submission showcases my experimentations with ‘news poems’, a creative practice based on taking the top stories of the day and re-writing them in a form of heightened speech which aims to be poetic. In the context of ‘fake news’ (Pomerantsev, 2019) and ‘post-truth’ (D’Ancona, 2017), a call to the imagination may sound like playing with fire. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the imaginative remake of journalism becomes an essential part of coming closer to truth. Much of the journalism we have known only tells us the half-truths we already know. But when we use our imagination to approach those involved in news stories, together we make room for our common humanity. This is the task for journalism today, and the news poem is our best chance of fulfilling it.