Sunday, January 18, 2009

"Are poets the new journalists?"

Um, probably not. Though as a person who is both a poet and a journalist, I found Jane Dwyre Garton's January 17 Huffington Post story "Take Me to the Intersection of Poetry and Journalism" to be of interest. It doesn't exactly go anywhere interesting, however.

The piece is basically a lament about the lack of music in news stories. Garton urges journalists to tell "us something that matters with words that tell us about the world, about the human condition." The funny thing is, her story lacks the very same thing she seems to be mourning in today's news (not to be confused with Today's Special). It's pretty choppy and artless. It also seems to be arguing for newspapers to start printing poetry again, forgetting, it seems, that newspapers are having a hell of a time printing much of anything. No one wants to pay for information any more. And while it would be quaint to live in a time where people cut out poems from the paper and stuck them on the fridge like they do the funnies, I don't see that happening again. Ever.

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