It was at that moment that I realized how paranoid and anxious many of the news articles I've read over the years have made me. From solar storms to the bird flu (which is essentially what the Spanish Flu of 1918 was) the news articles have given me a nearly fatalistic outlook to the future of our planet. It made me wonder why I should continue reading the news when there was little or nothing I could do to influence future events. So I came to the conclusion that I should just stop reading the news.
This only lasted about a week. I just can't stop myself from reading the paper. Reading the newspaper is the 21st century's equivalent of watching a giant three hundred thousand car pile up on a daily basis. At the very least though, my negative epiphany caused me to again begin writing poetry regularly after a four year hiatus.
Here is a great word that I incorporated into the poem: pixelated. It has a great double meaning.
First definition: pertaining to a printed image which has been digitized
Second definition: bewildered, confused; slightly insane
I don't know that I will be posting my poems in the future, but here is the one that I wrote after the NE experience:
January 15, 08
Pages of newsprint
pixelated past my eyes
to see through
the half-truths
and their lines.
A flicker of the screen,
behind me Tolstoy's ghost,
laughing.
4 comments:
The thing that I find ultimately bleak about the news is there's just nowhere else to go. We live in a place that, for a time, was where you went to escape oppression. Now how the tables have turned. We're really left with no choice but to be clever in our social and environmental interactions, yet sometimes it feels like we're trapped in a world that is completely devoid of compromise. With luck we won't be the generation that is intimately reacquainted with "survival of the fittest," in its post-apocalyptic sense that is.
One of the more interesting side effects of journalism school (besides the fairly predictable alcoholism) is that you begin to take comments about "the Media" to heart. And so I can't help but offer two suggestions:
1. A book called When the Press Fails (B. Lance et. al) offers insight into the reasons behind some of the more challenging aspects of our country's media present tense.
2. No matter what sort of epiphany is required to get you there, keep going with the poetry, and the questions. To quote Anne Lamott, "[Writing]'s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."
Ragnarok, welcome!
All I have to say is, I hear ya, man. The news these days seem to have that perverse fascination of a slow motion traffic accident, and I'm staring at it right along with you. Of course, if I had your NE, not only could I not do it for the reasons you stated, but I would be bored at work. Hopefully this new blog will give us a place to channel are thoughts. Keep up with the posts and the poetry!
Thanks for the comments and the positive feedback. I'm glad to be here and I look forward to posting.
Yeah, it did feel good to start writing poetry again rather than fiction.
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