Poetry from newspapers!

          Well, after all our serious study of Cody Klippenstein’s amazing fiction, it’s time to take a bit of a break and take a lighter look at that daily newspaper that’s in your hands while you’re drinking your morning coffee…

          First, take a peek at what I did with one headline that I found in our local paper, The Vancouver Sun :

Overfishing of hundreds of thousands of BC-bound sockeye by Alaskan fishers off Noyes Island

–headline in The Vancouver Sun

Overfishing of hundreds of thousands of BC-bound sockeye by Alaskan fishers (off Noyes Island)

Overfishing of hundreds of thousands of BC-bound sockeye (by Alaskan fishers)

Overfishing of hundreds of thousands of (BC-bound) sockeye

Overfishing of hundreds (of thousands) of sockeye

Overfishing (of hundreds) of sockeye

Overfishing (of sockeye)

Overfish(ing)

Over(fish)

O(ver)

(O)

()

          I used parentheses () like a net to “catch” words and parts of words until nothing is left. The form matches the content. In the end, all that is left is the empty net. When the spaces between the lines are removed, the shape is that of a fish tail or a seine net. It also looks like water going down a drain, so the shape works on many levels. I don’t usually write concrete poetry, but I saw the possibility in this “found” poem headline.

          The second style I want to share with you comes from Seattle. A writer there used to report the news in “Haiku Headlines.” At the simplest level, haikus are poems with three lines, of 5, then 7, then 5 syllables. Let me show you an example:

THE KINGDOME RETURNS

Kingdome blown away

Some ten years ago today

Still paying for it…

http://blog.seattlepi.com/haikuheadlines/

Try this:

          Grab a copy of a newspaper and start clipping interesting headlines. Get creative and see what you come up with. Go for a Haiku headline about the Royal couple’s new baby? Combine several headlines into an original poem? Manipulate a headline to give it new meaning? Give it a go, and let me know what you did…!

Coming tomorrow: Tomorrow we start a series dealing with beginnings–different beginning PARAGRAPHS (not just first lines), and the techniques writers are using to get going… see you then!