Updated: Poetry Vs. The News

Many of the newer poetry books I’ve been reading heavily interact with social media and the news. Some poets ask us to run away from the media world and attempt to engage with the physical page. Some try and fail to outrun publicized disasters in the news and media. In Cathrine Barnett’s poem, “Another Divine Comedy,” she writes:

“No matter how hard I push,

I can’t outrun the news,

can’t stop the trucks, destruction, blood,

ICE, uranium, platonium” (Human Hours, 53).

“Another Divine Comedy,” published in 2018, powerfully describes today’s disastrous, news heavy, digitalized culture. A culture where many feel a sense of hopelessness in the face of the mass tragedies we hear about on the daily: a culture which we can’t “outrun,” destruction that we “can’t stop.”

This culture didn’t start in the digital age, though. Shange’s “who is setting these priorities” grapples with the overwhelming and numbing horror that surrounds her and that she feels disconnected from: “there were international secret meeting for months. no one told me  […] i want have had to listen to governor turner refuse to pardon the wilmington 10 cuz he didn’t believe the lies the liars recanted […] what in the hell am i supposed to do?” (Nappy Edges, 100).

Shange seems to feel trapped and powerless when confronted with the worlds of the powerful: in the image I selected human bodies lay under two large screens. The screens seem to trap, over power, and also entertain the humans, and it reminds me how Shange feels helpless in comparison to huge systems of power that she hears about on the news, like “international secret meetings.” These worlds affect her and don’t at the same time. Nothing will happen to her because she heard news that a “satellite fell,” and while she hears statistics of millions of people dying earlier from smoking, she is still alive and smoking. But, she is also “very upset by all this.”

Aren’t we all? Now more than ever it seems like all of these huge, horrible things are happening right above our heads: Trump, mass incarceration, high profile sexual violence cases. It all feels very personal and impersonal, real and fake. But no matter how horrible the horror gets, here we are in the shadow of it trying to “catch the train at 8,” what the hell are we supposed to do?