About headline poetry

The idea behind the newspaper headline poetry came to me one morning while I was eating breakfast and, of course, reading the newspaper. I have always been the sort who skims headlines before deciding whether to commit myself to the time and energy of reading more of a story. As any journalist will tell you, the headline is crucial to snag readers, providing the gist of an entire newsworthy event in a sentence fragment. It is, like poetry, an economy of words.

There are some differences between the language of poetry and headlines. For example, headlines do not attempt to challenge the reader with unusual or flowery language. But they do use other poetic devices: meter, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance.

For this project, I skim through the daily papers of Melbourne, Australia, collecting headlines that have an interesting sound, ambiguity, truth, or connotation. I pare down to eleven headlines per paper per day, one for the title, ten for the body of the poem.

I include the page numbers for two reasons: for those who want to check the accuracy of my work and perhaps read up on the story themselves, and to emphasize how the values of society are reflected in a story’s placement in the newspaper.

This is found poetry, accessible to anyone. The words may be chosen by journalists and editors, but they conform to the mores of society, and are [supposedly] objective and provided to the public for reader interpretation.

Enjoy.

Jason