Headline News, by John Deming

Description

“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” wrote William Carlos Williams, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” In Headline News, John Deming gives us the news and makes a poem of it, springboarding into a prosody informed by brevity, clarity and precision, a kind of decalinear sonnet unfolding itself into blossom. Deming’s great gift here is a capacious and capricious mindfulness, improvising and responding to the deadpan lunacy of newspaper headlines in such a way as to make them seem almost mystical. —D. A. POWELL

In Headline News, John Deming makes us feel the strangeness of what we’ve been hearing and seeing in 21st century America. Reading these poems, “I’m feeling weirder/and clearer tonight.” Quoted headlines appear in all caps, but the rest of the writing is equally telegraphic and punchy—until we get punch drunk, wondering what’s real news and what isn’t. This mix-up seems telling and inevitable now. —RAE ARMANTROUT

JOHN DEMING has published poems and articles in Boston Review, Salon, Fence, New Orleans Review, A Public Space, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, and elsewhere. He is editor in chief of Coldfront and lives in New York City, where he directs the writing center at LIM College and, with Jason Schneiderman, co-curates KGB Monday Night Poetry in the East Village.