Poetry x Daily Press x Global Pandemics

Achille Pedespan

With these poems in collage form, my goal is to work on language while reflecting on the different ways the theme of global pandemic is explored in several daily British newspapers: The Scottish Daily Express, The I, The Herald, The Guardian and The Times. I chose to study journalistic language through poetic inquiry, inspired by Jakobson’s poetic function in which the writer focuses on the message itself, for its own sake. Therefore, poetry allowed me to question the language of global pandemics. My work dismantles media representation and is exposes it through poems.

By cutting texts I wanted to enact the idea of opening meaning, linked to the search for meaning and the feeling of absurdity during the global pandemic. I was challenging the meaning given by newspapers to the pandemic and trying to create a new meaning while constantly keeping it open: the readers can understand the poems as they want and create their own collages. I have tried to represent that in my title with the “Xs,” as if the words were ready to be cut and pasted on cardboard. Everyone can understand what they want in each of the poems. Thanks to collage I can create new meanings and overlaps of words—bringing words closer which were not supposed to coexist—which did not exist originally in the daily paper. The act of cutting and pasting newspapers’ headings put the words out of context by decentring authorship. Consequently, the combination of poetry and collage, furthered my reflection on the everyday language used by print media to write about the Covid-19 pandemic.

I followed a precise methodology: each poem is made up of excerpts from the same newspaper. This is a collection of five poems therefore five different newspapers have been used. Each title gives the name and date of the newspaper.

This poetic inquiry allowed me to realise that there is a common thread in a newspaper. Even titles related to topics which can be seen as completely disconnected from covid-19, such as sport, can echo the global pandemic or a theme linked to it — not only with titles linking the two subjects but also with words reminding us of lexical and semantic fields also used to write about the pandemic (see the comments about “Scottish Daily Express, Thursday 11 February 2021”). The pandemic is haunting the newspaper down to the smallest detail. Cutting titles with a poetic goal in mind helped me to see these hidden relations within the newspaper. It is this methodology that gave me the main theme and ideas for each of the poems, this sense of everyday life confronted with the pandemic. Accordingly, emotions such as hope, sadness, love, shock and loss can be found but also a feeling of absurdity which fundamentally questions the search for meaning during these times.

I want to keep the meaning open and to work on the “death of the author” (Barthes 1967)—effect of the pandemic or Barthesian choice?—therefore everyone can make their own interpretation.

The Herald, Tuesday 23 February 2021

Scottish Daily Express,
Thursday 11 February 2021

Comment: “Mercury’s still on the slide / Twist in tale as sun
sets on Venus / Call psychics now”
Example of an overlap of word: the original headings were
referring to temperature and a tennis championship.