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“The News isn’t new anymore, merely the latest instalment in the same old story, ie, whatever narrative appeals to whichever identity you happen to subscribe to. For ‘the news’ to recover its role as the catalyst of a wider public sphere, some part of it, at least, must be made anew.”

So says veteran reporter Andrew Calcutt (67). Nearly 50 years after completing basic training in print journalism, this seasoned hack has been rewriting news stories as poems, because “poetry arcs between the immediate and the timeless, and as it commutes between these two, so it asks us to follow suit”.

Andrew believes that, although the world is not a text, for us to approach other people’s experience, it has to be made into a shared text which serves as the common ground on which we may disagree. Developing the ‘news poem’ as an art form may be the best way to address today’s fractured society and to fulfil the role for which the old ways of presenting the news will no longer suffice.

‘News poems’, as factual and original re-tellings of the news in ‘the heightened speech of poetry’, might serve as ‘a new basis for a common culture’.

Does poetry have the potential to reconnect the public and private and recreate a shared culture? Andrew’s recital will be followed a Q&A: Andrew will answer questions about the development of the news poem and his recent work, and sign copies of his collected news poems.

BIOGRAPHIES

Andrew Calcutt has been a bassist, a reporter, university lecturer and a widely published author . He now devotes his time to developing the Ministry of News, a collaborative project to stage and produce news poems in various formats.

Simon Miles is a senior lecturer at the University of East London. A filmmaker and poet, he trained as a journalist in the early 1980s.