HEADLINE DU JOUR by mIEKAL aND

Description

“You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.

—Carol Ann Duffy

Headline du Jour by mIEKAL aND is great fun! He’s collected a couple hundred news headlines and presented them in large print, using the most popular fonts from the modern era. The headlines are alternately amusing, weird and horrible. Most of them are pretty funny. They reveal the strange depravity and comedy of human existence in a world such as ours.

—Craig Wilson

Many passages of the more bizarre headlines (and they are all bizarre) slip into the proud tradition of poetic list- poems running from Hesiod’s Theogeny through Villon to the Fluxists to the present day. Fortuitous juxtapositions leap out every so often. The book intersects with the plagiarist tradition of Ducasse’s Poésies, the conversation-poems of Apollinaire, the Situationist détournements and Neoist plagiarism. More specifically, Headline du Jour forms a delightful yet revealing addition to an anarchist micro-form of appropriated news-collage pioneered by Sousandrade’s epics, Fenéon’s Novels in Three Lines, and the work of Bern Porter (to whom the book is dedicated). It can feel as one’s reading one of Rabelais’ lists of satirical book titles – or those evocative lists of long-lost books scattered throughout Hellenistic texts. And indeed, I often found myself reading as if from some distant (perhaps) but inevitable (certainly) post-internet future, pondering over the vanished stories behind this array of baffling titles.

—Olchar E. Lindsann