Clive Birnie's Blog, page 8
February 13, 2015
Cutting Up The Economist
In Cutting Up The Economist is a critique of the extraordinary post Lehman Bros. era in a sequence of montage poems composed using headlines from editions of The Economist newspaper published between 2009 and the spring of 2014. The format mirrors that of The Economist itself with sections devoted to Britain, Europe & the Euro crisis, the USA, China etc.The headlines are used intact and strung into narratives within strict confines ‒ only headlines about Britain are used in poems about Britain for instance ‒ or the contents pages of single issues are redacted to reveal hints and hidden truths about the political calamity of the age of austerity. The result is a quizzical re-cast of a dramatic period of ultra recent history shot through with black humour.
ISBN 9781909136335 36pp £5.00 published May 2014. Burning Eye Books.
Sample poems:
Terminal Insemination Art
A fourteen poem sequence of montage-cut-up-assemblage from the mid 1990s published by those excellent fellows at Silkworms Ink (an eclectic electric publishing house). Written in Bristol, Beirut, Dublin, Saigon and Singapore and cut up and re-worked between 1994 and 1998.
