Foreword

      Jeffrey Brown in this book apprehends some specific realities: the news as a medium and the news that is the medium’s object. Brown’s poetry examines that material in a new way, giving it a fresh, urgent form. I mean form as the term applies to sports or dance: an effective, useful organizing of energy. The News is more than a venture into art by someone prominent in another field. In these poems, an unconventional subject for poetry is dealt with from within, by a real poet.

      “To see beyond the camera,” says Brown about his purpose. The phrase works in two directions. Looking outward, these poems strive to see beyond the camera’s instrumental vision of what is before it, the stuff of the daily news: disasters and elections, celebrations and wars, famous artists and notorious criminals. Looking inward, Brown offers a vision from the other side of the camera: the feelings, understandings, and bewilderments of the makers who work behind the instrument, directing and controlling its gaze.

      Jeffrey Brown respects his profession. His belief in the value of news reporting, along with his ways of questioning the processes, gives a spine of purpose to The News. Jaded skepticism would be trivial, and preening would be even worse. Pride in the work, along with candid fatigue and misgivings, animates the poet’s quest to get what the news medium and its devices can see externally and what it can know internally.

      Ultimately, this subject matter is as mysterious as culture itself. More immediately, it has immeasurable importance in the political realm, the world of power. Brown treats that world, its eminences and accomplishments, its thugs and abominations, with the passionate, lyrical understatement of a onetime classics major.

      For