On the night of the inauguration, I was lucky enough to watch an online reading of powerful poems (1 of 2) from Winter in American (Again: Poets Respond to the 2024 Election while letting little else fill my screens, as had been my commitment.
I was reminded of the warmth and magnetism of communities of the sane, the ethical, the artists. Thank you book editors and participating poets for inviting me in.
Then, only then, did I also remember my similar effort. I can’t tell if my 2022 book of poems by workshop participants (not the astounding writers you’ll see above, but poets nevertheless) is tragic, useful, or both. In any case, it’s free, like so many inspirational resources from the amazing punctum books.
The lengthy process that ultimately coalesced as this book about breaking through media manipulation began over the previous first 100 days of the very same president, when fake news felt catastrophic. Now conjoined with environmental and genocidal cataclysms as well as his return, technology’s and his lies are known knowns. I offer this now because perhaps poetry can reveal a few more real people’s truths, just as I experienced watching readings from Winter in America (Again.
“This book of poems about fake news written by diverse project participants is foremost an invitation and invocation for readers to participate, with others, in an experiment in knowing and working differently with the internet: Fake News Poetry Workshops. Between 2018 and 2020, Alexandra Juhasz directed more than twenty of these workshops around the world, and these are ongoing beyond the confines of this book. Each differs in form and structure, but participants are always asked to attend to research, their own knowledge about the internet and social media, and what they can learn from their workshop and previous ones.
My Phone Lies to Me shares the poems created in the workshops. As moving, eloquent, and useful as they may be — and you are invited to indulge in and learn from them — enjoying and learning from the poems is only a small part of this book’s project. Four short essays (two by Juhasz, with a foreword and afterword by critical internet scholars Tara McPherson and Margaret Rhee, respectively) introduce and situate the project’s processes of radical digital media. You can learn what Fake News Poetry Workshops make, do, and believe in, as well as how to collaborate with others to create your own.
Fake News Poetry Workshops are one way to counter dominant and dominating internet modes and values, to fight the corrupt ways of being and knowing that use digital media to create, fuel, and weaponize fake news. The project verifies good news in the face of fake news: that we can gather together in our many local places and use analog structures (about digital things and ways) to generate, hold, and share “art answers to phony questions.”