Each graphic used to tell the news operates within a complex discursive framework and shapes particular truths. Watching the news involves not only hearing its stories, but engaging with the temporality of the broadcast, the ways statistics and patterns are visualized, the graphical styles of text on screen.

This panel addresses how news-worthy events are made visible and mediated through poetic and graphical techniques that supplement and often complicate normative strategies of reporting and documentation. How do different forms of imaging relate and coordinate with discursive and poetic modes for engaging ongoing events? What methods, approaches, and theories could help us to understand how visualizations help tell complex stories, and how ongoing events are engaged through both text and image?

The first presentation, by Jonathan Gross, considers how the death of George Floyd and phrase “I can’t breathe” was depicted in corporate news broadcasts and in street murals created in his honor. “Corporate Media, Graffiti, and the Visualizations of the George Floyd Protests” asks how graphical styles of lettering used in news reports and protests relate to the street cultures and specific politics inflecting those events and their visibility. It draws on Ivor Miller’s Aerosol Kingdom, Christian Acker’s Flip the Script: a Guidebook for Aspiring Vandals and Typographers, and the example of Lee Quinones--the deformed alphabet of his wildstyle font went from the street to the Whitney Museum. Why did protestors turn on CNN in Atlanta, constructing their own visual lettering and fonts, and “bombing” the CNN letters? How does the visual form of lettering and public display of writing communicate within the broader discourse of protest?

The panel’s second paper, by Claire Grandy, asks how ‘the news’ might be witnessed and responded to from a Black feminist perspective that regards it as something that demands an oppositional form of witnessing and response. Drawing on bell hook’s concept of the oppositional gaze, “Oppositional Witness in Documentary Poetry” explores projects that engage with extended durations of televised news, treating these broadcasts as ongoing, ephemeral events that, themselves, require documentation. It considers sections of Dionne Brand’s documentary poem Inventory (2006)--which describes a woman watching the news nonstop for a year--that draw from the numbers of civilian deaths being tabulated in the Iraq Body Count project. And it considers Marion Stokes’s archival project of recording television news programs for thirty years, creating over 70,000 VHS tapes. Grandy argues that both these projects produce ways of looking back at the news media, finding non-cathartic responses to ongoing crises. They break from lyric, first-person forms of expression and the tropes of mourning and elegy to emphasize the political relevance of poetic forms that engage the impersonal documentation and enumeration of suffering.

The final presentation by Stefanie Heine, “Breathing Together Apart” reflects on the ways that the breath and breathing have been represented in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has caused heightened awareness about one’s own breathing and the breath of others. Diagrams and animations have attempted to explain air flows and safe distances. Poetic responses to the pandemic have also explored how it could be decoupled from its traditional association with life and engaged as a form of risk and mutual exposure. The poet Rex Wilder, for example, writes “This morning, CNN announced even an innocent exhale can kill / We are stranded, too near each other to breathe”. A recent anthology of poems, Together in a Sudden Strangeness, presents breath as an ambivalent site where both anxieties and redeeming perspectives concerning the pandemic are negotiated. This talk explores how a poetics of breath could suggest a Nancean idea of mutual exposure, a communality of shared separation.