Breaking Poems

August 2026

Breaking Poems transforms real-time news headlines into short poems, exploring the distance between knowing what happened and feeling what it means.

Running continuously on a Raspberry Pi, the project collects headlines from around the world and uses large language models to reinterpret them as free verse, sonnets, limericks, and ballads. Each poem is then automatically printed by a POS receipt printer, turning something designed for immediate consumption into something meant for contemplation.

The choice of thermal paper makes this transformation temporary. Just like the news it originates from, the printed text is fragile and when exposed to light it slowly fades until it disappears. The poem becomes another transient object, passing through our hands before leaving only the memory of having been read.

By translating the compressed, functional language of headlines into poetry, Breaking Poems attempts to restore some of the emotion, ambiguity, and human experience that inevitably disappear when reality is reduced to information. The facts remain the same, but their language changes.

Hopefully, by becoming poems, these headlines can leave a deeper trace, finding a quieter path into our subconscious and continuing to resonate long after both the news and the paper have disappeared.