THE WICHITA IS DEAD
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
See also: “I Am So Over The Rainbow“
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I broke down and bought an Iphone yesterday.
Like any tool, first you get it, then you figure out what to do with it.
If you follow me on Twitter, you saw the following 3 images today, all taken real-time with the Iphone camera and posted online with Twitpic (#1, #2, #3) while I was making the poem.
When does the poem become the poem? When you make that first connection? (Here, it was linking “dead. Now what?” and “Wichita” and then finding “ding” in “including”.) When it’s completely blacked out, “set in stone”? What about leaving behind evidence that could point to other, better poems? Does seeing the process kill the magic?
All questions that popped in my head. Also: what else could we do with this?
What about crowd-sourcing? What if I got stuck on a poem, took a picture of the article, and asked Twitter what my next step should be? Who would the poem belong to?
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July 26th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Well, once you publish it, doesn’t it belong to all of us?
July 26th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I like to think so…
July 26th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
[...] link: THE WICHITA IS DEAD : a newspaper blackout poem by Austin Kleon Tags: kansas, obscure-old, the-wichita, [...]
July 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
That’s the privilege we have as your readers/followers, etc. is that we get to relish and take it for what it is. I think that’s what I love about arts, especially writing.
Vonnegut wrote something a while back, but because of my experiences in life, I’m reading it with all of that, just like I read your poetry with my background. So, when Slaughterhouse-Five is described as a “funny book” by someone in my literature class, I can agree on a surface level, but then take it to a whole new place by adding my opinion.
Sorry, I’m rambling, but then an even better question to ask would be:
Could you make art without having readers?
July 27th, 2009 at 9:49 am
@Brianna Of course you can make art w/o readers! (I didn’t have many readers at all when I started the blackout poems…), but I’d argue that most great writing is made with an audience in mind–whether it’s yourself, a specific person, or an “ideal reader”
Speaking of Vonnegut: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
(I write for my wife–she gets first look at everything.)