3 or 4 months ago I did a batch of full-page “broadsheet” newspaper blackout poems — using the entire page of the newsprint. I soon realized they were a lot of work, and I probably couldn’t use them for the book anyways. So I dropped them. I did, however, take the time to scan a couple and found the scans recently on my hard drive. If you click the images below you can read them. I’ve also included a few “in progress” shots.
“On The Day”
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“A Hangover In The Mediterranean”
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“The Curator”
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“Olympic Games”
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It’s funny, looking at these again, I’m reminded of how important size and dimensions are to the success of the poems.
Normal-sized, they’re really easy to read (usually) on one monitor screen. I’ve always tried to make them the size of a paperback book. (Wishful thinking?)
Broadsheet-sized, they’re really hard to get a look at online–they take a long time to load, and you have to do a lot of scrolling.
My guess is that if I’d only worked on full-paged poems, they’d never become as popular as they have. I’m not even sure they’d work well as posters — it’d just be a sea of black hanging on a wall.
No matter!
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In other news, here’s some blackout fan mail that I received the other day from a girl who grew up near me (we’ve never met). It was one of the funniest e-mails I’ve ever received:
I took it as a compliment.
Thanks for adding the “in progress” shots. I took my first stab at a blackout poem the other night and found it quite enjoyable.
I am curious how people target the words of interest. So, for all of you (Austin and readers alike)…do you come to the text cold and scan it for words that jump out at you? do you read the article first and then identify the words you want to build on? do you identify words as you read? …or do you have another approach?
Susan: my biggest tip is to NOT read the article before you start finding words. Treat it like a word search — just a big block of text that contains the raw material for the poems you want to write. I know it’s difficult, but in my experience, that’s the method that produces the best poems for me.
Wow! Can I just say that this is by far the most creative thing I’ve seen in days? This reminds me of something I used to do in high school with the radio – I’d take the first few words or lyrics said on a station before randomly changing to another station and repeating until the concatenation could be interpreted as some sort of poetic message. It didn’t work all the time, but when it did, it was pretty cool.
Your site is very stylish! I’m glad to have happened upon it!
I especially loved Olympic Games and The Curator. Awesome work, as usual.