I polled The Twitterverse, and The Twitterverse spoke.
If there’s ever a Newspaper Blackout sequel (and I suggest you buy a copy if you ever want to see that happen), I think I’d like to use more drawing and graphic elements in the poems, a la Humument or TNT En Amerique.
Speaking of, you can now Look Inside! the book on Amazon. Tip: if you keep clicking “Surprise me!” you can see a bunch of poems.
True story, as told to me by John T. Unger during our Art Heroes interview, except I think it was $5.
“You wanna buy a book? It’s ten bucks.”
I try to keep a legal pad at my work desk at all times, so that whenever I get stuck or bored, I can just move over to the legal pad to keep my hand in motion, making marks until my brain gets back on track. (I learned this technique from Lynda Barry.) I use a legal pad and not a nice sketchbook because it’s cheap and I don’t feel like I’m wasting good paper on my crummy scratches.
Every once in a while I’ll come up with a doodle I really like:
And sometimes a podcast or a video will compel me to start taking notes, like with this excellent speech by Richard Nash on the future of publishing:
I am so excited to announce that my friends at Wire & Twine are handprinting our first-ever Newspaper Blackout t-shirt. I’m a customer, so I know their impeccable design taste and the high-quality of their products, but I also know that they’re good Ohio folks, based out of Oxford, a small town where I spent four of my favorite years.
“Creativity is subtraction.” It’s not a poem, it’s a rallying cry.
These tees are handprinted on American Apparel triblend atheletic heathered gray t-shirts. Which are super soft. (Meg and I own several.)
On sale now: store.austinkleon.com
Buy yours now! The preorder sale is now over. Check the store to see if more are available.
I can’t think of a nicer way to cap a release day than with a successful release party in your home town bookstore, so thanks a million to BookPeople, to my wife Meg for baking her delicious chocolate chip cookies, and to the 50+ folks who came out on Tuesday night! Y’all are the best.
See a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.
I started things off with a short slideshow about how I started making the poems:
And then I went into a little demonstration of how they’re done. Here I am quoting Allen Ginsberg in “A Supermarket In California“:
And here I am explaining how I think of the poems as “Word Find” puzzles we used to do as kids in elementary school:
After that, Bookpeople hooked everybody up with a marker and a newspaper, and we all set about playing:
I was really stunned by how focused everybody was, and by how many people offered to stand up and read their blackout poems for the group. It was truly awesome. You can read some of the poems over on the Newspaper Blackout Tumblr.
After that, it was time to sign some books:
Again: thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came out! It was such a gas to see y’all with markers and newspapers in hand.
For those of you outside of Austin, we don’t have many national dates planned yet, but I’m hoping that will change, so stay tuned.
UPDATE: Thanks to Eric Gomez for this really nice writeup of the event:
What stayed with me most was the fun I had. He was right: it was less like work and more like play, a kind of word search for buried humor, hidden wisdom, or laconic lament. Finding that right note of self expression might take more than a little practice however. Kleon has blacked out hundreds and hundreds of these poems. His experience is telling. I struggled with my article and then he mentioned with the timeliness of an oracle that it’s tough to write one from a political column. He finds that the articles from the “Arts or Sports sections are best.”
Austin Kleon has gained a fan not merely because of his down-to-earth and quietly erudite personality, but because the poems he has “found” buried within newsprint are poetical gems in their own right.
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