Search Results for: blackout poem

BROADSHEETS

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

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.

LAY IT ALL OUT WHERE YOU CAN LOOK AT IT

Monday, December 8, 2008

Meg took these shots of me working on the book. At this stage, I have about 175 poems scanned and cleaned up. I’d like to have about 150. I was trying to organize them all on the computer in Adobe Bridge, but I wanted to be able to see them all, to touch them, to shuffle them, stack them, sort through them. I decided to print them all out on paper. Now I’m looking for themes and threads, stories and characters, trying to make this thing flow.

It’s a lot like making a mixtape, or sequencing an album. The way the songs butt up against each other can totally color their meanings. One could craft a hundred different albums from the same batch of songs.

The task now is looking. Trying to see a book in this stack of pages.

Dan Roam, in his book, The Back of the Napkin, says “there are four basic rules to apply every time we look at something new.”

dan roam back of the napkin

1. Collect everything we can to look at—the more the better (at least at first).

2. Have a place where we can lay out everything and really look at it, side by side.

3. Always define a basic coordinate system to give us a clear orientation and position.

4. Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everything our eyes bring in—we need to practice visual triage.

Lay it all out where you can look at it. As Edward Tufte says, “Whenever possible, show comparisons adjacent in spaces, not stacked in time.”

Looking leads to seeing which leads to meaning.

David Hockney came to his theory on optics and painting by pinning a photocopied timeline of paintings down one wall of his studio:

He looked and was able to see a story.

Let’s hope it works for me.

TRAILS

Sunday, November 16, 2008

trails

When making a blackout poem, sometimes you can get around the Western left-to-right, up-to-down reading problem by using little connecting lines between words. These are a couple recent examples from poems I’m working on for the book.

I didn’t know this until a couple of days ago, but in comics, Scott McCloud calls them “trails.”

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In other news, there’s now a Newspaper Blackout Poems Flickr pool — join the group and share your own!

BROADSHEET

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Since I haven’t posted a new blackout poem in a couple months or so since starting on the book, here’s a little treat: my first attempt at blacking out a whole broadsheet. This is the front page of the business section. I’d like to do a series of these, as a break from the regular book work.

FYI: if you’re in the Austin area, I’m planning on showing this and some of the new, never-before-seen poems at the next Austin VizThink gathering on September 9th.

POETRY AS FLOW: CSIKSZENTMIHALYI ON THE PLAY OF WORDS

Sunday, June 29, 2008

poetry equals crossword puzzles equals flow

While re-reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s wonderful book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I came across this passage on working crossword puzzles. I think he could just as well be talking about making blackout poems:

There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges can be finely graduated so that both novices and experts can enjoy it, and its solution produces a sense of pleasing order that gives one a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It provides opportunities to experience a mild state of flow to many people who are stranded in airport lounges, who travel on commuter trains, or who are simply whiling away Sunday mornings.

Csikszentmihalyi then goes on to talk explicitly about poetry and writing:

What’s important is to find at least a line, or a verse, that starts to sing. Sometimes even one word is enough to open a window on a new view of the world, to start the mind on an inner journey….

And the joys of being an amateur (why leave it to professionals?):

Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet….Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.