Search Results for: blackout poem

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY, PART TWO

Monday, January 12, 2009

The last time an ad agency tried its hand at a blackout poem, it was for a Lexus ad. Today’s ad agency blackout poem comes from Microsoft, on page four of the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal:

see it bigger

It’s part of Microsoft’s new $150,000,000 advertising campaign. Read more about it here.

Since the folks at Microsoft are such big fans, it seems only right and natural that they should buy each of their 60,000 employees a copy of Newspaper Blackout Poems in September.

That’s fair, right?

(Spotted again by the eagle-eyed Linda Ball. Mark Larson pointed me to the image.)

UPDATE: see more ads from the campaign in the comments of this post

FORGOTTEN ARTIFACTS AND INSPIRATIONS

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Memory is a funny thing—you think the things you digest and then consciously cast away are forgotten forever—but they’re not. They’re stewing in the pools deep in your subconscious…making your every move..

My mom still lives in the house I grew up in, so when I’m home for the holidays, I often poke around my room and sift through nostalgia from my childhood.

Having just finished the book, I thought it was no coincidence that I found the following artifacts….

* * *

The Smoking Gun book

When I started making blackout poems, I was ignorant of Tom Phillips’ A Humument or found poetry—I was thinking about John Lennon’s FBI files and the de-classified documents on the Smoking Gun website: the way magic-marker-redacted and photocopied documents turn to pure black and white. But I had totally forgotten about this book, which I purchased in high school:

* * *

Green Day’s Nimrod liner notes

My stepmom actually found this left in a dresser drawer at my dad’s house. 1997—I was 14. It wouldn’t be the first time Green Day album art influenced me…

* * *

Tristan Tzara’s “How To Make A Dadaist Poem“

This one truly shocked me. I include Tzara’s manifesto in the book, but I found it only after reading William Burroughs’ The Third Mind. Turns out I’d read it in high school, and even tried out the cut-up method for one of my high school english classes. (Please: no wisecracks about the embarrassing writing and the use of the word “society”.)

Funny thing is, that paragraph is almost identical (in idea) to what I wrote in the introduction to the book!

(Cut-up lyrics to The Velvet Underground’s “Beginning To See The Light”)

* * *

Any artifacts from your childhood that seemed insignificant at the time that you now consider conscious or unconscious influences?

2008: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

What a nutty year. The pages of my paper 2008 diary are full—right up until the end of June, when things got crazy, and I lost six months of my life to writing a book, buying a house, and watching Obama get elected. Phew! About the same happened with this blog: July came around…and poof! I blogged about half as much for the second half of the year. (Check out the infographic above and the 2008 Visual Archive.)

So what now, 2009? The only thing I have planned is the book release in September. I’m going to take a break in January and February, curl up on my office couch, and read some really big books. Hopefully start blogging some more. Around March, I’m going to try to start on another book. Maybe a graphic novel. I’ll be posting whatever I come up with here, along with a bunch of blackout poems that didn’t make the book.

Thanks for reading. It was a great year for me, and everybody who visited the site, left comments, linked to the poems…y’all made it so.

My very best to you. Warm wishes for a great 2009!

RESIDUE

Saturday, December 20, 2008

res-i-due
noun
a substance that remains after a process such as combustion or evaporation

These are the back and front covers of the notebook I carried around to make, record (see my calendar and checklist), and store all of my blackout poems. I used the back cover (above) to absorb all the marker bleed, and it still reeks from the fumes of hundreds of poems.

The front cover says, “If it isn’t play, what good is it?” and has a quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson:

…we deal in things that are continually vanishing…and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on Earth that can make them come back again…

For photography, this is true: if you don’t snap the shutter at the right time, the moment has vanished.

For blackouts, it’s similar—mark over the wrong word, and it’s gone forever—but also different: as for moments in life that have vanished, blackout poems are the “contrivance” that can make them come back again.

William Burroughs claimed that cut-ups were a form of time-travel, and it’s no coincidence that the second poem in my book is about instructions for a time machine.

I’ve spent the last six months dipping into the pensieve. Now it’s time to move forward, think about the future. Discover the the next project.

How do you fill the empty nest?

GET YOURSELF A CALENDAR

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Several months ago, I was at a talk by comics artist Jessica Abel, and somebody asked her for her number one productivity tip. She said, “get yourself a calendar. Here’s what she has to say (emphasis mine):

“Get yourself a calendar, and schedule the work you have to do in there. Make sure the calendar is the type where you can see a day or a week at at time (not a month at a time), so there’s room to write under each day. Then, mark in any regular commitments you have…Once you’ve got all that there, you will be able to see how much time you really have to work….In the time you have for work, assign yourself very specific tasks…Taking a little time to get all this in your book will do several things for you. It will become clear to you how much you can reasonably get done in a week. It will become clear where you might need to shorten your daily activities to fit in more drawing. And, most importantly, it will give you concrete goals, so that when you finish what you set out to do, you can cross it off and feel good about yourself, and you can also stop working, sometimes the hardest thing to do for a freelance artist. Knowing when you’re on and what you need to get done makes your free time, once you’ve accomplished these goals, truly free, guilt-free. And that’s the most important part of learning to make a life as a working artist.”

When I started the book at the end of June, I knew I had six months to get the manuscript finished. 25 weeks to make 150 brand-new poems. That’s 6 poems a week, one poem a day…if I took a sabbath. But there was no way each poem was going to be worthy of being collected in the book. So I decided to shoot for a 3/5 success rate (which is still way too optimistic), and make 250 poems in 25 weeks. 10 poems a week. Out of the 250, I’d throw out 100, and still have 150 for the book.

250 poems!

I couldn’t see it happening, so I drew it. 25 rows, 10 checkboxes. If I was doing everything right, by Christmas all the checkboxes would be full.

And that’s how I’ve been living for the past four months. Every week, there are 10 checkboxes to be filled, and I fill them. At the end of every poem, there’s the satisfying X.

Creating any long work of art is all about time management. Any goal you want to accomplish: get yourself a calendar. Break the task down into little bits of time. Make it a game.