After only a few weeks, I’ve decided to shut down the Newspaper Blackout Poems blog. With work, three different comics I’m working on, and doing my own poems, I just don’t have time for any other project. (I’ll still be posting some on this site now and then.) Thanks to everyone who sent me their poems, and I hope that those interested will go on doing their own.
In honor of my brilliant wife who just got into graduate school, here is one of HER blackout poems:
I hope this blog hasn’t felt like too much of a copout lately. I hadn’t done one of these blackout poems in months, and then I got thousands (literally! thousands!) of visits from a few mentions and reading people’s comments (some of which are really hilarious) made me interested in doing them again. I love how on the internet you have no control over what you are. If somebody sees your poems, you’re a poet. If somebody sees your comics, you’re a cartoonist.
I am whatever you say I am. I think a famous poet said that once…
Oh wait: that was Eminem.
Ah, well.
An old blackout poem pulled out of a notebook…
Last January, after seeing a couple of my newspaper blackout poems, Winston Smith e-mailed and recommended to me a book called “A Humument” by an artist named Tom Phillips. In the mid-sixties, Phillips took an old Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called “A Human Document” and started blacking out the pages to make a new book, ” A Humument.” Well, I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but was too lazy to look it up, or even Google it, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about it.
A year later, Drew Dernavich e-mails me a link to Humument.com, the official site of the book! Little did I know that you can see every page from the book online. (There’s also a new edition you can buy online from Amazon.)
Too cool.
This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.