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New 20×200 Prints: “Open Road” and “How To Be Cool”
Just in time for the holidays, here are two brand-new Newspaper Blackout prints.
“Open Road” available at 20×200.com→
“How To Be Cool” available at 20×200.com→
This poem is a “deleted scene”—it was cut from my book, Newspaper Blackout, late in the editing process, although now I can’t remember why. It was made from an article about the Brooklyn rapper Lil Mama.
Also: Steal Like An Artist is available for pre-order!
TALK, TALK: A LOOK AT MY OFFICE AND SOME RECENT INTERVIEWS
On my two-desk setup with from the desk of…
I have two desks in my office — one’s “analog” and one’s “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on the desk — this is how I keep myself off Twitter, etc. This is where most of my work is born. The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, my Wacom tablet, and a MIDI keyboard controller for if I want to record any music. (Like a lot of writers, I’m a wannabe musician.) This is where I edit, publish, etc.
On “How To Steal Like An Artist” going viral in an epic, 1 1/2 hour-long interview my friend John Unger on his radio show, Art Heroes:
It’s been a really big happy mess….People keep saying, “Oh, nice problem to have,” and yes, it is a nice problem to have, but problems still require time, effort, and sometimes money to solve.
On stealing from the avant-garde with Fringe Magazine:
What’s fun for me is taking this avant-garde technique and trying to make something fairly traditional out of it. Something you can send your grandma. Or your mom, maybe. Maybe not your grandma.
On “my vision” for Newspaper Blackout with E-Junkie:
It’s less of a vision, and more of a smell. The smell of marker fumes.
On art as a career with The Daily Brink:
My mom always bought me tons of art supplies, and we had scheduled time for making stuff every day when I was really little. She also let me bang on pots and pans with her wooden spoons. I spent most of my afternoons in high school hiding in the art room, but I never considered being an artist a serious thing to do as a career — I thought I’d go off to college and become a professor. A professor of what, I didn’t know, but I figured I’d teach and write books. Sometime in middle school I think I stumbled across the term “Renaissance man.” That’s what I wanted to be — somebody who does a lot of different things.
On my favorite books with Austin Eavesdropper:
I love everything Kurt Vonnegut and Lynda Barry and Saul Steinberg ever put out. I love Joe Brainard’s I Remember, which is a memoir made up of a bunch of sentences that begin with “I Remember…” I love Carl Jung’s memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I love Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. I love William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. I love David Hockney’s book, Secret Knowledge. So many books! Since 2005, I’ve kept lists of the best things I read every year.
PUNT
Last night I tried for hours and hours to get a good poem. It just didn’t happen. This scrap is the best I could come up with.
I went on Twitter to complain:
And I had forgotten. It’d been weeks since I tried to make one. (I got occupied with reading and getting the store up and running.) There were days during the six months I was making the book, when I made 2 or 3 or even 4 a day…good ones, too. I was in the groove. I was making a lot of work.
Inertia is the death of creativity. You have to keep moving, keep making. So much of making art is muscle memory, keeping your routine…
And when you get out of the groove, you start to dread making work, because you know it’s going to suck for a while–it’s going to suck until you get back into the flow. A tweet from last week:
I should never let myself get to this point. I need the advice as much as anybody:
Take half an hour every day and make something. No matter what. No holidays, no sick days. Don’t stop.
(And don’t punt.)
FORECLOSURE
The folks from PBS Newshour were down last week to film me for their Poetry Series. It should air very soon — follow me on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll post there when I get the word that it’s about to run.
Mike Melia blogged this poem from Newspaper Blackout yesterday on the Newshour Art Beat blog.
Here’s what I said to Drew Dernavich about the poem:
It’s funny you mention “Foreclosure,” because that’s my least favorite poem in the whole damned book. My wife liked that one and made me keep it in!
Moral: listen to your wife.
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