Search Results for: blackout poem

NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT T-SHIRTS: “CREATIVITY IS SUBTRACTION”

Friday, April 16, 2010

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.~~

NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT RELEASE PARTY AT BOOKPEOPLE

Thursday, April 15, 2010

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.

NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT IS OUT!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Finally! After almost 2 years, Newspaper Blackout is out in the wild. You can buy it now wherever books are sold.

Thanks SO MUCH to everyone for all your links and tweets and support. This book would not exist without you.

You can see a ton of images of the book free for blogging/spreading around in my Press and Blogger’s Kit on Flickr.

Here’s a sampling of the wonderful press we’ve been getting:

“The poems resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead.”
—The New Yorker

“Highbrow/brilliant…”
—New York Magazine

“Kleon manages to turn the paper of record into visually stark nuggets of poetry and wit.”
—Texas Monthly

“[A] sense of play infuses the poems—short pieces that touch on first sex and outer space, in a voice that slips from funny to elegiac…”
—The Austin Chronicle

If you haven’t purchased your copy yet, please consider doing so!

We’re having a release party here in Austin tonight at BookPeople. 7PM. There will be newspapers, Sharpies, and chocolate chip cookies.

And finally, here’s the trailer for the book with music from the amazing White Denim. Feel free to spread it around!

NEW 20×200 NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT PRINT: THE TRAVELOGUE

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Very pleased to announce that my friend Jen Bekman and the rad gang at 20×200 are offering a new, affordable Newspaper Blackout print for sale!

The Travelogue

Fun fact: this is the poem that Renee Montaigne read on NPR’s Morning Edition in 2008.

Never bought from 20×200 before? You’re gonna love it. Here’s an idea of what you’ll get when your print arrives. (You can also see the other 3 prints we have available through 20×200 in my store.)

Jen wrote a really lovely newsletter about the piece, some of which I wanted to share here:

I met Austin in person in Austin, TX, when I was there for SXSW, and was glad to get to spend time with him as he was on the brink of big things—spending time with artists on the brink of big things is one of the true joys of my job. His book—which you can pre-order on Amazon—was available in the conference’s bookstore. We went to dinner on the same evening that we both got to hold copies of it in our hands for the very first time. Austin was frazzled and flustered and flattered by the attention that was beginning to percolate. He was anxious about what was to come, and whether the book would sell, and what comes next when it does or it doesn’t.

There were four of us at dinner, each representing a compass point on the map of North America—California, Canada, New York and Texas—sitting at a picnic table on a scrappy patio beneath trees strung with Christmas lights, sipping sweet tea and eating barbecue and talking about poetry. I mean really talking about poetry, because as it turned out, all four of us are pretty big poetry nerds. It struck me then that for all the talk about what was to come, Austin’s accomplished some pretty amazing things already and those things deserved a good portion of the credit for convening us there that evening. And being there? That was pretty great.

With all the insanity going on in my life right now, the giveaways, interviews, reviews, Amazon rank, etc., I really needed to read this.

To remember what’s important.

As I told the group that evening: the best part (for me) of being an artist and a writer is the people I’ve been able to meet–totally awesome people–whether it’s in blog comments, or on twitter, or in person over BBQ.

I’m a very lucky guy. So big thanks to y’all, and thanks to Jen.