NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS

Fitting it together

Thursday, April 21, 2016

“This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do: you take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things! That’s the way the work has to go. You make connections in your work… That’s what we do, we people who make things. If it’s a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or a musical composition, it’s all about that. Finding how it fits together and fitting it together.”
—Wendell Berry

The light of the universe

Monday, February 29, 2016

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“Every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered.”
—Lawrence M. Krauss

How to make a newspaper blackout poem

Monday, September 21, 2015

Next week I’m going to be an artist-in-residence at All Saints’ Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas. The teachers asked if I had a video explaining how to make a newspaper blackout poem. I didn’t, so I made one. Enjoy.

To be a teacher and remain a student

Sunday, June 14, 2015

C.S. Lewis wrote a great introduction to his Reflections on the Psalms that I used in the “Be An Amateur” section of my last book:

I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself… It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can… The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten… I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained…

This is the way I’ve always tried to approach writing, teaching, or speaking on stage: not as an expert, but as a fellow student. I’m trying to learn in the open. I’m letting others look over my shoulder while I figure things out.

And even when I do think I’ve figured some things out, I’m trying to find more things to figure out, because learning is the thing that keeps me alive, keeps me moving forward.

This, I think, is the great trick: To be a teacher and remain a student.