I hate writing. What I really love is reading. I tell people I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader. (Adam Phillips: “I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”)
Mission Statement
Always circling the same obsessions, I’ll often make a poem months (or years) after that would’ve fit perfectly into one of my books. This one would’ve gone into chapter three of Steal Like An Artist (“Write the book you want to read.”) Originally, it was going to go, “I read what I want to read,” as a screw you to people who try to make you feel guilty about what you read, but I decided I couldn’t pass this one up.
New prints for sale from the archives
We were digging in our flat files and found some extremely limited-edition prints that we pulled way back in 2010 at Texas State in San Marcos. The first is “Agoraphobia,” an edition of 18 screenprints. Here’s video of artist Curtis Miller pulling them:
The other print, “The Travelogue,” is a lithograph in an edition of 20:
Here’s a close-up of the raw image:
Here’s video of Clif Riley working on them:
You can buy both in our shop.
A brief history of my newspaper blackout poems
Every morning I try to pick up a newspaper and a Sharpie marker, and I make one of my newspaper blackout poems:
This is what one looks like after I scan it into Photoshop and play with the levels a bit:
(It’s sort of like if the CIA did haiku.)
Newspaper Blackout finally available as an eBook
My first book, Newspaper Blackout, is now available as an eBook.
Word of caution: you need to have a reasonably large, preferably backlit screen to appreciate these things. If you just have an old Kindle or an eReader with a tiny screen, you’d be better off buying the paperback. (I haven’t tested every device, but I can say it looks really great in iBooks on an iPad. Maybe even better than on paper.)
The eBook also contains some “deleted scenes”—a dozen or so poems that got cut from the original manuscript—and a new afterword.
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