Did this one today at lunch. It’s going I think it’ll go in the book.
LAY IT ALL OUT WHERE YOU CAN LOOK AT IT
Meg took these shots of me working on the book. At this stage, I have about 175 poems scanned and cleaned up. I’d like to have about 150. I was trying to organize them all on the computer in Adobe Bridge, but I wanted to be able to see them all, to touch them, to shuffle them, stack them, sort through them. I decided to print them all out on paper. Now I’m looking for themes and threads, stories and characters, trying to make this thing flow.
It’s a lot like making a mixtape, or sequencing an album. The way the songs butt up against each other can totally color their meanings. One could craft a hundred different albums from the same batch of songs.
The task now is looking. Trying to see a book in this stack of pages.
Dan Roam, in his book, The Back of the Napkin, says “there are four basic rules to apply every time we look at something new.”
1. Collect everything we can to look at—the more the better (at least at first).
2. Have a place where we can lay out everything and really look at it, side by side.
3. Always define a basic coordinate system to give us a clear orientation and position.
4. Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everything our eyes bring in—we need to practice visual triage.
Lay it all out where you can look at it. As Edward Tufte says, “Whenever possible, show comparisons adjacent in spaces, not stacked in time.”
Looking leads to seeing which leads to meaning.
David Hockney came to his theory on optics and painting by pinning a photocopied timeline of paintings down one wall of his studio:
He looked and was able to see a story.
Let’s hope it works for me.
NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS IN THE CLASSROOM
Are you or do you know of a teacher or student who has used Newspaper Blackout Poems in the classroom? Are you a writer using them in your writing group or creative writing workshop?
If so, please share your experience in the comments or e-mail me. I’m looking for lesson plans, results, testimonials, photos, videos, or even a few simple sentences about how you went about teaching them, what the response was, etc.
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: Check out the comments for examples!
171 BLACKOUT POEMS
In neat little rows in Adobe Bridge (which has been a total life-saver):
This is just the “yes” folder. It needs to be whittled down to 150 or less and sequenced.
52 in the “no/maybe/blog” folder.
224 total.
It’s still 26 shy of my goal of 250, but there’s only a month until the manuscript is due, so I might have to just end up short. So it goes.
Here’s what the Photoshop grunt-work looks like:
Wish me luck.
WINNERS OF THE NOVEMBER NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS CONTEST
A lot of good entries this month, but the winner was Erica Westcott of Virginia Beach, VA, for her poem, “Enigma.”
I love the restraint Erica showed in this poem and the top-heavy black space. Here’s what she had to say about the making of it:
I am a mild mannered histology technician by day, and in my spare time I enjoy skydiving, knitting, and reading. After stumbling across your blog and admiring all the blackout poems, I thought I’d try my hand at one. They looked pretty easy, something to pass my lunch hour at work: just pick out a few words and string them together somehow, sort of like refrigerator magnet poetry. Wrong! I struggled for several days before coming up with something that sounded and looked just right. (Rarely is the structural appearance of what I write as important as the words themselves.) The subject matter of the original newspaper article was an amusing distraction, too. I never imagined the travails of a hostess — who knew! — mixed with a snippet of a second article could all be pared down and curiously transformed into poetry at the end.
Our runner-ups: Sarah Reyes from Newtown, PA, Brandon Weaver from La Mirada, CA, and Amy E. Hall from Franklin, TN.
Congratulations, Erica, Sarah, Brandon, and Amy! Y’all will get your free books next September.
And an honorable mention goes out to Nick Wiesneski, who just couldn’t get it together in time to make the deadline, but finished his poem anyways, and sent it in in-progress and completed:
You can see all the winners of the contest in the Newspaper Blackout Poems Flickr Pool, and add your own to the mix!
A big thank-you to everyone who entered the four contests. Y’all were great.
Posting around here for the next month or so might be pretty slow, as I’m in the home stretch of finishing up the book manuscript. If you’re dying for more blackout action, check out this interview I did via e-mail with Mitch Knox, a journalism student from Australia, where we discuss the contest, the book, and Garfield Minus Garfield, amongst other things.
And stay tuned for fun stuff planned for January! I’m thinking about having an international contest, where y’all can send me whatever you want (as long as it’s in English and I can read it). I’ll pick a winner, or winners, and send them a signed copy out of my own personal stash. So keep practicing!
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