Memory is a funny thing—you think the things you digest and then consciously cast away are forgotten forever—but they’re not. They’re stewing in the pools deep in your subconscious…making your every move..

My mom still lives in the house I grew up in, so when I’m home for the holidays, I often poke around my room and sift through nostalgia from my childhood.

Having just finished the book, I thought it was no coincidence that I found the following artifacts….

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The Smoking Gun book

When I started making blackout poems, I was ignorant of Tom Phillips’ A Humument or found poetry—I was thinking about John Lennon’s FBI files and the de-classified documents on the Smoking Gun website: the way magic-marker-redacted and photocopied documents turn to pure black and white. But I had totally forgotten about this book, which I purchased in high school:

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Green Day’s Nimrod liner notes

My stepmom actually found this left in a dresser drawer at my dad’s house. 1997—I was 14. It wouldn’t be the first time Green Day album art influenced me…

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Tristan Tzara’s “How To Make A Dadaist Poem“

This one truly shocked me. I include Tzara’s manifesto in the book, but I found it only after reading William Burroughs’ The Third Mind. Turns out I’d read it in high school, and even tried out the cut-up method for one of my high school english classes. (Please: no wisecracks about the embarrassing writing and the use of the word “society”.)

Funny thing is, that paragraph is almost identical (in idea) to what I wrote in the introduction to the book!

(Cut-up lyrics to The Velvet Underground’s “Beginning To See The Light”)

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Any artifacts from your childhood that seemed insignificant at the time that you now consider conscious or unconscious influences?