Newspaper Blackout Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction: A Brief History of Newspaper Blackout

  Newspaper Blackout Poems

  Sing to Me

  Home Alone

  Time Machine

  Safe to Speculate

  Remembering Is Reliving

  Gym Class

  The Family Jewels

  Tetherball

  The Cool Kids

  The Bully

  Summer Camp

  The Ages of Trees

  Leaves on Fire

  Chain-Link

  In the Wind

  Little League

  A World Extracted

  The Pleasures of Play

  Skinny-Dipping

  Fireflies

  The Buzz of Insects

  We See Faces

  Two Amigos

  Two Drummers

  Dear Rock ’N’ Roll

  The Usual Feat

  Astral Plane

  Children Play

  The Snowball War

  Girls and Boys

  On Top of the Wheat Silos

  Martin Strapped In

  Swashbuckle

  Whiz

  Roll and Run

  Pure Emo

  Gasoline

  Stay Tough

  The Terminator

  The Ninja’s Chauffeur

  How to Learn About Girls

  The Nuts and Bolts of Woman

  Ladies’ Man

  The Date

  No Action

  Primed

  The Alien Lovers

  When the Weather Gets Warm

  On Her Planet

  Monster

  A Teenage Moment of Caution

  The Lot

  Seventeen and Dreamy

  Teenagers on the Moon

  The Worth of These Things

  All You Can Do

  A Mother’s Forgiveness

  The Reward

  The Skinny Son

  The Family Detectives

  Genetics

  The Mother Is Stubborn

  Jury-Rigged System

  Children, Parents

  On a Sunday

  Big Dreams Driving

  Origins Are Easy

  In Italy

  In Cleveland, on My Deathbed

  To Discover an Area

  Ease into Texas?

  The Old West

  Woe to the Yankee

  Cowboy Scene

  Slow Dancing

  The Heat

  Is It Too Hot to Touch?

  A House in Texas

  Remote

  Ed Is Emblematic

  The Pursuit of Landscaping

  In the Suburbs, in the Yard

  The Saddest Day

  Dirty Word

  Foreclosure

  The Universe Survives

  Lie to a Homeless Woman

  Anything Goes

  Some Blame Texas

  Extinction Is Bliss

  Who Put Me Here?

  On the 7th Day

  A Kind Colossus

  Surrender to the Giant

  On His Birthday

  Karaoke

  The King

  Underdog

  The Fastest Computer in Florida

  Ambitions Point Elsewhere

  Farewell

  Devil on Wires

  Mozart

  A Big Catch

  Millions of Hours

  The Office

  Pink Flamingo

  Lawyers

  Take a Holiday

  The Fire Alarm

  Kept Secrets

  The Hostile Universe

  Invaders

  The Dull Prince

  The Superpower

  Heart in His Hand

  As a Frog

  The Bride

  A Witch Float or Not

  Shoulders

  Her Magnificent Palais

  Kickboxing

  Evening Transformed

  Real People

  The First Mate

  Captain’s Log

  I Dressed Alone

  Loretta Lynn

  The Chemicals Inside Us

  The King Outside

  Go in Grace

  Road Trip

  No Spin

  The Secret Tower

  His Wife Appears

  See the Boy

  Torture

  Smile

  Love Letter

  You Can Warm a Room

  Orientation

  Open the Maps

  Say a Woman’s Name

  Oh! People Can Hear Us

  No Better Work to Do

  A Feeling of Flow

  The 1990s

  Happy Captain

  Sell Out

  Whaler

  For What I Do

  Never the Music

  How to Make a Newspaper Blackout Poem

  Newspaper Blackout Poems: Contest Winners

  Afterword to the eBook Edition

  Previously Unpublished Poems

  Enter a World

  Gimmick

  Hairdresser

  His Small Paycheck

  History

  Looking to Write

  Money: Making

  Only If You Name It

  Scoundrel

  Some Daughter’s Boyfriend

  The First Thing to Be Said

  Thinking Small

  Trees Are Gestures

  What Didn’t Happen

  What Sounds Simple

  Tell Your Friends!

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  To my wife, Meghan

  Preface

  The poems in this book exist thanks to petty crime, writer’s block, and the Internet.

  Four years ago, my girlfriend, Meg, was working in a crummy neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, and some lowlife thief was stealing the daily newspapers off the office steps. Meg convinced her boss to have the papers delivered to our apartment in a less-crummy neighborhood, where the bandit couldn’t get to them. The papers arrived on our doorstep every morning unharmed, and every morning Meg would clip out her industry news to bring with her to work, stacking what remained of the papers in a huge pile beside my desk before heading off.

  I was twenty-two at the time, barely out of undergrad, and trying desperately to be a short story writer. Short stories are what they teach you to write in college, and so I tried to write them. But without the structure of academia with homework assignments and writing workshops, I felt lost. I struggled through handbooks of writing exercises. Nothing worked. Each blink of the Microsoft Word cursor taunted me.

  Writing wasn’t fun anymore.

  One day, I looked over at that stack of newspapers left by Meg next to my desk. I might have had no words, but there, right beside me, were millions of them.

  So, fed up with my short story attempts and failures, I picked up a permanent marker and the Metro section and started blacking out words, leaving a choice few uncovered. I didn’t know what I was doing, or why. All I knew was that it was fun to watch those words disappear behind that fat black marker line. It didn’t feel like work, it felt like play.

  That’s the entire origin story I have to give you. I’ve since become suspicious of any artists who claim they knew exactly what they were doing when inspiration struck. The truth is, in the words of Donald Barthelme, art is about “
not-knowing.” It’s when you’re bored and frustrated and just looking to have some fun that the good ideas come.

  The pile of newspapers turned into pieces of blackened newsprint reeking of marker fumes. They weren’t just writing exercises, they were little finished objects. They were short, they made use of the page, they had concentrated language. I’d never wanted to be a poet, but dang, if they weren’t poems.

  I called them Newspaper Blackout Poems, and I began posting them to my blog.

  Time passed. People began to take notice. I’d get e-mails and links from other blogs. The more people showed interest, the more poems I’d post. Much to my surprise, my little poems were creating some big noise around the Internet and in papers around the country. Eventually they made it all the way to a feature story on NPR’s Morning Edition.

  In the four years since I made that first blackout poem to the time of this book’s publication, my girlfriend became my wife and we moved miles across the country to Austin, Texas. The following poems were created from June to December 2008. Most were composed on the bus to my day job, during my lunch break in the basement of the building where I work, and on the bus ride home.

  What’s exciting about the poems is that by destroying writing you can create new writing. You can take a stranger’s random words and pick and choose from them to express your own personal vision.

  Writing should be fun. Everyone can do it. I hope this book inspires you to try to create your own blackout poems. They’re a fun, constructive way to pass time. They cost next to nothing to make. All you need is yesterday’s newspaper and something that marks. I’ve included a “how-to” section at the end of the book to get you started.

  Thanks for reading. If you like what you read, head over to www.austin

  kleon.com for more.

  And if we see each other on the bus with our markers and newspapers, let’s be sure to wave hello.

  Introduction

  A Brief History of Newspaper Blackout

  When I first put marker to newsprint, I was ignorant of any artistic or poetic precedent.

  As a teenager, I’d seen images of John Lennon’s declassified FBI files on The Smoking Gun Web site—grainy photocopies of typed agent reports heavily redacted with strokes of black Magic Marker. I printed them out and pasted them in my notebook.

  Ten years later, I was posting poems to my blog that looked very much like those files.

  I thought I was ripping off the government!

  But after a handful of e-mails, blog comments, and message board flames (“1970 called, and Tom Phillips wants his idea back!” “Lame William Burroughs rip-off”), I decided to set out to do a little bit of research as to what might have come before.

  As it turns out, there’s a 250-year-old history of folks finding poetry in the daily newspaper.

  It all begins in the 1760s. Caleb Whitefoord, an English wine merchant, writer, diplomat, and former next-door neighbor of Benjamin Franklin, is living in the country about forty miles outside of London, shut in from bad weather, with only a deck of cards and a few newspapers to amuse himself. He sees no reason why newspapers—a “jumble” of “unconnected occurrences”—can’t be as entertaining as a deck of cards, and so, after he reads the tightly columned newspaper in the “old trite vulgar way, i.e. each column by itself downwards” he next reads two columns across.

  This method of “blind chance” brings about “the strangest connections . . . things so opposite in their nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.”

  He writes down the best combinations and publishes them under the name “cross-readings.” Here are a handful:

  This day his Majefty will go in state to

  sixteen notorious common prostitutes.

  On Tuesday both Houses of Convocation met:

  Books shut, nothing done.

  Wanted, to take care of an elderly gentlewoman,

  An active young man, just come out of the country.

  To be Iett, and entered on immediately,

  A young woman, that will put her hand to any thing

  They’re a big hit with his peers and fellow writers, one of whom says he “laughed till he cried” while reading them.

  Fifty years later, our nation’s third president, a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, decides he digs the teachings of Jesus, but finds all the miracles and supernatural elements of the Gospels a bit ridiculous. So he takes scissors to his King James Bible, cuts out only the parts he likes, and pastes them in a scrapbook. He calls it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It later becomes known as The Jefferson Bible.

  Cut to a surrealist rally in Paris in the 1920s. A Romanian poet named Tristan Tzara proposes to create a poem by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensues, and the surrealists decide to kick Tzara out of their club. He outlines the method in his “Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love”:

  Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

  “Poetry,” Tzara says, “is for everyone.” (Being a quarter Romanian myself, I feel it my duty to note that in Tzara’s native language “Dada” means “yes yes.”)

  The same city of Paris, 1959. A Canadian artist named Brion Gysin is staying in the Beat Hotel. He’s mounting paintings on a table covered in newspapers when his utility knife slips and slices through several layers of newsprint. Writing is fifty years behind painting, he thinks. He’s had an idea for a while that writers need to incorporate painting techniques like collage into their writing in order for the form to advance. He picks up the strips of newsprint and begins composing texts out of the “raw words” into what would become his work, Minutes to Go. The texts make him laugh out loud.

  His buddy, the writer William Burroughs, gets back from a trip to London, and Gysin shows him the “cut-up” technique. Burroughs goes nuts for it, and begins trying it out for himself. He uses the cut-up technique for many of his novels composed in the sixties, and everywhere proclaims his enthusiasm for cut-ups as a revolutionary way to write.

  “Cut-ups are for everyone,” he says. “Anybody can make cut-ups.”

  Burroughs even claimed the cut-ups were a form of time travel: you could predict future events based on the juxtapositions you made.

  London, 1966. A twenty-eight-year-old artist named Tom Phillips reads a 1965 interview with William Burroughs in The Paris Review. He tries out a few cut-up poems of his own on old magazines he has lying around. He likes the results of the technique, and thinks he can take it a step further. He heads down to a furniture repository stand named Austin’s (there are no coincidences) and buys the first book he finds for threepence. The book is an 1892 Victorian novel by W. H. Mallock titled A Human Document. Phillips begins by blacking out words with pen and ink, leaving only a few words behind, connected by “rivers” of blank page in between the lines of text. He soon starts painting and drawing and collaging over the pages, and the book turns into a modern illuminated manuscript. By subtracting letters from Mallock’s original title, he comes up with the name A Humument.

  A Humument turns into a forty-year-old and counting work-in-progress. Phillips first publishes it as a book in 1983 and it becomes a cult classic. The fourth edition is published in 2005. The work continues to this day, much of which you can see online at www.humument.com.

  San Francisco, 1977. A poet named Ronald Johnson picks an 1892 edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost off a bookstore shelf and begins erasing words and lines from the epic poem. He buys more copies of the edition, and after several revisions, publishes his own resulting text, Radi os (as with A Humum
ent, the title is born by erasing letters from the original). In the book’s introduction, as if to fend off any potential criticism about the originality of his poem, he writes, “I composed the holes.”

  In a later interview, Johnson says regardless of the amusing origins of the project, “You don’t tamper with Milton to be funny.”

  What began as a joke becomes serious.

  Beginning in the late 1980s, Crispin Hellion Glover, the actor perhaps best-known for his role as George McFly in the movie Back to the Future, adopts Phillips’s technique and “treats” old Victorian novels with drawings, photographs, and other collage materials. Most notable of these is his truly bizarre and crazy 1989 book, Rat Catching, which is derived from an 1896 book, Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching. Glover continues with the technique in several other books, and reads from them in a touring slideshow presentation to this day.

  The new millennium is full of activity, as cut-up, collage, DJ, and remix culture enter the mainstream.

  2002. French artist Jochen Gerner takes the comic Tintin in America and blacks out the speech bubbles into phrases and the colors into abstract symbols. The result is a kind of treatise on American culture, and Gerner calls it TNT en Amérique.

  2003. The artist Will Ashford adopts a technique very similar to Tom Phillips’s and alters the pages of old books into poetry and visual art. He calls his project Recycled Words.

  2004. The poet Jen Bervin grays out portions of text from Shakespeare’s sonnets, and publishes the resulting poems in Nets.

  2005. The writer and collage artist Graham Rawle publishes the delightful Woman’s World: a novel written in the conventional manner as a rough draft, and then replaced word-by-word, line-by-line with clippings from 1960s women’s magazines. An amazing feat.

  2006. The poet Mary Ruefle takes Wite-Out correction fluid to an old book and publishes the tiny book A Little White Shadow.

  2008. The poet Janet Holmes puts out The ms of my kin, an “erasure” of The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

  Admittedly, this idiosyncratic history looks less like a straight line and more like blips on a radar screen. The figures, separated by decades (and centuries!) are kin in the proximity of their techniques only: they found their own writing by destroying the writing of others. Some have used newspapers and scissors, some have used old Victorian novels and Wite-Out. Some have tried to be funny, some serious. Almost all of them stumbled onto their processes accidentally—they were seeking amusement and diversion from their “normal” routine.