Newspaper Blackout Page 2
I’m including this history to give credit where credit might be due. I’m sure I’ve left some creators out: I beg their forgiveness in advance.
I encourage inquisitive readers to seek out the works mentioned here and to Google the authors’ names, as well as the terms “found poetry” and “altered books” should they want to seek out more inspiration.
Suggested Reading
William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind
Paul Collins, “The Lost Symphony,” The Believer (November 2004)
Papyrius Cursor (pseudonym of Caleb Whitefoord), “Cross Readings from the Newspapers,” The New Foundling Hospital for Wit: Being a Collection of Fugitive Pieces, in Prose and Verse, edited by John Almon, 1786
Conrad Knickerbocker, “The Art of Fiction No. 36: William S. Burroughs,” interview in The Paris Review 35 (fall 1965).
Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s (February 2007)
Tom Phillips, A Humument
Graham Rawle, Woman’s World
How to Make a Newspaper Blackout Poem
The poet William Carlos Williams said it was difficult to get the news from poems, but I’ve found it’s not all that hard to get poems from the news.
In fact, it couldn’t be simpler. Here’s the recipe:
Grab a newspaper.
Grab a marker.
Find an article.
Cross out words, leaving behind the ones you like.
Pretty soon you’ll have a poem.
That’s it. Really. No reason to read on any further. Put down this book and try it out.
Not convinced? Think you’re not a poet? Check out the poems at the end of this book—they were all made by folks just like you . . . from newspaper articles that were one hundred years old!
Okay, maybe you’ll still have a couple questions. Here are questions a few folks have asked me:
What newspaper should I use?
Whatever’s around! No need to get fancy. You can use a national paper or your little hometown paper. You can use today’s, yesterday’s, or last week’s. All that’s important is that you have a bunch of words to work with.
And if there’s nothing lying around, go out and buy a paper. Lord knows the industry could use some sales. (And if you’re reading this book in the future, when newspapers are supposedly extinct, I’m sure there are still printers.)
What kind of markers should I use?
Whatever’s on sale! I like to use a big, fat, chisel-tip marker for the heavy-duty marking, and a fine-point felt-tip marker for detail work.
But who says you have to use a marker? You can use a ballpoint pen. You can use a paintbrush. Whatever gets the job done and suits your imagination.
(Check out Tom Phillips’s A Humument and Google “altered books” for amazing examples of what you can do to pages with different art supplies.)
What section makes for the best poems?
Although I’m on record lamenting the business section as being the worst section for poetry, even there you can still find some gems. I use all the sections, but I especially like Arts and Metro. Arts because the writers often write about themes and plots, and Metro because it’s often about people and what they do around town. The Sports section is fun for place names. (For an example, see the poem, “In Cleveland, on My Deathbed,” in this collection.)
How in the world do I even get started?
What you’re doing when you’re making a blackout poem, in the words of Allen Ginsberg, is “shopping for images.” You want to begin by looking for a word, or a combination of words, that forms an image in your head. (Tip: the best images are usually made up of nouns and verbs.) You want an anchor—a place to start. If you identify this anchor, it’s easy to branch out from there.
Once you identify your anchor, you want to move around the page and find words and phrases you can link to that anchor. Try not to have a preconceived notion of where you want to go. Let the method take you for a ride.
Also: remember that Westerners read left to right, top to bottom. Poems read best and they’re easier to make if you follow this rule. For example, if you’re looking for a word or phrase before your anchor, it would be above or to the left. If you’re looking for a word after your anchor, it should be below or to the right.
You can cheat the left-to-right, top-to-bottom rule by using little trails of white space to lead you in between words. (Tom Phillips calls these “rivers.”) There are tons of examples in this book.
I circle or draw a box around the words and phrases I like as I’m working, and black out the unwanted words later. If you’re a real scaredy cat, you can use a pencil when you’re starting out.
I still can’t get started! There are too many possibilities!
The solution to any writer’s block is to place some constraints on yourself.
Identify the size you want your poem to be. I’ve done blackout poems from a few paragraphs, and I’ve done full-page broadsheet poems. All the poems in this book were done with two columns of newspaper—the perfect width for a paperback book. When I was working on it, I’d grab a pair of scissors and randomly cut up the paper into two-column strips of varying lengths. Sometimes I’d use the ending of one article and the beginning of another, or the right column of one article, and the left column of another. I stuffed these strips into a folder and carried it around for easy access. (It’s almost impossible to open a newspaper on a crowded bus.) Regardless of the size you choose, your goal is to find a poem in that section of newsprint.
I also recommend setting a time limit. I used the time limits of my bus ride and my lunch break.
And rest assured: some articles just don’t work. Toss those in the recycle bin and move on to the next!
Do you read the articles first?
The answer might surprise you: No!
I’ve found that if I read the article beginning to end, I get swept up in the writing and the stories. It colors my impressions of the words, and I can’t see the trees for the forest.
I like to think of blackout poems like those old “Word Find” and “Word Search” puzzles we used to do in elementary school—a field of letters with hidden messages to find. The more I treat the newspaper as raw material and less as writing, the better my poems get.
Your results may vary, of course. Try it both ways and see what happens.
Okay, I’ve made some poems. Now what?
It’s up to your imagination. When I first started doing the poems, I’d use the little scenes I’d made to think up characters and plots for short stories. You can use the poems as brainstorming for your art, your writing, or even that big term paper or business meeting. You can paste them into your notebook or keep them as a diary.
It’s best to share them! Poems are meant to be read. You can collect a batch of the poems and photocopy them into zines to pass out to your friends. You can scan them and post them to your blog or your Web site. You can use them with your kids, or with your grandparents, in a classroom, or in a writing group.
Wherever you decide to go with the method, the poems are their own reward. By making writing pleasurable—by making it more like a game and less like hard work—you can pull things out of your brain that you’ve never dreamed of.
Have fun, and let me know how it goes!
Newspaper Blackout Poems: Contest Winners
The following poems were winners of a contest I ran in the fall of 2008. Each poem was made from a hundred-year-old newspaper article!
These five poets, regular folks with day jobs, whether consciously or unconsciously, all followed my tips to good results: they started with anchor words that conjured vivid images in their minds, they connected those anchors with other words (and sometimes trails of white space to make those words readable), and, most important, they used their imaginations to transform a newspaper article into poetry. All it took was some downtime and something that marks. I hope they will be an inspiration for you to try your own!
This poem does everything I think a great blackout poem should do: it transforms the original article (about a horrific construction accident) into a completely different image, it reads cleanly from left to right and top to bottom, and, best of all, it has a sense of humor. Alison did this poem to pass the time on her long train ride to and from her work in the Boston area. She told me that starting from the original article was daunting, but once she found the anchor words “crushed,” “roach,” and “kitchen,” she simply looked for the right words to pull them together. Note the way she drew geometric shapes around the words (everything is either a triangle, a rectangle, or a circle), and her innovations with the text, combining “struggle-ing” and “m-y.”
“Clue” by Peter Boet
Like Alison’s, Peter’s poem began with anchor words: when he saw “revolver” and “dining room” together, it reminded him of the board game Clue. Peter, a civil engineer from Grand Haven, Michigan, told me, “I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find Professor Plum or Colonel Mustard … I was searching for Mr. Green when I stumbled upon Mrs. White hanging out near the lower left-hand corner.” He then finished the poem by linking the three anchors. Note the way he blacked out the word “Clue”—you can use this method to not only draw letters, but also shapes and pictures!
“The Walrus Makes a Toast” by Stephanie Cheng
Stephanie’s poem was made from the same article as Peter’s poem, and while they’re both references to pop culture, the only overlap between the two are the words “dining room.” Then a med student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Stephanie liked to read my Web site in between patients during slow clinic days, and one of her favorite poems of mine was called “Adventures in the Batsuit.” She liked the way the allusion to Batman’s backstory made the poem richer, so when she saw the anchor words “oyster” and “steam” in the text, she thought of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and “the rest of the poem fell into place from there.” Note the way her snaking white trails in between the words create an interesting pattern and slow down your reading experience.
“Teeth” by Marty Smith
Marty’s poem doesn’t completely transform the original text (the article was about dentistry), but the teeth marks (made with Photoshop on the computer) make it into something new and visually interesting. Marty is an IT worker from Washington, D.C., so it makes sense that he would incorporate a computer into the process of making his poem. This brings us to an interesting point: one need not limit oneself to a simple black marker to make blackout poems. Any tool, be it a pencil or a laptop, is on the table.
“Enigma” by Erica Westcott
Erica is a histology technician from Virginia Beach, and after stumbling upon my blog, she thought she’d try her hand at a poem to pass the lunch hour at work. “It looked pretty easy,” she said. “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.” I love the restraint of Erica’s poem, and the top-heavy black space. As I’ve blacked out in one of my own poems, “What sounds simple never comes across as dense with effort, but try it and see!”
Afterword to the eBook Edition
It’s hard to believe that most of the poems in these pages were made in 2008. A lot can happen in half a decade…
In February 2010, a few months before Newspaper Blackout was published in paperback, I launched NewspaperBlackout.com, a Web site where visitors could learn the blackout method and share their own poems. Submissions poured in from people of all ages from countries all over the world. In 2012, the site was named “a must-see Tumblr blog” by Time magazine. As of today, the site has a daily readership of over 120,000, and the #blackoutpoetry tag on Tumblr.com is filled with examples of folks taking the form in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions.
“A writer,” George Saunders says, “understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him.” Blackout poetry definitely got away from me in the best possible way.
And it all started with this little book. While going back through my files, I’ve found a dozen or so unpublished pieces that got cut in the editing process. Since this is the electronic edition, and digital pages don’t add heft or cost, I thought I’d include them here.
Of course, I’m still making poems every day alongside my small army of coconspirators. Stop by NewspaperBlackout.com to read them and share your own.
Austin Kleon
2013
Previously Unpublished Poems
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About the Author
Photo courtesy of the author
Austin Kleon is a writer, cartoonist, and designer. His Newspaper Blackout Poems have been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, in Toronto’s National Post, and all over the Web. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Meghan. For more information on Austin Kleon and Newspaper Blackout Poems, please visit www.austinkleon.com.
Acknowledgments
Big thanks to:
All the amazing fans, readers, and bloggers who linked to my Web site and spread the poems around the Internet. Without your support, I would’ve stopped making these things a long time ago. This book would not exist without you.
My wife, Meghan, who was the first person to read the poems and encourage me to do more, and who somehow found a narrative hiding within the two hundred or so poems I originally made for this book.
My editor, Amy Bendell, who saw a good thing and scooped it up.
And to the other good people at HarperCollins who have helped make the book happen: Lisa Sharkey, Amy Baker, Joseph Papa, and Erica Barmash.
Tom and Amy Feran, for their support and free legal advice.
My parents, who made me.
My family and my friends, many of whom might find themselves in this book. To paraphrase R. Crumb, “It’s only marker on newsprint, folks!”
My teachers, past and present.
And finally, all the newspaper writers out there who ever struggled to meet a deadline and crank out copy day after day, who now find themselves in a dying industry. They are a national treasure. Go out and buy a newspaper to support them!
Copyright © 2010 by Austin Kleon.
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