Austin Kleon, a writer who draws, gave a demonstration of his Newspaper Blackout poetry technique at BookPeople Tuesday evening, April 13.
Kleon grew up in a home that read newspapers. A lot. That love of newsprint stayed with him. After he graduated from college, he found himself struggling with writer’s block. He missed the structure writing courses had given him and began experimenting with the photos he found in newspapers, adding captions, objects, or characters. Later he started to pay more attention to the text.
Initially, he felt that he was “ripping off the government” by which he means the heavily redacted documents that the military, CIA, or FBI release to the public. But the compressed language in text messages, blogs, and other electronic media morphed into something different under his permanent marker.
His work got noticed. Then it got noticed some more. Soon, he realized he had something. Flashforward to 2008: Harper Perennial called him and asked if he ever thought about a book. “Heck yes!” was his honest answer. While shuttling to and from his day job on the public bus, he was able to finish the book of poems collected in Newspaper Blackout.
Kleon is refreshingly humble about this approach. His friends and fellow bloggers dialed him in about similar work, and he diligently researched other artists/writers who experimented in similar fashion. In his book, he provides a concise history of found poetry or altered works. His work has sound aesthetic underpinnings: creativity is subtraction. Imagine a sculptor carving a block of granite, lopping away the dross and leaving behind the essential. And it’s meant to be shared. He doesn’t stake a claim. On the contrary, he has set up a website where other people can share their experiments with newspaper blackout at newspaperblackout.tumblr.com.
The Process: Kleon described the initial step with Allen Ginsberg’s phrase “shopping for images.” It’s important to seek out nouns and verbs. After finding the “anchor word/phrase”—or after it has found you—Kleon advises working on the ending. He added that many people who have tried newspaper blackout found the process not as simple as it seems. And he was right. Several participants did come up with decent poems in 15 or 20 minutes.
What stayed with me most was the fun I had. He was right: it was less like work and more like play, a kind of word search for buried humor, hidden wisdom, or laconic lament. Finding that right note of self expression might take more than a little practice however. Kleon has blacked out hundreds and hundreds of these poems. His experience is telling. I struggled with my article and then he mentioned with the timeliness of an oracle that it’s tough to write one from a political column. He finds that the articles from the “Arts or Sports sections are best.”
Austin Kleon has gained a fan not merely because of his down-to-earth and quietly erudite personality, but because the poems he has “found” buried within newsprint are poetical gems in their own right.
Read more about Austin Kleon.
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