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.