This was a fun one. The top half is from an article about an opera singer. The bottom half is about the box office (”Transporter,” “Milk,” etc.).

Merry Christmas! Hope everybody gets what they want.

UPDATE: the poem as originally posted didn’t make any sense. I’ve updated it!

This was kind of a funky, abstract one that I just couldn’t figure out how to fit in the book.

I’m about to finish up the first draft of my manuscript and send it off to my editor.

Last night my wife and I were talking about the book, the book only she and I have read, and I asked her, “Is it something you’d want to read?”

A cliched piece of writing advice is to “write what you know,” but really, this is terrible advice. The late, great John Gardner tells us:

Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister. For some writers, the advice may work, but when it does, it usually works by a curious accident: The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of this kind–realistic fiction of the sort we associate with The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre. A better answer, though still not an ideal one, might have been “Write the kind of story you know and like best–a ghost story, a science-fiction piece, a realistic story about your childhood, or whatever.”

Though the fact is not always obvious at a glance when we look at works of art very close to us in time, the artist’s primary unit of thought–his primary conscious or unconscious basis for selecting and organizing the details of his work–is genre.”

Not write what you know. Write what you like.

Bradford Cox, lead singer of the band Deerhunter (a new favorite of mine — get their album Microcastle) recently commented on his blog about the leak of the new Animal Collective album:

Back in the 90’s when I was first starting to make 4-track tapes I had a game where I would make a fake version of an album I was anticipating. If Pavement’s Brighten the Corners were (sic) coming out soon, I had to wait till release day to hear it. I would record a set of songs that I would want the Pavement album to sound like. Some of those songs ended up becoming Atlas Sound and Deerhunter songs years later.

My advice to those who are so desperate for AC’s album to leak is to pick up instruments and make your own version of what you would want it to sound like. Respect the BANDS wishes and wait till release day. Then you can compare your new songs with theirs. Who knows. Maybe your album will be the one people are wanting to leak next year.

I’m reminded of the last Dirty Projectors album, where Dave Longstreth found an empty cassette case of Black Flag’s Damaged and recreated the album from memory.

The manifesto is this: draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.

3 or 4 months ago I did a batch of full-page “broadsheet” newspaper blackout poems — using the entire page of the newsprint. I soon realized they were a lot of work, and I probably couldn’t use them for the book anyways. So I dropped them. I did, however, take the time to scan a couple and found the scans recently on my hard drive. If you click the images below you can read them. I’ve also included a few “in progress” shots.

“On The Day”

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“A Hangover In The Mediterranean”

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“The Curator”

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“Olympic Games”

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It’s funny, looking at these again, I’m reminded of how important size and dimensions are to the success of the poems.

Normal-sized, they’re really easy to read (usually) on one monitor screen. I’ve always tried to make them the size of a paperback book. (Wishful thinking?)

Broadsheet-sized, they’re really hard to get a look at online–they take a long time to load, and you have to do a lot of scrolling.

My guess is that if I’d only worked on full-paged poems, they’d never become as popular as they have. I’m not even sure they’d work well as posters — it’d just be a sea of black hanging on a wall.

No matter!

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In other news, here’s some blackout fan mail that I received the other day from a girl who grew up near me (we’ve never met). It was one of the funniest e-mails I’ve ever received:

I took it as a compliment.

Did this one today at lunch. It’s going I think it’ll go in the book.

Are you or do you know of a teacher or student who has used Newspaper Blackout Poems in the classroom? Are you a writer using them in your writing group or creative writing workshop?

If so, please share your experience in the comments or e-mail me. I’m looking for lesson plans, results, testimonials, photos, videos, or even a few simple sentences about how you went about teaching them, what the response was, etc.

Thanks in advance!

In neat little rows in Adobe Bridge (which has been a total life-saver):

This is just the “yes” folder. It needs to be whittled down to 150 or less and sequenced.

52 in the “no/maybe/blog” folder.

224 total.

It’s still 26 shy of my goal of 250, but there’s only a month until the manuscript is due, so I might have to just end up short. So it goes.

Here’s what the Photoshop grunt-work looks like:

Wish me luck.

A lot of good entries this month, but the winner was Erica Westcott of Virginia Beach, VA, for her poem, “Enigma.”

I love the restraint Erica showed in this poem and the top-heavy black space. Here’s what she had to say about the making of it:

I am a mild mannered histology technician by day, and in my spare time I enjoy skydiving, knitting, and reading. After stumbling across your blog and admiring all the blackout poems, I thought I’d try my hand at one. They looked pretty easy, something to pass my lunch hour at work: 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. (Rarely is the structural appearance of what I write as important as the words themselves.) The subject matter of the original newspaper article was an amusing distraction, too. I never imagined the travails of a hostess — who knew! — mixed with a snippet of a second article could all be pared down and curiously transformed into poetry at the end.

Our runner-ups: Sarah Reyes from Newtown, PA, Brandon Weaver from La Mirada, CA, and Amy E. Hall from Franklin, TN.

Congratulations, Erica, Sarah, Brandon, and Amy! Y’all will get your free books next September.

And an honorable mention goes out to Nick Wiesneski, who just couldn’t get it together in time to make the deadline, but finished his poem anyways, and sent it in in-progress and completed:

You can see all the winners of the contest in the Newspaper Blackout Poems Flickr Pool, and add your own to the mix!

A big thank-you to everyone who entered the four contests. Y’all were great.

Posting around here for the next month or so might be pretty slow, as I’m in the home stretch of finishing up the book manuscript. If you’re dying for more blackout action, check out this interview I did via e-mail with Mitch Knox, a journalism student from Australia, where we discuss the contest, the book, and Garfield Minus Garfield, amongst other things.

And stay tuned for fun stuff planned for January! I’m thinking about having an international contest, where y’all can send me whatever you want (as long as it’s in English and I can read it). I’ll pick a winner, or winners, and send them a signed copy out of my own personal stash. So keep practicing!

When making a blackout poem, sometimes you can get around the Western left-to-right, up-to-down reading problem by using little connecting lines between words. These are a couple recent examples from poems I’m working on for the book.

I didn’t know this until a couple of days ago, but in comics, Scott McCloud calls them “trails.”

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In other news, there’s now a Newspaper Blackout Poems Flickr pool — join the group and share your own!