I recommend dual sinks.

See also: “What Happens to The Married” & “Home Depot“

Meg and I took a 6-hour roadtrip down to South Padre Island last weekend. It’s amazing to me that taking a car trip can still be so romantic. The car as an intimate space. You’re not distracted by your normal routine–there’s nothing to do but talk to each other, listen to music, or look out the window. We stayed off of the big interstates for most of the trip, took 183 down to Corpus Christi through small Texas towns. I saw a huge row of wind turbines spinning on the horizon. Tractors running in the fields. Cones from Dairy Queen. Little traffic. No stress.

Yes, it felt like a victory of sorts.

Check out this white-out interview with Ed Champion.

True story.

Thanks to everybody who has bought a copy of Newspaper Blackout and kept it on the Poetry Foundation’s Best Seller list for 16 weeks straight.

I had a professor in college who told me, “the only reward you get from being an artist is that you get to make art.”

No matter what, it always comes back to the work.

In progress:

Check out my tweaks to the Newspaper Blackout book page.

TEDxPennQuarter – Austin Kleon – Reinventing Poetry

Photo by Flickr user sexyfitsum

The TEDxPennQuarter folks asked me to give a 10-minute talk around the theme of “reinventing,” with the (not-at-all-lofty!) title, “Reinventing Poetry.”

It started out like almost everything I do: with doodling.

Here are doodles from my phone call with Kes Sampanthar, the organizer of the event:

Kes encouraged me to really think about my personal story and focus on the question, “What does it mean to be an artist today?” (No pressure!)

So I scrapped a lot of the ideas I had, and started thinking about story and process. The meat of the talk really started with my notes on this “Publishing 3.0″ talk given by Richard Nash:

I used the flowchart above as a starting point for all of my slides. (See them on Flickr):

This wasn’t the best presentation I’ve ever given, but the process of sorting through all these ideas turned out to be way more valuable to me than a perfect performance. And as they say, why do anything if you can’t learn something from it?

Thanks to Kes and the TEDxPennQuarter folks, and thanks to my friends for showing me a good time in DC!

See also: my visual notes from the rest of the TEDxPennQuarter talks