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

I was pretty thrilled when The Austin Museum of Art asked me if I wanted to do a Newspaper Blackout event. We got to display a mini-exhibit of originals and prints, and I led a 90 minute blackout poetry workshop. It was a great time, and we had a terrific turnout.

see it bigger

More photos on my Flickr and AMOA’s Facebook page.

Here’s some video Anne Heller (@annevid) shot of the talk:

Big thanks to AMOA and everyone who showed!

The great folks who organized TEDxPennQuarter out at The Newseum in Washington, D.C. not only had me out to give a talk of my own (which I’ll post soon), they asked if I’d take some visual notes for them as well. So I did my best — I missed a few speakers, since I had to get into makeup and prepare for my own talk.

I decided to revisit the sticky notes, like I did for TEDxAustin. Here I am showing them off onstage:

photo by Flickr user Sexy Fitsum

D.C., by the way, was a total blast. Thanks to my friends for showing me around their awesome town.

A few more notes below–you can see the whole set on Flickr.

You can see the rest in the full set on Flickr.

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I can’t think of a nicer way to cap a release day than with a successful release party in your home town bookstore, so thanks a million to BookPeople, to my wife Meg for baking her delicious chocolate chip cookies,  and to the 50+ folks who came out on Tuesday night! Y’all are the best.

See a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.

I started things off with a short slideshow about how I started making the poems:

And then I went into a little demonstration of how they’re done. Here I am quoting Allen Ginsberg in “A Supermarket In California“:

And here I am explaining how I think of the poems as “Word Find” puzzles we used to do as kids in elementary school:

After that, Bookpeople hooked everybody up with a marker and a newspaper, and we all set about playing:

I was really stunned by how focused everybody was, and by how many people offered to stand up and read their blackout poems for the group. It was truly awesome.  You can read some of the poems over on the Newspaper Blackout Tumblr.

After that, it was time to sign some books:

Again: thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came out! It was such a gas to see y’all with markers and newspapers in hand.

For those of you outside of Austin, we don’t have many national dates planned yet, but I’m hoping that will change, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Thanks to Eric Gomez for this really nice writeup of the event:

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.

On Monday, I did my first-ever booksigning at the SXSW bookstore. My awesome publisher had copies shipped hot off the press to SXSW, for sale a whole month before the release date. People who picked it up at the conference officially owned it before anyone else…including me!

I’d never actually seen the final book before –I haven’t received my author copies yet, so I didn’t get to do the whole un-boxing-your-author-copies-at-home thing — the first time I saw the book, Adam Norwood tweeted that he’d seen it, so after a panel I rushed over to the bookstore to see it stacked next to Laura Dern (not a bad first impression):

I must say, I was not 100% about the book cover until I saw it in person. It looks really great, it has a matte finish, and feels real nice in your hands.

Here I am gesticulating to somebody. Loved getting to chat with all the folks that came up to by a copy. The added bonus was that everybody had their SXSW badge on, so spelling names was no problem…

After things wound down, I signed the rest of the copies:

Last I checked, there were only about ten or so left, so I’m hoping we sell out over the rest of the week.

Hope to have more pics up of the book soon. Thanks to my shutterbug wife, Meg, for all the awesome pictures. You can see a few more on Flickr.

In the meantime, be sure to get your pre-order in!

Austin Kleon at PechaKucha Night Austin 07 from PechaKucha Night Austin on Vimeo.

Above is the video for my Newspaper Blackout Pecha Kucha presentation last month in Austin.

What is Pecha Kucha?

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

It was incredibly difficult to time and plan out, and it’s probably the best presentation of my work that I’ve come up with. The audience was really amazing. Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks to Carla and Herman for inviting me.

Here are all my slides in one deck.

And here’s the 20-second time-lapse video that’s in the presentation:

[ Watch a high-quality HD version on Vimeo ]

I was invited to draw TEDxAustin this weekend. I was skeptical about an event that was so secretive about its contents beforehand, but it far exceeded my expectations. It was well-planned, well-executed, and had a stellar lineup of speakers. I bumped into lots of great people and had some good conversations. Kudos to the team, and thanks to my buddy Sunni Brown for the invite!

The theme of the day was “Play Big,” so I decided to do something special: I drew the background stage and the studio in my sketchbook, then drew the speakers on sticky notes. I wasn’t sure what I was going to with all the drawings, and then the idea of making a video popped into my head. The video was shot with my Aiptek HD camcorder and cobbled together in QuickTime Pro on my slow-as-molasses Mac Mini. Watch the results. (Be sure to click HD!)

Favorites? As someone who hates answering the question, “What do you do?,” Steven Tomlinson’s talk about keeping all your interests in play really hit home. I also loved Carrie Contey’s talk on the power of the pause. John Philip Santos had some terrific images in his talk on genealogical genetics. Both the musical acts, Ruby Jane and John Pointer, were really impressive.

If written notes are your thing, John Lebkowsky has some great ones.

Here’s a photo that Shane Guiter took of me during a break (annotations mine):

See scans of all the sticky note drawings after the jump or on Flickr.

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Tonight I’ll be giving a slideshow about Newspaper Blackout as part of Austin Pecha Kucha night #7. Sneak preview of my slides, above.

What is Pecha Kucha?

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

At the last Austin event, they had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I heard they even had to turn some folks away, but tonight It’s gonna be in a big empty retail space at 416 W. Cesar Chavez, so everyone should be able to get in. The doors open at 7:30pm, presentations start at 8:20 pm. There’s beer. No cover, only donations.

Come by, listen to some cool folks talk about their work, and pick up a postcard!

More info here.

Brea McAnally was kind enough to send me some pictures of my work in the “Old Media/Old News” exhibit at The Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis.

The show has been getting some really good reviews, which makes me even sadder that I won’t be able to see it in person. Here’s the Riverfront Times:

Yesterday’s headlines are re-presented in traditional (old) media by a group of local and international artists in this inventive elegy to the death of print journalism. Idiosyncratic, methodical processes seek to replace or reclaim the generative grind of tangible print….Writer Austin Kleon uses a Sharpie to black out the majority of text on a page, suggesting that what’s left reveals poetic insight into otherwise prosaic reportage….Fact, here, becomes marginalia, while emotional and personal experiences surface as all that’s most articulate, memorable or worth remembering.

More pictures, some lifted from The Luminary’s Facebook page:

If any of you St. Louis folks still haven’t seen it, it’s open until March!