I got this cool e-mail from Liza Cowan, a Vermont artist, director of the Pine Street Art Works gallery in Burlington, and regular blog reader:

I’ve been reading your blackout poems avidly, and trying and trying to find a postcard I made in 1981. It was kind of a blackout poem except that instead of showing all the black areas, i just took the words or word fragments and re-typed them, using a font as close to the original as I could find. Mind you, this was before personal computers. My rule was that the words or fragments had to be in the same order as the original. I probably have a copy of the original catalogue but I’m not sure where. I do remember that “She” came from “Sherwin Williams” I think it is the only word fragment.

I did the card as a part of Jerri Allen’s Apron Project. My text source was a Sherwin Williams Paint catalogue from 1939. That was also the image source. I processed the image with a Mita 900D copier, which I happened to own at the time, because I lived an hour’s drive from the nearest public copy machine (I kid you not!) Then I added a quote from Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. I published the card under my own imprint, White Mare, Inc.

It’s all on the back of the postcard.

Good Grief, I had to look everywhere to find this one scrap of paper. Thank goodness I found the one remaining copy!

I mentioned how impressed I was by Liza’s elaborate pre-Photoshop method, and she said, “Not only was it before photoshop, it was before any design program. I had the words typeset, and used letraset film for the background. And did cut and paste for the composition. It all seemed very modern then.”