The folks from PBS Newshour were down last week to film me for their Poetry Series. It should air very soon — follow me on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll post there when I get the word that it’s about to run.

Mike Melia blogged this poem from Newspaper Blackout yesterday on the Newshour Art Beat blog.

Here’s what I said to Drew Dernavich about the poem:

It’s funny you mention “Foreclosure,” because that’s my least favorite poem in the whole damned book. My wife liked that one and made me keep it in!

Moral: listen to your wife.

I forgot to blog this: back in June, The Austin American-Statesman quoted me in an article on mind-mapping and ran one of my maps.

Read the article: “Mind-mapping gets the ideas flowing“

So here’s a funny story about how weird life is right now:

I get back from a long night out with pals at SXSW, and Meg is on the couch reading Texas Monthly. (We’re subscribers.)

I’m in the can, and all the sudden I hear this little squeal come from the living room.

“Your book’s in Texas Monthly!!”

And just like that, our first review. The magazine had been sitting on our coffee table for at least 3 days.

Thanks Mike Shea!

UPDATE: What’s even cooler about this is that Marc Burckhardt (fellow Austinite and very nice guy) did the awesome Selena cover.

“Blackout Poet” on Youtube

The awesome guys at Texas Country Reporter uploaded our show from last year to YouTube — it’s a really nice piece. Those guys are a class act. Thanks Dan, Mike, Ryan, and Bob!

Here’s a photo of Ryan and I working on the “blackout” shots:

See more photos from the shoot.

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!

The content of this interview I did with Nate Burgos over at Design Feaster might be familiar to anyone who’s read my posts about blogging before, but you might want to take a look anyways.

On why I started a blog:

When you’re a writer in college, you have the ultimate luxury: a captive audience. Your teachers get paid to read your writing and your classmates pay to read your writing. And then, suddenly, you get out of college, and nobody gives a crap anymore. So you start a blog!

On my hatred of computers:

This might be blasphemous for a blogger to say, but I don’t like spending more time in front of a computer screen than I have to. The good stuff comes from your hands and your head. (The cartoonist Lynda Barry says, “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” A blog is just a delivery system—a way to get eyeballs looking at your stuff (and minds thinking about it).

Read more here.

Take a few minutes to watch this really fantastic video of the winners of the Oklahoman’s newspaper blackout poetry contest that I judged. They’re all fantastic, but when the winner, Rose Gorr, an 80-year-old grandmother of 33 (!) reads her poem it gives me chills! A round of applause to everybody: the poets, The Oklahoman, Tanner Herriott who shot the video, and especially Yvette Walker who co-ordinated the whole thing!

Walter Isaacson has written a front-page article for Time Magazine entitled “How To Save Your Newspaper.” The Oklahoman is taking their own approach to getting you to buy that Sunday paper:

Think a newspaper is good only for reading, recycling or wrapping dead fish?

Think again. Think … poetry.

Newspaper Blackout Poetry is the creation of poet Austin Kleon and only requires three things: a newspaper, a black marker and your creativity. We know you’ve got it, Oklahoma, and we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is.

Grab a copy of this Sunday’s The Oklahoman at CVS and other locations and pick any story from that paper. Take a marker and black out lines from the story, leaving only the words you want to remain visible. Those words become your poetry.

Your poem can rhyme, or not. It can be a haiku. It could be a limerick (keep it clean), it could be free-form. Kleon will help us pick the winner.

Problem solved!

Bob Phillips and his great crew of Ryan Britt and Dan Stricklin came out to the house last night to interview me about the blackout poems for Texas Country Reporter. If you’re not familiar with the show, here’s a bit of background from the NYTimes article, “If It’s in Texas, the Texas Country Reporter Has Seen It“:

Bob Phillips, the Texas Country Reporter…barreling…with his television crew in his Ford Explorer daubed in the billowing red, white and blue of the Texas flag….Not much escapes Mr. Phillips, 56, a Lone Star Charles Kuralt, who has logged more than 35 years on the state’s back roads and may be the most-traveled man in Texas….Mr. Phillips’s half-hour programs already total more than 2,000 — about four times as many as his idol, Mr. Kuralt, produced for his CBS News segment “On the Road” from 1967 to 1980. They are broadcast weekly on 25 stations in Texas and afterward are beamed eight times a week on the rural satellite and cable network RFD-TV. The network…reaches some 30 million households nationally….

He has long been an institution in Texas, where he spent a dozen years as the spokesman for Dairy Queen and now shuttles between his television studio in Dallas and Beaumont, where he lives with his second wife, a television anchor.

Meanwhile, Texas Country Reporter has become a popular brand, with guidebooks, cookbooks, T-shirts and an annual October festival in Waxahachie, near Dallas, where more than 50,000 fans come to meet subjects from the shows…

Check out their Youtube channel to see some of the shows.

Here’s Dan, Bob, and me making a horrible face as I BS about something.

Here’s Ryan shooting a trick shot of the marker bleeding through the paper.

Here’s Ryan and Dan shooting some stills for the feature.

They were real nice guys, and even though the shoot was a little grueling (5 1/2 hours!) it was a good time. Bob asked terrific questions, and we had a good interview.

The segment won’t air in Texas for a couple months (nationwide will be even longer), but I’ll let y’all know when it does.

(Thanks to my wife Meg for taking the great photos!)

Today the poems were featured on NPR’s Morning Edition:

Read Between the Lines to Find Texas Poet’s Verse
Morning Edition, May 9, 2008

A poet in Texas is blacking out words in order to write. Instead of starting with a blank page, Austin Kleon grabs the New York Times and a permanent marker — and eliminates the words he doesn’t need. He recently transformed an article about a piano concert into a poem that begins: “Forget about trying to speak … the image is the travelogue.” The newspaper ends up more black than white, and shows another way to read between the lines.

My wife and I are huge NPR junkies, so this was quite a Friday treat. Welcome to new visitors, and thanks again to everyone who’s spread the word about them! You guys are awesome.

PS. Did this one on the bus this morning.