30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs | NewsFeed | TIME.com

His redacted masterpieces have won him both a book deal and a line of art prints sold through online gallery 20×200. The focus of his Tumblr, however, is his fans. Anyone with a marker, a newspaper and a little creativity can submit to the site. The result is a kind of free-form word search, with people providing one-liners that range from funny to enigmatic to genuinely thought-provoking. Whether or not you consider it actual poetry, it’s definitely not a bad way to recycle your morning paper.

Thanks very much to TIME readers who recommended the site and to all who’ve submitted poems in the last couple of years. Strangely enough, the site is almost exactly 2 years old! I knew there should be a site where people could submit their own poems, but I was waiting around for the right platform to come along. Luckily, a few months before the book came out, Tumblr started allowing users to submit posts. And that was that. Today the site has over 25,000 readers.

I’m still accepting poems, so feel free to send me yours: NewspaperBlackout.com→

Thanks to Nicole Frehsee for writing such a nice little piece on Newspaper Blackout in the February 2012 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine!

Read the article online→

Texas Poet Twists Newsprint Into Prose | PBS NewsHour | Sept. 14, 2010 | PBS

The folks from PBS Newshour came out in July and filmed a segment for their Poetry Series, and it finally ran tonight!

Thanks very much to producer Mike Melia and videographer Dave Frederick for their awesome work. Here’s a shot of them eating BBQ after our 5-hour shoot.

That’s right: 5 hours! Mike told me you get about a minute of footage for every hour you shoot. Mike’s very good at pitching questions in the interview so that the subject ends up narrating the piece:

Here’s a bonus shot of Milo (who has a cameo in the piece) sniffing the camera equipment:

Watch the segment →

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

UPDATE 9/09/2010: (Archiving the interview here:)

Why did you create a web site of regular entries?
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!

What web-based solution did you select and why?
I use WordPress for my blog because it’s free and endlessly hackable. I use Tumblr for an online scrapbook because it’s effortless to use, and hackable enough that you can make it look like the rest of your site.

What is your definition of a good blog and what are three good blogs that you frequently visit?
David Foster Wallace said that his non-fiction pieces were “occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright, but also reasonably average, pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lifes.”

The same could be said for good blogging: someone reasonably bright, spending a lot of time thinking and posting a lot about their obsessions.

I had a teacher once who passed out our mid-term papers to the class, walked up to the blackboard, and wrote in big chalk letters on the board, SO WHAT?

Then she said, “Ask yourself that next time you write something.” Good blogging passes the So What? test!

Three amazing bloggers:

1. Roger Ebert—The man writes as though he doesn’t have a lot of time left, which means he writes about the important stuff that he can’t cover in a movie column. His post on Death (who else blogs about death?) was one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen, period.
2. Steve Brodner—A cartoonist of the highest caliber: you can see his thought process alive in his drawing.
3. Hugh Macleod—A no-B.S. cartoonist. His blog is a perfect mix of words and images. He has helped me figure out how to go about life as an artist more than any other blogger (Hint: keep your day job).

How do you create content for your blog?
Almost all the content on my blog comes from a non-digital source:

• I’ll make one of my newspaper blackout poems and scan it into the computer
• I’ll draw in a sketchbook or on an index card and scan it into the computer
• I’ll be reading a book or a magazine and I’ll illustrate it with a mind map, or it will spark an idea about something I want to write about

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).

How do you stay organized and motivated to contribute
to your blog?
I recently hacked my WordPress template to show a Visual Archive of my posts throughout the year. After a number of posts, your output can get kind of abstract, so I like being able to look at my output visually as a little kick-in-the-pants to make something new.

For those aspiring to make a web site composed of regular thoughts and/or images, what is your advice?
I drew a cartoon once called How To Blog:

• Step one: wonder at something
• Step two: invite others to wonder with you

You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about. If everybody’s blogging about apples, go blog about oranges.

Aspire to be the blogger who is linked-to, rather than the linker.

And for crying out loud, don’t do it just to make a buck. Do it because you love something and you want to share it with the world.

What is your quest in blogging?
To win friends and influence people. ;-)

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!