Note: this post has been updated since 2010.

People always ask me when I’m going to develop an iPad app for Newspaper Blackout. I’ve always told them that I don’t want to because I think there’s something magic about feeling the newsprint in your hands, smelling the marker fumes as you make your poem.

Even though I still prefer the old analog way, there are times (mostly on the bus or out on the porch or lying in bed) when I don’t have a newspaper and a marker in front of me, so I’ve been experimenting with making them on my iPad.

Here’s how I do it, if you want to play along…

(more…)

See also: “I Am So Over The Rainbow“

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I broke down and bought an Iphone yesterday.

Like any tool, first you get it, then you figure out what to do with it.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw the following 3 images today, all taken real-time with the Iphone camera and posted online with Twitpic (#1, #2, #3) while I was making the poem.

When does the poem become the poem? When you make that first connection? (Here, it was linking “dead. Now what?” and “Wichita” and then finding “ding” in “including”.) When it’s completely blacked out, “set in stone”? What about leaving behind evidence that could point to other, better poems? Does seeing the process kill the magic?

All questions that popped in my head. Also: what else could we do with this?

What about crowd-sourcing? What if I got stuck on a poem, took a picture of the article, and asked Twitter what my next step should be? Who would the poem belong to?

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Pre-order the book

In neat little rows in Adobe Bridge (which has been a total life-saver):

This is just the “yes” folder. It needs to be whittled down to 150 or less and sequenced.

52 in the “no/maybe/blog” folder.

224 total.

It’s still 26 shy of my goal of 250, but there’s only a month until the manuscript is due, so I might have to just end up short. So it goes.

Here’s what the Photoshop grunt-work looks like:

Wish me luck.

Just a little experiment. Nothing to be taken seriously.

Test Reel #2

Here’s a little Friday treat: me messing around with video capture and Flickr’s new video features to show what goes into carving a throwaway panel…