Christopher Hitchens said that “the great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They give you things to read that you should have read already. [Putting out a book is] a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

Last month I got an email from Mike at The Encyclopedia Show Austin, telling me about Censored Mother Goose Rhymes—a charming little book featured in the Ransom Center’s excellent “Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored” exhibit.

Published in 1929 by a writer and editor named Kenneth Banning, it was dedicated to “THE CENSORS who have taught us how to read naughty meanings into harmless words” and was supposed to be a demonstration “of the effect of censorship upon anything it touches.” If I’m not mistaken, it was even passed out to congressmen in the middle of the censorship debates.

It’s a very very funny book.

Anyways, Mike asked me if I’d do something with the book, and while I almost never read my poems publicly, I think this book is even better read aloud, so, with the help of my iPhone, I read a few at the show.

Watch the video →

See the slides →

The folks at AIGA San Diego (I’ll be speaking at their Y17 conference next March) asked me for a 15-second video of me answering the question, “What drives you?” I will do anything to avoid talking to a camera, so I drew them this:

Details

- Signed and numbered edition of 50
- 26″ x 40″ on 100 pound paper

Backstory

The minute I saw the GBV posters that my friends Satch Grimley and Jaime Cervantes screenprinted, I knew I wanted to collaborate with them on a big Newspaper Blackout print. We batted around a few ideas, came up with a design we liked, and I brought my camera down to Red Bluff Studio on Saturday and filmed them working their magic.

Watch the video of them printing:

The fellas will be printing at the Art Authority during SXSW, so if you’re in town next month for the festival, be sure to check them out!

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 →

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