Newspaper Blackout

I read this book based on the brilliant excerpts that kept getting posted around Tumblr.

Sadly, those were the highlights. There are some gems, to be sure, but for the most part it feels forced.

Quite a few of the poems have abandoned the top-down left-right style, and instead roam around the page like ants. These tend to be the best and also the most fun to read.

I'd recommend getting the book for the three or four five star pages, but know that there are quite a few 1 star ones balancing them out.

I already have a love of newspapers. Now Kleon has turned the printed page into poetic art. Love this idea. Try it yourself. I did. It was fun but not an easy task. He makes it look easy. And the results are magic.

Newspaper blackout is basically when a person takes a block of text (from a newspaper) and a black marker, and starts blacking out the words they don't need, only to end up with something completely different than what they started out with; instead of starting with a white blank page, you start with a page filled with words and you take your pick without having much flexibility… and ta-da! You have a poem.

I really like how the author went over the history of writing methods that are similar to his. Apparently, this has been around since the 1760s; however, he claims that he wasn't inspired by anyone and that he found out from others that it was used before, and extensively.

I personally didn't love some of the poems very much, the show more content was too random (and I honestly don't like that type of poems), maybe that's the point, but the rest of them was really amazing and vivid.

At the end of the book, the author shows you how to make your own newspaper blackout poems in detail.

Overall, it was a good, unique read. Recommended for fans of poetry and art. show less

The hardest part of writing poetry is finding the words. Austin Kleon’s found a secret: the words are already there. With a black Sharpie, Kleon finds the poetry hidden a pile of newspapers, just waiting for him to cross out the words he doesn’t need. Mixed into the daily journalism, "we are all schoolboys and schoolgirls staggering under the weight of dream-stomping adults."

On my list of high school booktalks for the fall, and a potential program idea for the spring.