What’s black and white and read all over?
The newspaper, of course. And that, as you probably know, is a joke that predates by decades all the non-paper ways “print news” is now delivered. But today we’re going old school by announcing an FYI contest that requires an actual newspaper — you know, ink on newsprint. Black and white and a few other colors. Our Star Blackout Poetry Contest is inspired by the recent book “Newspaper Blackout” by Austin Kleon of, appropriately, Austin, Texas. Kleon is a writer and artist who, among other pursuits, transforms print newspaper articles into poetry. We bet you can do the same. And if you need a little motivation, we’re awarding $25 gift cards to each of four grand-prize winners. Kleon (rhymes with neon) makes his magic by “redacting” words with a permanent marker. In other words, he blacks out all the words and lines of an article that he doesn’t need for his poem. (We usually hear “redacted” in the context of a government censor blacking out the juicy parts of a formerly top-secret document.) Kleon uses The New York Times for his blackout poems. For our contest, you can use any newspaper. Don’t be scared off by the thought of creating “poetry,” by the way. A poem, in this case, means a string of words that together make some kind of sense. Or make you chuckle. Kleon says you could call them aphorisms — terse statements of wisdom. They often sound like a sentence. They might seem haiku-ish. And no, a poem definitely does not have to rhyme.“People who have an affinity for words and language play tend to be the best at it,” Kleon, 28, told us recently from Austin.Left-brained people, those who tend to be logical and analytical, can “have a hard time letting go and snapping into it,” Kleon says. “It really takes a loosening up.”And “you have to make the newspaper kind of strange again.” When you’re in blackout poetry mode, don’t read the articles as you normally would. Look at the words as raw material. Toggle between part of one article and part of another, looking for words (and images they suggest) that you can turn into something completely different from the topics of the stories. You’re making fiction out of nonfiction. Three examples from Kleon’s book, minus the blacked-out parts and the correct spacing:• sing to me oh muse i have the time, and the spot• the mother can be as stubborn as a goat and so you hop a cab to be home-for-the-holidays ! What a mistake.• Children Use Their parents and 30 years in parents use their children As Kleon points out in his book, people have been messing around with the printed words of others pretty much since there’ve been printed words. Thomas Jefferson sliced up a King James Bible to create an account of Jesus’ life he liked better. More recently, writer William S. Burroughs used the cut-up technique in crafting some of his books. (Reading Burroughs is a trip, although we’re not sure what kind of trip.) And artist Tom Phillips had his way with an 1892 Victorian novel titled “A Human Document” — blacked out to become “A Humument.” There are other examples as well. (Google “altered books.”) Kleon had just graduated from Miami University in Ohio, trying to be a writer of short stories, when he caught the redacting bug. One day, fighting off writer’s block, he picked up a newspaper and a marker and started blacking out words. “I didn’t know what I was doing, or why,” he writes. “All I knew was that it was fun to watch those words disappear behind that fat black marker line.” What he’d end up with were “little finished objects,” pieces of art. He started putting them on his website, austinkleon.com, and next thing you know, he had a book. The ad-copywriter-by-day has a new book coming out in late February: “Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative” (Workman). Kleon says the Internet is his main medium — “Everything that’s come to me in my career has come to me through the Web” — but he’s also a fan of newspapers and the printed word. He grew up reading newspapers and magazines. His father-in-law writes for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and an uncle worked as a newspaper editor.“I don’t think there’s anyone who’s never clipped something out of a newspaper,” he says. “There’s always something in there you want to save.” Like a poem … but first you have to find it.Tips for creating a blackout poem I’ll be honest: “Composing” a newspaper blackout poem is harder than it looks — at least it was for me — and when I told Austin Kleon that, he laughed: “That’s what everyone says.”Kleon, author of “Newspaper Blackout” (published in 2010 by Harper Perennial, $12.99 paperback), has his own technique. But for novices, I’d suggest starting with one fairly short article or parts of two articles. Kleon will tell you to look for an “anchor,” a word or a couple of words that suggest an image. Concrete nouns and verbs are ideal. I just started circling words that appealed to me, then tried to see if there was a way to link them into quasi-sentences. Limit your poem to 15 words or fewer. Kleon is more about size than word count; he tries to keep them the size of a paperback book. Remember that the poem will be read from left to right and top to bottom. Once you’ve found the words you want, start blacking out all the words, lines and space you don’t want. A black marker works fine, but any color is OK as long as it covers up the unnecessary verbiage. Other suggestions from Kleon:• Set a time limit. He has done them on his bus ride to work or on lunch break.• Some articles won’t inspire you. Move on.• Don’t read the article first. “I like to think of blackout poems like those old ‘Word Find’ and ‘Word Search’ puzzles we used to do in elementary school — a field of letters with hidden messages to find,” Kleon writes.• After you’ve created a few blackout poems, use them as the basis for short stories, artwork or other creative endeavors. Share them.
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