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b1gfan — - or so it seemed
Published: 2011-01-07 06:44:57 +0000 UTC; Views: 653; Favourites: 33; Downloads: 13
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Description
Blackout poetry - this is page 48 of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time.I cobbled this piece together using a screen capture and a little basic editing. Why didn't I use an original page of text you ask (do you? do you ask?). Because I would have had to destroy a school textbook to do it and, as you may have heard, school budgets are a little tight for me to run around ruining their resources chasing my own hubris and caprice.
You can read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time using Google Reader if you're interested. It's a powerful read, believe me you. Remember - page 48.
If you have a moment, and you haven't done it on your own already, jump on over and check out Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout Horoscopes . They're a fun little bowl of Cap'n Crunch
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Comments: 29
Very well done. Have you ever gone to [link] ?
They have kits of words that you can stick to your file cabinets at work or whatever and make poetry. I've had mine for years.
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I've been there before yes 
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I had their calendar a couple of years ago - you were given a challenge every month. Of course, finding the right words was sometimes difficult. It's easier to use your own.
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Thats such a cool way to create poetry...i think it turned out lovely!
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Glad to see more from you. I love this. I've never tried blackout poetry. Perhaps I'll give it a go after reading this.
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I think that would be an excellent idea Elizabeth.
Many thanks for taking the time to read the poem so supportively
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Enigmatic and beautifully crafted. Love the puzzling aspect to this poem, and I like how you've made it and the subsequent typography. It's fantastic - we did a similar thing at school where we collapsed a poem into the words alphabetically, chose a few words and had to write poetry from that.
Not half as good as this, though
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Thank you very much Amz 
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No problems, I really enjoyed reading it
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Thoroughly sensical, love the soapbox nonsense speech complacency. There's a sense of arcane, dark wisdom to the whole thing, with the crowds out doing nothing human, and finding your hands through what they held (perhaps an interesting metaphor fo the whole blackout poetry concept as a whole, in the vein of projective tests like Rorschach inkblots?)
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Oh, I'm projecting my friend
On a more serious note, I am deliberating over the "with clubs" portion of the text. Cut it. Retain it. Cut it. Thoughts?
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Actually, it reminds me of downtown Birmingham, lunchtime, in the rain. Which is a oddly specific evocation I suppose! But the context and the theme (as I perceive it) seems to fit my experiences there nicely.
I see why you'd want potentially to cut it, as it seems a little more abstruse than the rest (I guess in part due to the polysemy of 'clubs'). I don't think it detracts however... I wonder, are there any words in proximity that might construct a clearer meaning?
Otherwise I'd say, your call. As I said, it certainly doesn't distract or detract in any way, as one reads it.
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Alas thee are no other words nearby to select as alternates...You make good points in favor of keeping the word. Maybe I should just let well enough alone
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I guess such is the nature of making poems from these texts.
Yes. Well enough more often than not ought to be let alone, I feel.
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I'd never seen this before- until I read your author's note, I thought it was a kind of modern poetry... because it somehow made sense. I mean, I could imagine things going on as I read. How interesting!
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You should give it a try
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perhaps I will.
It is captivating! Most of the time it is difficult for me to be captivated by poetry (I have no idea why, because I love it so much) but your word choice was excellent, the way you strung them together and the spacing and what have you. It was all disconnected from itself but at the same time it flowed brilliantly. The last section was also very powerful to me--one of those times that the words kind of hung inside my head for awhile. That doesn't really happen to me often, and at the moment I'm wondering why I didn't favorite it. I will fix that.
Thanks for the llama. xD Oh, my...I'm sorry for the novel.
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I haven't seen this done before, so thank you for introducing it. I like the effect, the large gaps between most of the words. Well, it's far better than writing a poem with too many short lines (which ends up as just heavily fragmented prose from the ones I've read posted by others here). A nice idea, taking prose and making poetry.
Especially after seeing those horoscopes, this is something I'm going to have to try.
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I look forward to the results! It's a frustrating process in ways, more like stone cutting than anything, looking for the shape inside the block, but it's exciting too.
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This is one of the better blackout/found poetry pieces that I've read.
Well done.
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Why thank you Stephanie
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