Newspaper + Marker = Poetry.
There’s a certain type of person these days who exists to be a victim.
They see oppression in everything and everyone. They’re masters at innuendo and they know the justice system of public opinion deems you guilty unless proven innocent. They profit through ostentatious “grieving” and character assassination.
Avoid them.
I challenged myself this past month to create a month’s worth of newspaper blackout poems, which are poems made by redacting newspapers with a permanent marker.
I’d never done a blackout poem before and as I noted in the first post, my creative muscles had atrophied a good deal over the past few years. It was hard.
One interesting thing I found was that Arts, Profiles and Obituaries are the best sections in the newspaper for blackout poetry. Politics is near impossible because of all the boring writing and big names.
It’s also very difficult not to bias the theme of the poems coming into the activity. I often found myself wanting to create a poem around a particular topic and then struggling to find a newspaper that would work for that topic, which is really not how blackout poetry is supposed to work.
My favorites of the month are To create first collect, Dominique, Art will shape you, Just exciting enough, and Intro to a graduation speech. To be sure, none of these are poetic masterpieces and I’m not even sure the last one qualifies as poetry at all, but I’m glad I did them. I have enough here for maybe 1/4 of a book of blackout poems! I even had a couple people ask for prints.
Here’s the complete list of poems:
I don’t want to put anything concrete in writing about my plans moving forward. I may or may not continue doing these, and at what frequency, I have no idea. It was a valuable, fun activity and it was a nice changeup to the kinds of things I’ve grown accustomed to writing and thinking about over the past few years.
Here’s a video covering how to do your own.
It’s a new month tomorrow. That means you’ve got roughly 30 new days ahead of you, the perfect time in which complete a 30-day challenge for something meaningful that you’ve been putting off. In other words, a time to answer this question for yourself: do I want to “be” or do I want to “do?”
This past month I challenged myself to blog publicly and make a new newspaper blackout poem every day. Funny enough, those daily activities laid the foundation for a mostly happy and productive January. I’m thinking more clearly and originally, communicating more effectively, and feeling far more focused than before.
The traffic on this blog has also grown tremendously, I’ve got a ton of new content ideas, and if I never blog again, I’ll always have at least 30 posts to point to, which is more than most people can say.
Of course, I do plan to blog again, and in addition to daily blogging, I’m going to issue myself another daily challenge this coming month. Since I’m not settled yet on what to do, I’m going to use this post to think publicly and hopefully help you find a challenge for yourself.
I tend to prefer challenges that end with something that requires a bit of public creative output. For any of these, consider that you should do a blog writeup every day tracking your progress. I also don’t recommend trying to stack too many of these but if you can, go for it.
If you’re new to this, it almost doesn’t matter what you choose. The act of doing something creative and valuable every day is enough to start seeing a return. As I wrote this month,
…small acts of deliberate creative work yield far better results than waiting for big wins.
Think of yourself like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Living the same day over and over is tragically underrated.
And so it is.
Like newspaper blackout poetry, life too is often more about what you take away than what you add.
In dieting, for example, it’s better to remove sugar, vegetable oil, and grains before you focus on introducing other foods. Similarly, Tim Ferriss recommends negative visualization as a tool as valuable or more valuable than positive visualization.
In my own life, exiting situations — redacting things — from my life, has made some of the biggest differences. High school football, bad relationships, college, all redacted.
So, redact. Then redact some more.
My work with Praxis puts me in touch daily with young people at the beginnings of their careers.
The hardest lesson they have to learn? Nobody cares about your wants. Your friends don’t. Your colleagues don’t. Nothing you think or say can help you cheat reality.
You’ll just have to work.