Austin Kleon, “Hope,” 2017

Austin Kleon, “Refugee,” 2017

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

Some recent work. More on Instagram.

10/18/15

Last day to get a t-shirt! buy one here

How To Make A Newspaper Blackout Poem

Filed under: how-to

An oldie, for Ireland

Clear history #newspaperblackout #blackoutpoetry

Making blackout poems on Periscope

This is like a lot of my blackout poems, with one difference: it was made live, with the help of an audience using Twitter’s new livestreaming app, Periscope. (Here’s another one, and here’s something I wrote about how my friend Wendy is using the app.)   

My rig if anybody’s interested

First we selected a section from today’s paper: 

Then I selected an article and a window of text, and people messaged me snippets of text to circle: 

Then we found a little story that read “later, after successfully defending her robot”:

But then, because I’m sort of a control freak, I saw the text “what it’s like” and decided to connect it to the word robot, and came up with a new sequence: 

Until finally, it turned into this: 

It was pretty fun, but it took a whopping 28 minutes. (If you have the Periscope app, you can watch it all here for the next 23 hours or so.)

Or, I shortened it to a 15 second timelapse:

I’ll probably make another one tomorrow afternoon, so follow me on Twitter to get notified when it’s time to join in: @austinkleon  

And if you have any ideas of fun stuff to do on Periscope, let me know! Maybe we’ll do office hours on there?

Newspaper Blackout is 99 cents on Kindle right now!

My day just took a sharp turn toward brilliant.

Thank you austinkleon