Sharpie Poet talks Newspaper Blackout

Austin Kleon, whose book Newspaper Blackout is at number 16 on the bestseller list this week, talks about his materials and methods on Words Pictures Humor :

Well, after doing a bit of research, I found out people have been finding poetry in the newspaper for over 250 years. The farthest back I can trace it is to a guy named Caleb Whitefoord, a wine merchant, writer, diplomat, and former next-door neighbor to Benjamin Franklin. In the 1760s, he’d read the newspaper across the columns, to come up with all kinds of funny juxtapositions, like, “On Tuesday both Houses of Convocation met : / Books shut, nothing done.” He’d read them aloud in the pub, and on occasion have them printed up as broadsheets. In the 1920s, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara cut up a newspaper, tossed it in a hat, and read the words he pulled out to make a poem. Then, in the early 1960s, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs take up the cut-up technique, and it just goes on and on from there…

I guess such long history shouldn’t be any big surprise: as Walt Whitman said, “The true poem is the daily paper.”