A Good Kind of Blackout - An Interview with Austin Kleon
Though he shares his name with that of our fair city, writer and illustrator Austin Kleon was initially born “in the middle of a cornfield” in Ohio, studied art and creative writing at Miami University (also, strangely, in Ohio), and now resides here. During a frustrating bout of writer’s block while trying his hand at short fiction, Kleon took to the newspaper and his sharpies and combined his duel pursuits into intriguing visual poetry, recently compiled and put out by Harper as Newspaper Blackout. Kleon spoke with us (and, inadvertently, with someone adjacent to our table) at Spiderhouse about his past, print media, and ‘90s pop punk.
Of all the dying mediums to use in your art, newspapers make an interesting choice. And they seem to have been appreciative of the attention you’ve given them.
Well, the smart ones have been. I’ve had a couple of newspapers that have seen the book and have used that to run a contest - the Oklahoman was the first one to do it, and they had like 400 people enter. They had prizes, like win a free iPod or a hundred bucks or something. You had to buy Sunday’s paper, make something out of it, and send it in. It’s a funny thing. On the one hand I’m defacing their product, and on the other hand I’m giving it a different kind of value.
I think it was a newspaper in New York that said about your book: “It’s better than it sounds.”
Yeah, that was New York Magazine. It was great press. I think the sentence “It’s better than it sounds,” is important because if you just explain the concept to someone, it just sounds like, “Okay…”. You really have to see them; they’re visual pieces. When I do radio interviews it’s kind of funny because they ask me to read one, and it’s fine…but they’re so short, that you get that pause afterward like, “Is he done? Oh, okay.”
Radio’s another funny medium. Maybe you can work on that next when you’re done with newspapers.
There was actually a game show in the eighties called "Blackout." I’m going to mess this up, but…they’d play a snippet of a conversation but mute part of it, and the contestant had to recreate what was missing. I had never heard of it, and then one of my friends showed it to me and I was like, “This is weird.”
Did it make for an engaging game show?
I don’t know. I watched like a clip, and there’s a reason it’s kind of obscure.
How long does a blackout piece take for you to do?
I’d say on average about thirty minutes. Depending on what you’re expecting, that might sound like a long time. I imagine most people think it happens pretty fast, and it doesn’t. Sometimes I’ll start one and I’ll leave it for a couple days and come back to it, just like you would a normal poem. Sometimes, if I get really into it, it’ll take like an hour, because I’ll be in front of the TV or something just kind of circling around. But usually it takes like half an hour. I made all of the poems in the book on the way to and from work and on my lunch break.
I assume you rode the bus?
Yeah, when I made the book I was living near the Thunderbird on Koenig. I was commuting from there, and took about twenty-five minutes. Now I live over on the east side and I don’t take the bus anymore, which is a bummer ‘cause I don’t make poems in the morning.
When making a poem, it sounds like you’re careful about the words you choose, but at the same time you leave a lot up to chance.
The chance is in the article. The chance is just what happens to be there. People have been doing this type of thing forever, and I go into that in the book. I traced it all the way back to the 1700’s to this guy Caleb Whitefoord who used to hang out at the pub. Back then, they had newspaper articles where the columns were wicked skinny, and there were a bunch of them across a page. Instead of reading the column from top to bottom, Whitefoord would read them across and get all of these funny combinations. Then he’d read them to his friends, they’d all have a chuckle and then he’d publish them in a broadsheet. And then you have the Dadaists and William Burroughs and the cut-up method. People have been doing it for 250 years in some form or another.
It started out as a lark, I guess.
It all starts out as a lark. If you go back and you look at these guys and their techniques, they were just bored and looking to amuse themselves. I kind of wonder if that isn’t how all art happens, in some way. If we were all scavenging around for food all day, we wouldn’t have time to make art.
True, except for cave paintings, maybe.
And even then, I think there was down time.
“Even the cave men had a hard time creating art when it’s stressful.” - Guy sitting behind us at Spiderhouse
I think so. It’s always been a struggle, I think.
Have you tried writing this type of poetry before?
Well, I first started writing poetry when I was trying to write song lyrics. I played in bands when I was a kid and that’s probably where I first started thinking about putting verses together and everything. I had never tried to write poetry and publish it in journals or anything like that. My problem was that the only people I knew who read literary journals were writers. I thought, “Why not put everything you’re doing on the internet, even if no one’s looking - even if only ten people are looking.”
At least they’re not all writers.
Right, and I’m really wary about making art for other artists. I just think that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, because the best compliment I get from anyone is, “Dude, I don’t even like poetry and I loved your book.” You’ve got someone hooked that way, and I have to think if someone reads my poems and they like them, maybe that’s the gateway drug.
I think about when I was a kid. You know people like to poo-poo Green Day now…they’re not a hip band to be into, but I remember when I was thirteen and I listened to Green Day, and I had never heard punk rock or anything like that. And slowly, over time, I found out about other things. You make your way back to the Ramones, and the Stooges and The Velvet Underground. So in my mind, anything can be a gateway drug. I think that’s great.
