Today's Post, now with part two!

As of 1:20 GMT, this post is now complete with part two.

I woke up to an email from Luli, aka "Ew," who is home from a week-long visit to Colorado. (We miss her and "Goo" terribly already.) She sent me a link to artist Austin Kleon's article, How to Steal Like an Artist. It's great. Read it.

After I posted the link to the article this morning, I decided to try Kleon's idea of newspaper blackout. You can see examples of Kleon's blackouts here. (I found this site through http://www.austinkleon.com/.) Basically, Kleon takes a page from a newspaper and blacks out many of the words. The remaining words make a poem. This idea of blacking out has always intrigued me. The poet Mary Ruefle did something similar in her book A Little White Shadow, using a 19th century book with the same title and blacking out text to make a new book of poems. And I haven't seen it, but the poet Ronald Johnson did the same thing with Paradise Lost. You can read a review of both of those here.

All of this is a kind of "found poetry," which is simply poems found in the world. My students loved found poetry. I used to do a lesson in which students cut out words from newspapers and magazines and glued them together to make poems. Another fun thing is to sit around and eavesdrop, writing down words you overhear, and make a poem out of them.

Since I conveniently had Sunday's Denver Post scattered all over my kitchen table, I decided to try a blackout poem this morning with Amelia.



You can see my poem on the right and hers on the left. She did a greenout poem.

After about 5 minutes Amelia was done with blackout poems and had moved on to something more interesting



so I had to stop. I was going to publish the text of my poem but, sadly, it was lost when someone spilled milk on the newspapers. It wasn't that great, anyway, although it was fun to make. Even though the technique is simple, it takes some effort to create a good blackout poem. You need to read the text and have an idea. Or maybe not. Maybe I am taking the fun out of it. I would like to find an old book and black it out a la A Little White Shadow. I'll put in on my list of poem projects.

Switching gears, today is Poem in Your Pocket day. I had planned to really celebrate this day by sending out poems to everyone I knew, but it snuck up on me. So please take a minute to download your own pocket poem here. You click on a pocket with whatever word intrigues you most. I already read "moo" and "glass."

Finally, in non-poetry news, we visited Jes, Kim and Micah for Jes's 30th birthday last weekend. Micah remains super cute and he got a new hat:



Here are Amelia and Micah sizing each other up.



And, in conclusion, here is Amelia wearing a lot of bibs.