Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon

Armed with a newspaper and a magic marker, Austin Kleon makes the process of writing poetry more about chiseling away instead of starting from scratch. I am a huge fan of found poetry and have my students create found and headline poems every April during National Poetry Month. What I always find when students perform these exercises is that at first they think the assignment is just for fun, but then end up creating something really profound.

The idea is the same in Newspaper Blackout. An otherwise mundane newspaper article is now suddenly something really profound.


My only criticism of this book is that sometimes the poems were a little hard to follow and the flow of the poem was stifled because your brain was too busy trying to translate the order of everything.

Check out the book trailer here:





Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon
Published: April 2010 by Harper Perennial
Pages: 224
Genre: Poetry
Audience: Adults