Poetry Launch

tyunglebower ♦ August 30, 2021 ♦ 3 Comments

As of this morning, my latest book, a short collection of experimental poems, is available for download for a dollar. You’ll find links for purchase in the “my books” page of this website.

This collection began life as a brief experiment, and evolved into a full collection.

In it, I compose “black out poetry.” This simple method has been around for ages. In short, one takes a pre-existing work, and by way of removing certain words, (blacking out, as with an actual marker sometimes) and leaving others, an entirely new work is created.

I’d seen this done before, but hadn’t tried it myself until I came across a video online of someone doing so. I was determined to try my hand at it.

I purchased a religious screed from the bargain bin, and had at it. Originally, the book itself was to be adorned with artwork of my own creation, thus being its own unique entity. But as this proved more complex and time consuming that I planned, my mind drifted toward the idea of “blacking out” several other works and putting the results into an anthology of sorts. Lodestone Crossing is the fruit of that idea.

The rules were simple, but nonetheless a challenge. In the first poem, I would not only require the words to remain in the original order, but the punctuation as well. If I wanted the poem to ask a question, I had to “wait” for a question mark to come up in the text. I’m proud of that result, but opted to let go of the requirements for punctuation for the subsequent poems. I still added no words, and I fashioned my stanzas out of words that remained in the same order they appeared in the book. Punctuations on said words could be anything I wished, however.

This method not only produced a different kind of poetry than I am used to, but forced me to take a more nuanced view of language, metaphor, and composition. If I never try this again, it was worth it this time just for the new perspectives.

That being said, I am proud of the work itself, and hope you will spend a buck to see what I’ve come up with.