Overheard on the Titanic by Austin Kleon

Bright and brisk Tuesday greetings, collectors near and far. It's the day before the eve of my departure for the nerd-spring-break Nirvana that is SXSW; visualizing myself nibbling on a breakfast burrito at Jo's after a night sipping cocktails in the courtyard of the San Jose is providing strong incentive to plow through the seemingly insurmountable pile of stuff I need to get through before I'm Austin-bound. And speaking of Austin, there's also our Austin, who I last saw (and will see again!) in Austin. Our Austin, he of the Kleons of Austin, is the prolifically poetic edition-maker with whom we've had the good fortune to collaborate with to produce several well-worded works. Today's clever addition, Overheard On The Titanic, brings us to my favorite number's worth of editions, which is five.

I introduced Austin's The Travelogue shortly after returning from my Austin-with-Austin travels and what I wrote back then is still the best description I can think of to describe why I find Austin's work so enchanting:

His selection-by-omission practice is the semi-illogical next step in a process that I go through constantly, one which I've pursued, involuntarily at times, for as long as I can remember being able to read. Nearly all my reading is a swim against an undercurrent of my unending search for a motto, a rallying cry or a mantra. Whether it's a poignant refrain of a pop song, a quote from a dead person or a few lines swiped from an admired poet, my constant search for a few good words is... constant. But, my ceaseless scanning of a page for a string of resonant words is thoroughly trumped by Austin's talent for stringing them together. He doesn't find poetry, he makes it—and he doesn't just make it, he publishes it. Which is to say that this creative-writing-major-with-a-concentration-in-poetry college dropout makes me both green with envy and glowing with pride.

Today, Austin can add acclaimed author to the list of his accomplishments of which I'm envious. When I last saw our hero, it was while sipping sweet tea, eating barbeque and debating poetry. Two (signed!) copies of his fresh-off-the-presses book sat on the picnic bench beside me. Austin had shrewdly arranged for the SXSW bookstore to stock a boxful of them, well in advance of their availability in bookstores. Back then, he was really thrilled about its impending release, but also anxious about its reception. I beseeched him to please be sure that the black cloud of uncertainty he had brewing didn't keep him from basking in the glow of his major accomplishment. A book! Of his very own! Released by a major publisher. Pretty cool stuff, you know? Today, Newspaper Blackout is a real out-in-the-world thing, with rave reviews and everything, its poems described in The New Yorker as being "like a cross between magnetic refrigerator poetry and enigmatic ransom notes, funny and Zen-like, collages of found art".