Thursday Edition: Austin Kleon
10"x8" ($20) | 14"x11" ($50) | 20"x16" ($200)
Happy National Poetry Month collectors! I'm no April fool but I am a fool for poems and in celebration I have a bonus edition from Austin Kleon: The Travelogue. And though Austin's edition exhorts us to "forget about trying to speak", I'm going to do my best to write just why and how all of our editions with him came to be.
Austin and I have known each other on the interwebs for a while now. How we met exactly I can't recall—it was Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook, or maybe some combination thereof. It's easy to see why his work would catch my fancy, considering that I'm a poetry nerd whose affinity for the incorporation of text and typography into artwork is well-evidenced in 20x200's archives. What moved me from interest to admiration was what Austin pulls off with the humblest of media—usually a Sharpie pen and yesterday's news.
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.
I met Austin in person in Austin, TX, when I was there for SXSW, and was glad to get to spend time with him as he was on the brink of big things—spending time with artists on the brink of big things is one of the true joys of my job. His book—which you can pre-order on Amazon—was available in the conference's bookstore. We went to dinner on the same evening that we both got to hold copies of it in our hands for the very first time. Austin was frazzled and flustered and flattered by the attention that was beginning to percolate. He was anxious about what was to come, and whether the book would sell, and what comes next when it does or it doesn't.
There were four of us at dinner, each representing a compass point on the map of North America—California, Canada, New York and Texas—sitting at a picnic table on a scrappy patio beneath trees strung with Christmas lights, sipping sweet tea and eating barbecue and talking about poetry. I mean really talking about poetry, because as it turned out, all four of us are pretty big poetry nerds. It struck me then that for all the talk about what was to come, Austin's accomplished some pretty amazing things already and those things deserved a good portion of the credit for convening us there that evening. And being there? That was pretty great.
Next Email : Edition Announcement #263 - Sean GreenePrevious Email : Edition Announcement #261 - Sharon Montrose
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