Inspired by writer & creative Austin Kleon’s “Newspaper Blackout” poetry book, I decided to take James Joyce’s Chamber Music, a book he originally published in 1907, & make a blackout “reduction” version of it.
I simply adore the poems in this book, & it was quite fun to go through the book & black out sections of the poems to find (& therefore, create) new poems inside them. I liken this creative process to, in a somewhat orderly fashion, shuffling cut-out words from a specific book inside a hat & seeing what poems you find in them. I have approached all the poems from the standpoint of creating art from them.
Admittedly, it was difficult at times to decide what should stay & what should go, as there are so many good bits in these poems.Note: As this book was created digitally & without taking a Sharpie to paper & being locked into the inherent spacing in the text, I have also added punctuation where desired so the created poems read properly.
In some places, I have left entire lines intact if I particularly liked it (the collaborative effort, metaphorically reaching back into time, with Joyce being stronger here). With other poems, I have redacted all but a few words, making these poems mostly-mine. Either way, a thousand people could go through this book & all find different poems that meant something to them.
These are my creative & derivative contributions to a new, semi-collaborative work of art. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.
Publication Date: July 24, 2019
Genre: Poetry
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
From the book —
