The Personalities…

The unique died!

Fearful in their hearts, even if they were walking with destiny.

Vanity, doubt, romance.

The extraordinary damned minds!

It would be wrong to be purified.

Less effective.

The clear concealed by the symbolic separation.

How deep its roots will strike attempting to confine controversy and dispute.

Life could only find sense with something perverse and elusive.

The difficulty till the end!

So I promised myself that when I started the blog that I would use it to share all of my creative work, not just my photography. With that in mind and with a little trepidation, this is a simple poem that I created with a little imagination and some marker pens!

This is something I do from time to time to help me stay creative and that occasionally sparks some new ideas or inspiration that might translate into an image of some sort later down the line. It’s a simple but effective technique. I scan the page of text and pick out words or phrases that resonate with me with a pencil, underlining each one. I then look at all the words on the page and see what starts to form in terms of sentences or statements. Once I have decided on a structure that I am happy with, out come the marker pens to blackout the rest of the text to leave the selected ‘poem’ exposed. Simple right!

This poem was created from a book called ‘The Office of Prime Minister’ by Robert Blake, published in the 1970s. Not one from my personal collection I might add! A random find, ironically, on the day that Boris Johnson was “elected” (said with the largest of all inverted commas) Prime Minister of the UK! Current climate and all that, I thought that there might be some interesting blackout poems to be made, so the pencil and the marker pens were primed and away I went.

Make of the poem what you want! It’s not for me to explain where I was going with its meaning etc but can’t help feeling there is something poignantly dark about it. A reflection of current times? Or maybe I need a hug or something haha? I promise I’m a glass half full, optimist as best I can be but there is definitely ‘something in the water’ at the moment. Everyone seems to be arguing about something! Maybe everyone needs a hug haha!

This isn’t a new idea and I first came across the concept while reading some of the work of Austin Kleon. I would recommend this guys work to any creative out there looking for a little inspiration. Austin is the author of books like ‘Steal like an Artist’ and, his first book ‘Newspaper Blackout’, where the inspiration came from to give it a go myself. I would definitely advise that if you are an artist, writer, photographer or creative of any kind, that you check out his work. I have included a couple of links below:

https://austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-blackout-poems/

https://austinkleon.com/steal/

Thanks for sticking with me and I hope that you’re finding the blog interesting and maybe it’s helping you to spark some inspiration of your own. Feel free to get in touch and say hello and maybe send me some pictures of your own blackout poem if you decide to create one. New blog post next week!