The subject line for Friday’s newsletter came from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

“Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which … owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.”

(Every book of mine is what I was able to save from the shipwreck of a great idea.)

Read the rest here.

I used this 2016 blackout poem for last Friday’s newsletter, “The year is too young to be this long.” A few people commented that they couldn’t believe it was made 10 years ago. This is the thing about making art and writing in a diary: you keep the receipts.

In today’s newsletter, I wrote about the best way to read the internet.

This blackout is featured at the top of today’s newsletter, “Designed to break your heart.”

Last Friday I didn’t have a top image or a subject line for the newsletter, so I said, “You know what? I’ll give myself an hour to play and see what happens.” I pulled a half-finished blackout poem out of the drawer and came up with “New dumpsters, old fires.”

Two recent blackout poems: “Come On, World” and “The World Between My Ears.”

This poem was inspired by listening to The Cure’s Disintegration at top volume in my studio.

I put it at the top of last Friday’s newsletter, “A New Appreciation.”

Here is an old blackout poem I stuck in Tuesday’s letter, “Your next best friend,” which is about making good friends — with people and books.

We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But how many great books are already waiting for us on our shelves? How many favorite authors would we form deep relationships with if we simply read or re-read a few more of their books?

I really like the way this one turned out. You can read the whole thing here.

I made this blackout last week and put it at the top of Friday’s newsletter about getting in and out of trouble. Unfortunately, it was prophetic, because I was up at 4 a.m. this morning…

Today’s newsletter begins with a quote from Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise:

“When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.”

Read the rest here.