Austin Kleon is a poet whose basic tools include a black marker and the New York Times rather than pen and paper. Kleon, recognized by NPR and Toronto’s National Post as an original, insightful poet with a fresh take on the world of poetry, has a blog featuring new poems every few days. Many are funny, some are weird, and a few are insightful. An interesting take on form and restrictions when there are so many debates going on in the poetry world about what constitutes avant-garde, whether there should be a return to traditional forms, and what the role of poetry is today–how relevant is it and how relevant it should be, what the act of poetry is (very controversial when you get people like Levertov saying that ‘writing the poem is the poet’s means of summoning the divine”).

Thanks go to Aaron for the discovery of Kleon.