Making Blackout Poetry

If you search for “Blackout Poetry” on Google or follow the hashtag through any social media platform, specifically @MakeBlackOutPoetry on Instagram, you will see an incredible amount of stunning Blackout Poems, some of which blur the lines between visual art and poetry. Blackout poems are a type of erasure poetry in which the author essentially excavates a poem from a given text, be it a work of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or even a manual. This is an incredibly inventive type of poetry that opens up meaning and interpretation of the poem created.

Black out poetry can do many things, one which is enter into a conversation with the text it comes from—for example, a writer can make a blackout poem out of a news article and in doing so can highlight certain aspects of what is not said in the article. By extension, this can inspire the reader to think about what news reports and articles say and what they don’t say. Though this doesn’t have to be the case. No matter what your goal is in creating a blackout poem the end result is you will have a distinct poem. For example, take a look at the before and after pictures below:

One way to think of blackout poetry is that it is a way of illuminating a poem. To write one, first decide which text you want to use—you can find a page of a book you love on Google, if possible, print it out, but if you don’t have access to a printer, that’s okay! You can just save the picture and open it in whatever photo-editing program you have. Through most photo-editing programs you will be able to choose either a “paint brush” or a highlighter tool. Read through the page of writing you have in front of you and start to think about which words stand out to you the most. If you want, you can add a little dot next to the words that you think you may want to use. At this point, it is really about just trying to allow the words on the page speak to you. Put a box around the words you know you want to use. You can also grab a piece of paper and write down which words really jump out at you before you make any marks on the page.

See what the words you have collected through this process say to you, and don’t be afraid to experiment! This is the fun part, also the challenging part. Find a poem within the glorious mess of words and enjoy trying out different poems. Then the final step is all about “blacking out” whatever words and sentences you are not going to be using within the poem. After, if you want to, you can also write out your poem in a separate document. Blackout poetry is a fantastic creative exercise that has the incredible ability to inspire our minds to think about words as they are as well as the variety of meaning that can be attributed to them.

Below are some links that will easily enable you to experiment with some! Enjoy!

https://blackoutpoetry.glitch.me/ (this is the site where I made the poem above)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/multimedia/blackout-poetry.html (This is another fantastic way to make some blackout poetry!)