Perhaps you’ve come across the hundreds of thousands of permanent markers moving at hyper-speed to trending audio on TikTok, or you’ve picked up a blackout poetry book at the bookstore. Or maybe you literally blacked out and have no idea how you ended up on a poetry article, but stay with us! #BlackoutPoetry isn’t just for those who consider themselves poets. Today, we’ll look at the form’s historic roots, its connection to Dadaism, and why it might be the cure for your writer’s block.
Definition of Blackout poetry
First, let’s define Blackout Poetry
Blackout poetry exists at the intersection of visual art and literature. Also known as erasure or redacted poetry, blackout poems are created in the tradition of found art. Found (or readymade) art takes existing materials and transforms them into a new artistic work.
DEFINITION OF BLACKOUT POETRY
What is Blackout poetry?
Blackout poetry is a type of erasure poetry where the writer takes an existing text, often a page from a book, newspaper, or article, and blacks out (or otherwise obscures) most of the words. The remaining words form a poem, giving new meaning to old text.
Six styles of erasure poetry:
- Blackout: crossing out words to create a new poem.
- Computer: using computer software to add or remove lines.
- Cut out: using a knife to cut words out of paper.
- Cover up: covering up the original text with another material.
- Retyped: retyping the original text to make it look like a conventional, traditional poem, leaving space where the original text used to be.
- Visual: Incorporating additional visual elements such as collage, drawing, painting, etc.
Blackout Poetry History
The birth of the blackout poem
The idea of creating new meaning from existing text isn’t new. In fact, as long as print newspapers have existed, people have used redaction to create new bodies of work. Poet Austin Kleon traced this back to the days of Benjamin Franklin. In one of the earliest known examples of this form, Franklin’s neighbor Caleb Whiteford published a broadsheet created from the very first print newspapers. Perhaps started as comedy, his edited versions replaced serious news with jokes and puns. Another early example, “The daily advertiser, in metre," published in 1781, made fun of advertisements in a London newspaper by rearranging them into verse.
Austin Kleon on the history of blackout poetry
Blackout Poetry and Dadaism
Dada poets bring back the blackout
The early 20th century saw the return of blackout poems with the dada movement. Hugo Ball’s “Dada Manifesto” named Dadaism “a new tendency in art” that rejected logic and reason in favor of chance. For Dada artists, “nonsense was the ultimate political tool to smash existing power structures and artistic norms,” which might explain the popularity of absurd memes, video collage, and the rise of black out poetry today. That #aesthetic Tiktok video you love of seemingly random videos mixed with cartoons from the 1940’s, set to a trap song? Dada.
Tristan Tzara, one of Dada’s founders, created poems by cutting words from a newspaper, putting them in a hat, and pulling them out at random to form verse. His “How to Make a Dadaist Poem," subverted the traditional confines of art and poetry, emphasizing spontaneity and chance.
Beginners guide to flash photography
Blackout Poetry
Examples of black out poetry
While many black out poems use black markers, blackout poems can be created by covering words with anything. For example, Erin Dorney’s use of foliage.
The Poetry Foundation offers these excellent examples of erasure poetry: “Freeland: An Erasure” by Leigh Sugar; and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, “which uses court documents about the 18th-century slave ship that threw more than 120 enslaved Africans overboard in order to collect insurance money.”
Blackout poetry ideas
Create your own blackout poem
From newspaper articles and magazines to the dusty one dollar book pile at the thrift store, part of this form’s appeal is its accessibility. With just an old book (or screenplay!) and a marker, you too can be a blackout poet.
How to do blackout poetry:
Step one: source. Your source can be anything with preexisting text. The most common sources are newspapers, books, and magazines, but if the back of a cereal box is what you feel called to, go for it!
Step two: inspiration. Scanning the source material, you’ll want to choose a block of text to pull from. For our example, we’ll use the front page of a newspaper. Use a pencil to underline the words that catch your eye, regardless of if they feel connected.
Step three: create. After marking the potential words, you’ll want to read over them to see what story is emerging. Here you can add or remove words for flow and find connecting words if needed.
Step four: commit. Once you finalize your word selection, highlight the words more boldly by drawing a box, circle, or underline with a pen to make sure they stand out.
Step five: blackout. Cover all unwanted text so that only your circled words remain. Staying true to the name “black out poem,” our example below uses a black permanent marker, but you can cover the redacted words with anything you’d like.
Optional step, share your work! Whether you’re a first time or long time poet, hashtags like #blackoutpoetry and #newspaperpoems are filled with erasure poems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Blackout Poetry FAQs
A type of poetry that takes an existing text and blacks out (or obscures) most of the words. The remaining words form a poem.
Five easy steps! Find a source, get inspired, choose your words, finalize with a pen, black out the rest.
No one single person is credited with the invention of this form, but key figures include Doris Cross, Tom Phillips, and Austin Kleon amongst others.
There are no strict rules, though it has been suggested to black out at least half of what is on the page for your work to be considered original.
Some scholars consider Tom Phillips’ A Humument the most famous erasure poetry work in literary history, while Austin Kleon’s work is the most famous modern blackout poetry example.
UP NEXT
Cure your writer’s block
Writer’s block often happens because the blank page feels intimidating. Black out poetry removes the pressure to start from nothing and forces the brain into a creative space. Too often we meet the page while with the stress of writing something that can be produced on a specific budget, but with poetry one can write for play. If you’re looking for other ways to reignite your creativity, check out our list of 23 ways to overcome writer’s block.
