Making Blackout Poetry
In a world of complete freedom, sometimes the most frightening and paralyzing obstacle can be a blank page. Creativity hinges on that impassive wall of nothingness. Whole books have been devoted to prompts, exercises, strategies for overcoming writer’s block.
But what if you didn’t have to start with a blank page?
What if someone already populated your page with words and your task was to cut out most of them? Editing, especially someone else’s work, often causes less anxiety that creating anew. When we work with known factors, we can mould them, adjust them, polish them.
Found poetry comes in many forms, one of which is variously caused erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, occasionally whiteout poetry.
The act of erasing or blacking out a text is an act of intimate reading. To select the key words, the keepers, one has to read the entire page, noting the words that leap out. Often these are nouns and verbs — theater, fire, rendezvous, leaped, tiptoed, slouched — though a good adjective is a gem — elongated, bohemian, yellowed. Over time, compound words and words easily divided into new words jump forward — knowledge: know, ledge, now, no, ow, owl, edge, ed. Past tense “ed” or plurals can be adapted as well.
Be careful not to neglect articles, conjunctions, or prepositions. Whether you compose more of a narrative, where connective tissue is important to making grammatical sense, or you compose more spartan verse, do no underestimate the power of “and,” “the,” or “of.”
Depending on my intentions, sometimes I go right for those dynamite words, circling them in sharpie, connecting them or doodling around them. Other times, I photocopy the page and make drafts, or make lists of words on a separate page, mapping in my head what the page will look like.
I started my most serious blackout project on a book about how to stop smoking. I ran through several sharpies and killed innumerable brain cells inhaling their strong odors, blacking out many of the pages, including one entire page except for 11 instances of “concentrate.”
I have whited out a book about growing avocados, a short inspirational book, and the beginning of a book about hunting. I chose each of these carefully.
1. I wanted to find texts that were relatively short so I could finish the entire book, completing a sort of singular project.
2. I wanted to find books without too much text on a page. While this might seem countintuitive (fewer words to choose from), it does mean less whiteout or fewer sharpies for the landfill.
3. It is helpful if the text is not too small or close together.
I admire folks with artistic skills who can black out a page and weave in a picture. I often assign blackout poems to my poetry classes and receive a bell curve of blocked out miscellany beside a polished rendition of a grim reaper or seascape with a haiku-like poem accentuating the art. This seems like the opera of blackout poetry to me — the sublime combination of multiple arts into a cohesive vision, like finding the optimal point on a multi-vector graph.
That said, there are many ways to discover “found” poetry. You might use electrical tape to hide unwanted words, actually cut out words and letters and arrange them on a new page, or compose centos from phrases, song titles, lines from poems, or sentences from a variety of sources or different pages from a single source to compose a unique poem in a sort of third voice.
However you find your groove editing out less than necessary words in newspapers, classical texts, your own poetry, or your partner’s shopping lists, you might find it addictive. You might also find it a jumpstart to tackling your own blank pages.
For more blackout/whiteout poetry, check out
Holly Lynn Walrath’s intro to her course on blackout poetry
Mary Ruefle’s “A Little White Shadow” (excerpts)
Colette Love Hilliard’s “A Wonderful Catastrophe”
