Blackout Poetry

Take a page from a book, literally, and cross out words so that the ones left are a poem. Made famous by Austin Kleon, blackout poetry is a unique way of creating. Part destruction, part seeking, part rebuilding, all creativity. What you remove is as important as what remains.

To begin I bought myself a hefty Sharpie and perused my bookshelf for a book I was willing to destroy in the process. I chose a self help book on anxiety. Not because I don’t need it anymore (hello third wave of Covid!) but because it was small in stature. My beginner brain assumed that less words on the page would make it easier to construct the poem.

That was a false assumption.

Such a specific topic and small pages meant that each page I ripped from the book was likely to contain one very narrow topic with a lot of repetition of words. This, I think, made it challenging to not only construct a poem I felt was valid and beautiful but also one that wasn’t necessarily about what was already on the page. Some days were better than others. Here are some of my favourites.

At first I felt my heart in my throat as I ripped pages from the book. The destruction! I really do love paper books. Then I started to see the beauty in the craggy edge where the page came away from its confines. I love the back side, where the Sharpie bleeds through. I love the searching for more beyond the content of the page. Finding the poem is almost like resuscitating the words so that they aren’t lost to the ether.