“Because I could not stop for debt, he kindly stopped for me.” Blackout Poetry by Anonymous, misquoting Emily Dickinson The two texts work wonderfully both as separate entities and as an intertextual dialogue. In other words, the blackout poem helps modernize the themes of Stevenson’s memoir, while also using imagery to suggest something short and bittersweet about love. With this context, the poem’s natural imagery becomes both somber and hopeful, reinforcing the poem’s implications about love. It’s central images are starlight, sleeping cities, and the night these images build upon each other a romantic notion of the quiet dark, subverting a general notion of romance as bright and energetic.Īdditionally, the poem’s source text is a memoir about Stevenson’s journey through the wild as he distanced himself from a recent love affair. Source Text: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevénnes by Robert Louis Stevenson (Chapter 10).Īnalysis: There’s a wonderful simplicity to this blackout poem. Note: the third poem is an example of erasure poetry, not blackout poetry, but we include this in our examples list as the two forms accomplish something similar. Here are three poems that accomplish that goal. Well-crafted blackout poetry pages give new meanings to old texts, and the interplay of those texts often creates new and surprising meanings. There’s only one rule of the form: have fun making it! Great blackout poetry can be short or long, abstract or concrete, linear or lateral. In 2010, Austin Kleon published his collection Newspaper Blackout an instant bestseller, Newspaper Blackout (alongside Kleon’s Tumblr and Instagram presence) put blackout poetry pages in front of every writer’s screen.įrom the New York Times’ interactive generator to Outrun the Stigma’s erasure poetry community project, blackout poetry continues to enjoy its digital popularity.īefore we dive into how to do blackout poetry, let’s look at and examine some blackout poetry examples, including the original texts those poems used. The Dadaists, the Beat Poets, and other 20th century movements continued to explore and expand the form, but blackout poetry earned its greatest support from Austin Kleon at The New York Times. This interplay, commonly known as collaging, reignited a love for the physical play with language, encouraging poets to experiment with form and language simultaneously. This creative play with physical text would not resurface until the Dada movement (1915-1925), in which artists expressed surreal, absurd, and existential thoughts through the interplay of words and images. You can learn more about Whiteford in this TEDxKC talk with Austin Kleon. Ben’s neighbor, Caleb Whiteford, would publish redacted versions of the paper, using puns flowing across the text to create new meaning in the pages. In fact, the earliest known blackout poetry examples hail from Benjamin Franklin’s days. Like most things in literature, blackout poetry-also known as erasure poetry, redacted poetry, and a form of found poetry-has a complex history. What is Blackout Poetry? A Brief History of the Form Let’s explore this artsy and inventive poetry form. The internet is populated with blackout poetry examples, and we’d like to share some of our favorites-while also explaining how to do blackout poetry. Blackout poetry pages are easy to create, share, and celebrate, so it’s no wonder that their prominence coincided with the rise of social media. What is blackout poetry? Chances are, you have already seen blackout poetry in action: maybe it’s shown up on your social media timeline, or maybe you’ve read The New York Times’ Searching for Poetry series. If you struggle to find the right words, why not start with somebody else’s? Such is the philosophy behind blackout poetry, a recent artistic and literary phenomenon that has blossomed in the past decade.
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