Blackout Poetry 101

I've been teaching a workshops in my hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota for a few years now and I've got one coming up at the Grand Forks Public Library. In honor of National Poetry Month, I'm teaching a mixed media blackout poetry class! 

Not familiar with blackout poetry? Essentially, you create a "poem" by blacking out words on a book page, leaving behind a specific selection of words. 

Here are some examples of my blackout poetry, which I also pair with artwork: 

RISE

LIMITLESS AND STRONG

WILD FOLK

So how do you go about finding a blackout poem? It can be a little more challenging than you'd believe. I'm going to break it down into simple steps. 

STEP 1: FIND A BOOK

I did say simple, right? 

When I first began creating blackout poetry artwork, I thought I'd go through every single page in the Odyssey and create a poem per page - sort of an epic tribute to a, well... epic poem. :) 

But it quickly became apparent that. not every page holds a poem (or at least not a poem that appeals to me, personally). 

Which brings me to 

STEP 2: FIND AN INTERESTING PHRASE ON A PAGE AND CIRCLE IT LIGHTLY IN PENCIL

I found the phrase "than a woman who imagines" and circled it lightly (more on that later) in pencil. Most of my artwork involves strong, female-centric themes, so I was specifically drawn to that phrase. 

STEP 3: START BUILDING YOUR POEM

Once you have your phrase, start building your poem by looking for other things that might complete the phrase or sentence. It's important as you're looking that you skim over the words and don't read full sentences of the book, or you'll start to get really sidetracked, really fast (at least if you're me). 

As I was building this poem, I thought, for a woman who imagines WHAT? and built "than a woman who imagines herself and all womankind" 

and all womankind WHAT?

Later on the page I found the word "wondrous". 

STEP 4: KEEP ADDING WORDS
AND ERASE WHERE NECESSARY

So. I had the latter part of my poem built "Than a woman who imagines herself and all womankind wondrous" but I had nothing to start my poem. I thought maybe I could build something along the lines of "There is nothing stronger than a woman who imagines herself and all womankind wondrous".

When you're working with a book page, however,
not all the words you're hoping for are going to
magically appear on the page. 

So I came across the words "the voice of" but that didn't pair with "than a woman who". To pair it correctly I need to erase the "than" from my phrase. Now I had something that worked "the voice of a woman who". 

As I searched for verbs that could begin my phrase, I found three and lightly circled them. "raising" "fighting" and "raised". 

Then, I looked for my bridge and found "with" which told me that I knew I needed to go with "fighting" because it was the only word that made sense. 

STEP 5: ERASE ALL UNNECESSARY WORDS AND HEAVILY BOX IN YOUR FINAL POEM

 My final poem reads "Fighting with the voice of a woman who imagines herself and all womankind wondrous". 

Pretty marvelous huh? 

Poems can be short or long. They can span the whole page or just part of it - the creativity is yours. 

For those here who are taking my class and finding this intimidating - have no fear! I will have a selection of poems for you to choose from, if you don't want to create your own. :) 

Happy creating!