Experimenting with Blackout Poetry

For the past few days, I have been struggling to begin this blog. With my students, I try to come up with fun, non-threatening writing activities to ease them in. Usually, poetry seems to cause them the most grief so I decided to try out one of my own opening poetry activities as a way to begin this assignment. I feel sheepish to admit that although I’ve had my students try writing this type of poetry many times, I’ve never attempted it myself.

Below are my first feeble efforts at writing ‘newspaper blackout poetry.’

Austin Kleon created blackout poetry one day when he had a bad case of writer’s block. In his struggle to find his own words, he realized that words are always around us. He grabbed a newspaper, a sharpie, and began ‘blacking out’ all of the words he didn’t want. I find so many of his pieces to be quite powerful, and a selection of them can be found at his website at http://austinkleon.com. 

In the beginning, I found this a bit nerve-wracking; I was even fussing about whether the newspaper that I was using was ‘good enough’- whatever that means. I finally just picked a Calgary Metro from the recycling bin and began ‘blacking out,’ while also trying to silence my inner critic. Writing these poems reminded me of a Frank O’Conner line from the Leigh & Cramer (2011) article where he said, “’cause we don’t know what we/ know until we write it” (O’Conner in Leigh & Cramer, p. 84), which is an aspect of this poetry that I really enjoyed. Once I had blacked something out, I had committed to the deletion and the surviving words seemed to (hopefully) come together as a poem. The next time I run this activity, I will sit down with my students and write and share with them. And really, if theirs are better than mine, I should really be pleased about it. In the forum, I mentioned my goal to consistently write with the students, and so think that this is a good opportunity.  

Reference List: 

Leigh. S., & Cramer, R. (2011). Two voice poem: A conversation with writers on

writing. English Journal, 100(5), 82-89.