April is National Poetry Month! Experience Blackout Poetry!

What is Blackout Poetry? 

Blackout poetry is the creation of a new, original poem by taking a page of text and blacking out or erasing most of the words and phrases of the original text. The words left will make a new poem. Blackout poetry is also called “found poetry.”

How to Write Blackout Poetry

Find a page of text, such as a newspaper article, an old book, or a magazine.

Skim the page of text or passage you have chosen and look for interesting words. See if you notice a theme or topic.

Underline or circle the word(s) or phrase(s) you wish to keep before blacking out anything.

Black out the rest of the words on the page. 

More Ideas 

Use a different color or a different material. Use a purple crayon to black out the words you don’t want. Or use a gold pen. 

Draw a picture. Before blacking out the words, draw an image over the words. When you color in the illustration, keep the words you want and blackout (or block color) the rest of the text around the illustration. 

Congratulations! You’ve made a blackout poem!

You can also create your own blackout poetry online on the New York Times website!

Austin Kleon, the author of Steal Like an Artist, popularized this type of poetry. He started stealing like an artist using newspapers that he’d black out all but a few words and phrases. His work became so popular that he put his poems in a book called Newspaper Blackout. You can also learn how to make a newspaper blackout poem.

But Kleon wasn’t the originator of blackout poetry. It was British artist Tom Phillips. Phillips was a visual artist who altered secondhand books with collages and drawings, choosing some words to leave visible. 

In the 1960s, Tom Phillips embarked on a project known as “A Humument.” He took a forgotten Victorian novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, and began redacting and altering its pages to reveal a whole new narrative. Phillips’ work with "A Humument" paved the way for blackout poetry as we know it today, blending visual art and literature in a captivating way. Sometimes his work is also called redacted poetry, but he is credited with popularizing the concept of blackout poetry, inspiring Austin Kleon.

Jeanne McMahan

Information Specialist - MLIS