The History of Blackout Poetry

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Blackout poetry or redacted poetry according to Bustle, is created when;

“…a poet takes a found document, traditionally a print newspaper, and crosses out a majority of the existing text, leaving visible only the words that comprise his or her poem; thereby revealing an entirely new work of literature birthed from an existing one” (Miller, 2017).

Made popular in recent years by Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout and inspiring blackout poetry evangelists like Make Blackout Poetry, the lineage of blackout poetry or redacted poetry actually traces back the 18th Century.

According to Austin Kleon: Benjamin Franklin’s neighbor in the 1700s published an entertaining broadsheet of puns constructed with words read across the narrow columns of a newspaper, instead of down (Kleon, 2010). The hodgepodge sequence of words created playful puns, like MadLibs for the 18th Century. From that point forward, redacted poetry would meander through various countries and mediums.

Romanian-born French poet, born Samuel Rosenstock better known as Tristan Tzara (trisˈtan ˈt͡sara), founded Dadaism during the First World War, in Zurich. Dadaism was a nihilistic…