Erased: Notes on Blackout Poetry
An aesthetically pleasing but ultimately limited art form
Originally published at https://cameronsbradley.substack.com
Blackout poetry, or erasure poetry (or redacted poetry) is the art of creating poetry out of an already existing piece of text by erasing or blacking-out unwanted words and creating a poem with the remaining text. Many poets use this technique to alter the meaning of newspaper articles and literature in an ironic way, transforming the original meaning or story into its opposite-typically as a political or contrarian statement.
Some notable examples of blackout poetry include:
Early last year, while scrolling through the soulless abyss of Instagram, I stumbled across a few blackout poems that caught my eye. Just like everything else on the ‘gram, the poems were eye-catching, visually appealing, and artfully designed to snag the attention of even the most listless social media zombie.
And, like 99% of the content you’ll find on Instagram and other social media platforms: they’re shallow-but they look cool.
Anyway, I was flipping though an issue of National Geographic later that day when I thought… maybe I could make my own blackout poetry for the ‘gram using this-and only this-magazine.
And that’s when I embarked on a fun but short-lived poetry project which I dubbed Geographical Nation: a collection of blackout poetry and collages that strictly uses National Geographic magazine as its source material. Behold:
One of the most exciting aspects of creating blackout poetry is that you don’t need to be sober-there’s no pressure to conjure up brilliant turns of phrase when all the words are at your fingertips; you simply need to find the right ones, circle them in pen/pencil, then use a marker (or paint, or whatever) of your choice to blot out the rest of the text.
Of course you don’t want to slam too many cocktails before cutting up magazines with a hobby knife. And your ability to accurately black-out the unwanted text might take a hit as well. Case in point:
Yep, that’s pretty hard to read, right? This is one of the drawbacks to these kinds of poems: even if you have the hands of a surgeon, the poem can still be damn-near indesipherable. I’ve transcribed the madness above into the nonsense below:
"The Habitats of Anguish, Despair, and Earthmoving Machinery"
a dark year has passed
still disappearing
still unraveling
we've moved
we've reconsidered
we've seen
and we've pursuaded the state of natureI am scared
I am hopeful
and
it's still not clear why
the animals trek
the world we created
Something else I learned while making these poems is how often one needs to accept that the poem isn’t going to make perfect sense and simply chalk up the absurdity of some of the lines to poetic license.
After “writing” a few more poems like this I decided to try a new technique: drawing arrows between my chosen words to allow the reader to “follow” the poem as it moves around the page. This way, I didn’t need to choose words in the order they were written in the original text; I could simply find the ones I wanted, organize them on a separate piece of paper, then go back and black-out the text, drawing helpful arrows around the page.
Of course, if you get a little too ambitous, you can wind up with something like this:
And because I don’t want to give you a seizure trying to read the poem as it’s printed, here’s how it’s supposed to be read:
“His Deep Freeze”
standing on a glacier
the prince
stood beaming
on mushrooms in late summer
his mind retreated
to a black-and-white photograph
of the last crown prince
on a balmy summer day thick ice
plunges downward
forming snowflakes much of the snow
is now
human made snow cannons
strong enough
to cloud
the water:neither can live
without these machines
Needless to say, I’ve only utilized this technique the one time; my next attempt at it (if I even bother) will focus more on the logistics of the readers’ eyes as they travel around the page so it’s not such a chore to read.
It’s worth noting that a huge swathe of the text contained within magazines is advertisements. The first time I skimmed over my copies of National Geographic, I completely ignored the ads; even the images were mundane compared to the spectacular photography the magazine is so famous for.
That was until I saw an ad for Oatmilk, which is a real thing and not some absurdity I concocted with my pens and markers. After perusing the text for a few minutes I realized the potential for humor buried between the lines and got to work. The following is a blackout poem crafted entirely from such an ad:
Looking back on it, I missed a huge opportunity on the right-side page: each check-marked sentence could have had words swapped out for funnier words from the magazine. There are twenty lines there: that’s twenty potential punchlines that never came to fruition. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.
Next time, Oatmilk, next time.
After writing dozens of these poems, I found that many of them came to resemble short stories rather than verse. I was pleased with the following poem, which was bizarre and somewhat humorous, while managing to retain much of the actual content of the original text. I took some extra liberties and rearranged a few sections of the article to better suit the final product. Anyway, let me know what you think in the comments:
“Cricket Catchers”
on a sunny morning
a man appears
carrying cone-headed
bush cricketsthe man is a bush cricket wholesaler
salted and fried, the crickets
are sold at taxi parks
with popcorn legend has it the insects come from the moon
bush crickets have been lauded
as key
for preventing undernutritionon the hill in harugongo
a trap’s bright light
caught about three sacks’ worth —
two fewer than
the previous year everyone slumps away disappointed
As a sort of interlude between poems, I dedicated a twenty-page section of Geographical Nation to a huge, multi-page maze using animals from the magazine as various targets to “find” as the reader navigates through the labyrinth of crude pencil lines and poorly-glued paper. Although this is not poetry, per se, it was a fun way to whittle down the heap of unused photos I had painstakingly cut from the magazine.
For the sake of keeping this post at a reasonable length, I’ve opted to simply link the Instagram post it originally appeared at, which can be accessed by clicking the link below:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CaCs4gRucm-/
I mentioned near the top of this post that Geographical Nation was “short-lived”. Although I do plan to complete it at some point in the distant future, the notebook containing the finished poems, as well as my stack of unused magazine clippings is currently in storage-on the other side of the world. Literally.
So I likely won’t be completing more blackout poems anytime soon, but I learned a lot about the craft during my brief phase of ransacking my favorite magazine for words and images. I hope you found something useful in this post as well.
For more of my blackout poetry, you can check out my Instagram page here.
Until next time,
Cameron
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