Blackout poetry is simply isolating selected words from a written piece of text, and using them to come up with your very own poetry. It refers to any poem in which the author covers a majority of a source text in favor of leaving meaningful words to form a poem.
Blackout poems can be created using the pages of old books or even newspaper articles. Using the pages of an existing text, blackout poets isolate and then piece together single words or short phrases from these texts to create lyrical masterpieces.
Austin Kleon was a writer who created poetry by blacking out words in discarded newspapers with a marker. He started by drawing a box around words that had meaning to him, then connected words until they made phrases, which turned into poems.
Although Blackout poetry seems like a modern form of writing, some sources say it dates back to the 18th century.
"There’s such a hopefulness to blackout poetry. It’s uplifting and can bring some lightness in a dark world.” John Carrol
Brought to you by class 7a and class 7b, Vugrovec-Kašina Primary school, Zagreb, and teacher Marina Sertić
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Created with an image by stp23 - "maori decorations on wood"