Blackout Poems, a How-to for Creative Writing 2015

Please read the instructions and the explanation of blackout poetry thoroughly before getting up to go grab your newspaper.


Your learning target and job for the day is to create a blackout poem using the current issue of Spilled Ink. Please pick a newspaper up from the crate at the front of the room after you read these instructions. The blackout poem is a process which needs to be considered carefully. Read through my example and instructions for creating a blackout poem before you attempt one for yourself.

Your instructions are to:

• Read through this blog carefully and read all of the instructions therein,
• Get up and grab a newspaper,
• Scan the pages to find the article you will be working with,
• Choose said article,
• Pick out the words you want to use and circle/box them out,
• Think about the message you want to send to your audience,
• Think about the pattern you want the reader to follow to make your message clear as well as the flow,
• Trace out the pattern that you want to have. This will sometimes help to show the flow of your poem (optional),
• Think about how ambiguous or non-ambiguous you want your poem to be, is there a natural flow? should there be many different meanings like in this poem? (there are apparently many different poems in this one)

• Black out all of the words that you did not choose.

The form of poetry which we are going to be exploring is called blackout poetry.

The blackout poetry form has many different elements, some of which are:

1. words and their economy,
2. attention to detail, diction, and spacing.
3. the difference between poetry and prose.

Let us first talk about words and their economy. The definition that we are most interested in for economy is: The management of the resources of a community, country, etc., especially with a view on its productivity. The "resources" for the economy we are concerned with are words, of which we have a limited number. We are not able to write anything ourselves, so we must be creative with what is given to us. We want to be as productive with our words as possible, even if we have to take a few creative licenses with our words to convey the meaning we would like as an author. An example of a creative license would be if we were to use a homophone in place of the actual word. The poem below uses Organz instead of organs because it sounds the same in our American voice.



Since we will be working with blackout poetry today with the current issue of Spilled Ink (our school newspaper) we will only have the diction our peers have provided us from cover to cover to work with. Blackout poetry is a form which uses the words and phrases that are provided on the page, and does not add anything to them. We, as writers of this style today, do not get to choose our own words to write down but must find our words hidden in something that someone else has produced.

Hence, this is called a shared word economy; we will have to use what is given to us. Without the means to create any words on our own, we must become attentive to detail and how the diction of the piece speaks to us. This is the second piece of blackout poetry.

As an example of what we are going to be doing with our newspapers to create our blackout poems, I will put pictures of the process on the website after each of the steps. This process is also explained in this short video: https://youtu.be/wKpVgoGr6kE

 Let us consider something like this news article as the start for our bank of words:



From yahoo news:

'Oh, my God': Man who finds missing 2-year-old girl jubilant

WARREN, Ohio (AP) — A man who found a little girl who'd been missing from her great-grandparents' home for two days sounded jubilant in a 911 call.

"Oh, my God," Victor Sutton told a dispatcher on Sunday evening after finding 2-year-old Rainn Peterson sleeping in a field not far from where she went missing. "Talk about luck."

Rainn, who apparently had wandered away on Friday, was found around 6:30 p.m. Sunday in North Bloomfield Township, just north of Warren and Youngstown near the Pennsylvania state line. She was taken to a hospital for an evaluation.

The Trumbull County sheriff said Monday that Rainn was in good shape except for being dehydrated.

Authorities organized a massive manhunt to comb the area for Rainn over the weekend, when there were downpours and overnight temperatures in the low 40s. The search for her involved planes and helicopters and people on foot and on horseback.

Sutton found Rainn, who wasn't wearing a jacket, while searching on his four-wheeler.

Sutton, who lives in the area, told the dispatcher how "tough" Rainn is.

When the dispatcher heard Rainn crying softly during the 911 call, which was made from Sutton's cellphone, she told Sutton she had "goosebumps."

Sutton agreed.

"I didn't give up on this kid," he replied.

Rainn and her two brothers, ages 3 and 4, were staying with their great-grandparents on Friday when they reported her missing. Investigators from Trumbull County Children's Services are looking at the circumstances surrounding Rainn's disappearance.

Rainn's mother, Brandi Peterson, said her children had been staying with the couple because she was moving into an apartment. She said her grandmother was in the kitchen and the three children were with her grandfather in another area of the house when the toddler walked away.

The sheriff said the family had cooperated with investigators and there were no signs of foul play or violence at the home.

I picked this particular article because I wanted to have a base for my blackout poem that spoke to me and my style as a writer. The word jubilant jumped out at me as high diction, and I wondered if the author had any other descriptive words that I could borrow for my poetry. Indeed he/she did. A good way to find an article (in the newspaper today) or a book for a blackout poem is to look at the headline or the opening sentence. If either of these should be lacking, you will be hard pressed to find anything that you will like. Skimming is the key to finding an article that you will be interested in for your blackout poem in a timely manner.

First I looked for the words and phrases that stuck out the most to me. I felt these were powerful words: jubilant, missing, on Sunday evening, sleeping in a field, evaluation, dehydrated, a massive manhunt, comb, downpours, Rainn (what a cool name!), crying softly, goosebumps, investigators, circumstance, disappearance, toddler, foul play, at home. I circled these in green to make myself recognize the heart of the tale.

I then looked at my list, and found it to be satisfactory for what I wanted to do: create a poem, and these words were lyrical enough for me to work with. I circled all of the words in green in the picture above to help you visualize where I picked them.

The process of picking out these words would be the "attention to detail" piece that I mentioned before. The diction is elevated and the descriptors in this article make it easy select the words to create the poem that I want to create. 

Some of the words can even be shortened by blackout such as "Disappearance" can be shortened to "Disappear" or even "appear". Also if I am talking about a phone "app" or if I want the word ear in my sentence it can be shortened to "ear". In this way, I can make use of the resources given to me by the author, and still not adding anything of my own to the word bank. This is one of the better techniques blackout poets use in their poems.

Then I thought on the message that these combined words would have on my audience and the mood that they evoked in me. Perhaps a jubilant man finds himself after a downpour, manhunt, crying softly, and investigating himself? There were many possibilities, but I did not know what my poem would say until I found the right words to say it. 

If you don't find the words then don't push it. Sometimes your blackout poem can't say exactly what you would like. This is one of the challenges of finding a poem out of prose. Your poem does not need to follow a story, although you may want to develop a narrative poem, as I did.

I then looked through the words that I had, and tried to find words in between those that could make these fit together. I like to call these connector words. They are not as pretty as the ones before, but they add a flavor to the text. If I found none, I crossed out the word and moved on. (these marks were in red)

Some of the words that I have circled are not the original words that the author chose. Like what I did in "disappear"  I have spliced and shortened some of his/her words to change the meaning. An example of this can be found in the poem below.

Also, some of the fun of poetry, especially blackout poetry, is the interpretation that your audience has. The words that you use will remain the same, but if I were to mention the word "bird' contextually, and in memory it would evoke different pictures in different people's heads. Some might think of a finch, while others might think of a chicken, while still others might think of a penguin, an ostrich, or other birds.

In this poem, by Austin Kleon, the word "then" is actually the word "the" combined with the starting letter "n" of the word after it. The word "Organz" (organs) is also made from the word "Organize"

In this way Austin Kleon has made his own words from what the author had on the page.

We can also see that we are following the traditional left to right and up to down way of reading that we are taught in the western world. If your audience does not have  a trail to follow visually, they will most likely read your poem left to right, or up to down. Consider that you are probably reading this sentence left to right and up to down.

If we wanted our blackout poem to go right to left we would have to give our audience some guidance, like we see in the poem about "whizing" on the flowers in the poem below. We can also see that the author has a way of writing from down to up in the poem about "The ages of Trees". By making arrows and paths for the reader to follow visually, we can make our own black out poems go in different directions than the western way of reading a poem.


Back to my own blackout poem:
I looked over the article twice now and I believe that I have something to go off of. Now I am ready to make my mark on the page and transform the article into the poem it will be.

It reads:

Jubilant:

A man found a missing home, 

God on Sunday evening after sleeping in a field,

A parent wandered away, North, Just north, 

the Sheriff Rainn was dehydrated,

Organized downpours overnight, 

Involved people on foot and horseback,

Rainn wasn't wearing a jacket on his four-wheeler.

Crying softly, he had

"Goosebumps."

circumstances disappear,

Foul play at home.

For the next part, I took the piece, made my revisions to it by "boxing" the words that I wanted (refer to the video for boxing or the example below) and Blacking out what I didn't want. I still needed to put in the way that the reader was supposed to read the words because it seemed a bit jumbled, and messy. It looked something like this:

So, what I thought I had accomplished was turning an article about a heartfelt search and rescue into a poem about a sheriff called Rainn (who ironically is dehydrated). It can be interpreted in different ways and I won't spoil what I was going for in the poem. My wife saw something different in the poem than I saw, however, because I did not put a connector or a line that the reader could trace visually in the poem.

If you would like your audience to follow the flow better, seeing as my poem is a bit hard to read in the previous form, refer back to the pirate poem which actually has lines between what the author wants you to read, and which way it can be read. I tried my hand at this with paint (and I believe I didn't do as good a job as I could)

Here is an example of ways to make your reader read the way you want by adding some lines for them to follow visually. Some of these poems actually read backwards, such as the whizing on the flowers poem!

Our job as writers of poetry is to evoke emotion in the mundane. All subjects can be the spark of a wonderful poem. 

Your job is to replicate this exercise on your own with an article from Spilled Ink for the remainder of the hour.  If you would like, you may skip to the last sentence in the blog now, or you can look at some inspirational pictures below.

Some inspirational images from other blackout poets include these: 

here are some additional links :)

http://suzenart.blogspot.com/p/blackout-poetry.html

http://www.visualnews.com/2013/02/15/newspaper-blackout-poetry/

Please comment below so that I know that you have read the way to do blackout poetry and that you have read the instructions carefully.

Technology of today, teacher of tomorrow

Today, I write about the technologies that I will be using in the classroom; tomorrow I will be using these technologies because I will be volunteering to go to Lesher Middle School because I enjoyed working with the students there so much that I wanted an extra day with them (where I am not constantly worrying about the next class and grade that I will be receiving therein. I believe that technology in the classroom is an integral part of becoming a teacher in the 21st century. What we consider to be "technology" today may be considered "necessary" tomorrow, and who knows, our literature within the foreseeable future (before I am gone) may be completely technology-based and no longer require print-form.
I can see myself using the technologies that I learned in my Tech for the Classroom class, however there are a few technologies which I picked up, that I would like to say beat out all the rest. One of them being the use of Pixton, Socrative, and other technologies which allow students to write their own material online and share it with their peers. Socrative allows for students to quiz themselves on material for tests coming up, and has helped me in many classes where memorization was key. Pixton allows for students to create a comic for their own use and share it with their peers based on the lessons/narrative we are writing in class.
Limitations should only include those which are set by the school you work for, not your ingenuity, and should also include unforeseeable circumstances such as the weather or Wi-fi signal.
I plan on conversing with my students to allow myself room to grow using technologies, and if students have feedback about a unit, I would like to hear their take on which technologies are better for what I am doing than the ones which are currently being used. I will also share these with other teachers to see if they are appropriate for others to use in their classroom, because it isn't about being the best teacher in a school, it is about being the best school for a child.
I hope that I will continue to grow alongside my peers, those students who have taken this class with me, and that we will make the future as bright as possible for the students who are leaving our care and going out into the world to find jobs and succeed in school much as we have and our parents did before us.

This will not be the last blog post here, but rather it is a good segue into what I will be writing about in my professional life. Please stick with me as I try to blog about what it is to be a substitute teacher, what it is to be a new teacher, and what it is to be an experienced teacher.

Web 2.0, What Is It?

Reasearch Projects done easy

We all would like to see research papers go according to plan, but what where would you start? Who would you turn to when the teacher asks you to research your favorite actor, author, book? Would you just Google it and wing the rest? Who can you trust? Who can't you trust?

Well, let's start with Google, there is actually a lot you can do with Google that is relevant to the research project you have been assigned. So let's look at the front page, found at www.google.com 

everyone who is reading this should have a background knowledge of how to use the Google search bar, but if you're a first time Google user, the task ahead is simple, you type your search query into the search bar and hit the "Enter" key.

What we are looking for, however, is a way to make Google relevant to our research project. Let's say we are researching the book Beowulf. Simple enough right? Type Beowulf into the search bar and see what comes up. A mess of movie titles, and places to buy the book, but no scholarly articles about what other people say about Beowulf. There are sources which may help us on Google, but we must remember the rule of thumb when using this site, and that is that Google makes revenue based on the commercial properties of the website being published, and therefore, websites which generate a high amount of money will appear first in the query. The first link you will most likely come across is the Wikipedia website for Beowulf.

Wikis are a great resource for research projects, but we need to remember one crucial bit of information, that everyone can edit a wiki. Since everyone can edit a wiki, I will show you how to properly use a Wiki for your research project. Don't navigate away from this page yet, I am not finished. Even if your teacher says "You can't use Wikipedia for this paper or you will get an F", you will find this part useful. So, to go ahead and use wikipedia, we will need to look at the website first. Type Beowulf into the search bar and hit enter. The first site is Wikipedia, as expected.

If you click on the link, you will be taken to this page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf everything from the top to the bottom you should disregard completely, take your mouse and literally go all the way to the bottom of the website. The reason being is because I could go in, delete everything that there is on the website, put down "I saw Angelina Jolie in this movie" and skip along afterwards without many repercussions. The information that we are looking for is at the bottom of the page called "Reference Bibliography". Here, we can see a plethora of links, books, articles, magazines, and other references that wikipedia and the people that made the Beowulf page, have used to compile their information. Remember to always go to the website in order to check its credibility though.

If you click on the first link that shows up in the "Reference Bibliography" section you will be taken to this page http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3202069?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104415865391 which has a book review on the book Beowulf. As we can see, the page looks similar to that of Amazon.com or other websites selling books with teasers from the information. On this website, you can "Check out" books like a digital library, and even buy electronic copies, however, Jstor.org is not a very reliable website, because the information that they hold is not always scholarly. Scholarly information is information which has been reviewed by one or more collegiate level graduates and deemed worthy and accurate at that time.

You can also see that there are other valuable offline resources which you can take to your local library and check out at any time. These automatically count as scholarly, because they have undergone a process which means that at least one more set of eyes had to see it before it saw print (if not more).

As useful as Wikipedia is at finding resources for researching Beowulf and other topics, we must again return to Google to see if we can make use of this product for our research paper. Regular Google does not work, as we just found out, so let's try Google's scholarly engine, Google Scholar.

The domain name for Google Scholar is Scholar.Google.com . You can click on this hyperlink provided and it will take you to the main page. Enter the search term "Beowulf" again, and you will see a page which is oddly reminiscent of Google, the commercial search engine. If your research project has to be scientifically relevant, you have to make sure your sources are up to date, and to make sure of this you have to click on one of the links to the left which tells you when the article was published or edited last, such as "Since 2014". You may also note that you can search by relevance or by date published and that you can search for articles which have patents or citations.

Citations are a great part of any project, but make sure to always double check your work. Citations, as a reminder, must be in alphabetical order, and must be in the format which is most recent. If you are having troubles with telling what is up to date, visit the https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ website and click on your appropriate style (MLA, Chicago, Chicago Turabian, or APA are the most common).

If you would kindly go back to the search page on scholar.google.com with Beowulf, there are some other tools which you can use to narrow your search down to those which are relevant to your research paper. First, on the right hand side of the page, you will note that each link has a description of what type of link, and where that link came from beside it. Here, you can tell if the link came from an HTML, a book, a magazine, or any other source.

If you are have a google account, Google scholar also has a way for you to save your links so that you can reference them at home, or in your office, or wherever you may go in the future without searching for them time and time again. It is called "my library" If you click on the link to the left of the page you are currently on you will get this page

For you google users, Enabling this will help you save, and eventually help you build your works cited. if you go back to the webpage, you will see a downward facing arrow in the upper right hand corner of Google Scholar. If you click on this, you will be given the option of changing your settings (which is unnecessary) or going to an "advanced search". Click on this, and you should see that it brings up a search bar below your search bar.

Here you should be able to see how you can search for "Beowulf" in articles. We can search using the exact words "Beowulf dies to a dragon" and google scholar will search for any and all articles with that phrase. We might want to exempt from our searches any mentioning of Grendel, so we put into the search box, Without the words "Grendel" and finally, we want to find an article which was published sometime in the last 10 years, so we will go ahead and put in the bottom of the search terms 2004-2014. These tools can help Narrow down 70,700 results to a little over a hundred.

Review questions for section 1.
What is the domain name for Google Scholar?
Where can you find a good reference using Wikipedia?
What is Jstor.org similar to?
How many items can you check out simultaneously with Jstor.org?

Copywritten in stone

While Copyright can be scary to most of us, and whenever we are talking about copyright I break out in a cold sweat, it is not as scary as all of that.

What we need to remember is the rules of copyright, and know how to better protect ourselves.

Some ground rules are:

1. If you don't know if it is copyrighted, it probably is, so cite it.
This rule is a simple one, ignorance may be bliss when we're talking about war and other subjects that are disturbing to talk about, however, Copyright does not have to be one of these subjects. Ignorance in this case, to be honest, could: land you with a hefty fine, jail time, AND have other consequences such as expulsion from your school, district, or community via a firing at a job. Copyright is a law, and that means that we need to make sure that we are giving it the proper amount of respect that it deserves.

2. If it is copyrighted, give credit where credit is due.
This comes with an addendum, even if you give credit where credit is due you can still have a lawsuit taken against you for using someone's permission to use their creative works.

3. Always get permission when you're unsure whether or not you can use a creative work.
Creative works are always protected, going into a public domain is an easy way to sidestep this. However, someone can claim their work is their own at any time, and have you remove it due to the copyright laws.

4. Creative commons are your friends.
When using media and creative works, try to use creative commons:
Some Creative commons resources include:
Creativecommons.org.nz
Creativecommons.org
Creativecommons.org/licenses
You will find videos about creative commons on these sites.



Why the rules?
The rules help me help you keep yourself safe.


How do I find an image that is not protected under copyright?

If using Google search, this window is your friend you can access it by googling your image, then going to the Gear on the upper right hand corner of your screen which looks like this.



This little gear will be your friend from the day you start browsing the internet for creative commons images. Under this you will go to advanced image search, as you can see, i am trying to get an image of creative commons, however we don't know what i can use yet, Under everything we can see the usage rights. If we click on the blue hyperlink text, it takes us to a page which describes which images you can use, and what you have to attribute them to. to the right of that hyperlink you can scroll through and see what you would like to have for the copyright law.


But Alex, how do I find things when I am NOT using Google?

There are other ways to find images when you're not using Google that are similar to the Google engine, you need to do some digging, and usually it is under some sort of "advanced" settings tab. These "Advanced" settings can seem overwhelming, but you shouldn't be intimidated, let's go to a page that i have never been to before... which is Bing Image search.

Here is the homepage for Bing
Confused? that's alright, I am too.
What i see on the page is at the top i can see what that i can search for videos, images, maps, news, more (and if I put my mouse over it I can see that I can search for travel, and other items.), and even view my search history.
Down below, we can see the "Newsworthy News" section of Bing, a good place to search for news if you're looking for some current events.

What we're going to look for is "Cats" because I love cats, and we're going to search for works which are not protected under copyright to its full extent.

You can search for cat images one of two ways, one, you can type in cats and then click on images, or you can click on images and then type cats.

If we do, we get a page which looks like this.

we can see that there are a lot of suggestions as to what i am looking for in cats, but I am not picky. Therefore, I won't change that. What I AM looking for is this part

See the Circled area? That is the one that we need called "License"

This, if we click on it will give us the magic "Copyright" button that we are looking for. Simple enough to click on it, and then click on "Free to Share and use"

What we need to remember, though is to give credit where credit is due, whether we give them credit within the article, or we attach a hyperlink, we need to make sure that we are protecting the artist who took the pictures of these cute kitties.