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:
- words and their economy,
- attention to detail, diction, and spacing.
- 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)
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 :)
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.
