Graphic Poetry

Recently in poetry class we made poems by cutting words out of magazines and piecing them together like a ransom note. I've seen somewhere where the author does the opposite. Instead of cutting the words out and pasting them on another page, the author takes on page and blacks out the words that they don't want. The viewer reads the uncrossed words together as the poem. This style of poetry is known as blackout poetry.

This poem, author unknown, is a good example of a blackout poem. The author crossed out the other words to leave the words "I want to go back so I won't grow empty." I find this form of poetry more difficult to create than the ransom note poetry because the author is limited to the words on the page and the order that they are in. Some people chose to use newspaper articles and other choose book pages.

Some poets create their poem and put artwork around it. This poem to the left, author unknown, created a tree-esque design around the words and in the root area, the poem reads "Heart pounding, spiraling into the darkness."  Austin Kleon wrote a book titled Newspaper Blackout in which he shows his various blackout poems. If you go to that website, he has his poems titled "October Horoscopes" displayed. I find this group of poems interesting because in each horoscope he creates poem. This must have been challenging because of the limited words, but he makes it work.

However, some people strongly oppose this type of poetry. Laura, from www.go-home-roger.tumblr.com, finds blackout poetry offensive to the author of the original work. She says "

I wish people would stop doing black out poems. Guess what? A person took the time to put their feelings on paper. To put thoughts, and ideas, and perspectives on a piece of paper so maybe someone else can understand where they’re coming from and feel like they can relate to someone. A person took their thoughts and wrote them down and shared them with the world despite all the vulnerability that comes with and you just stomped all over it. Their work inspires you? That’s fantastic. That’s exactly what they were hoping for. Write it down on a piece of paper instead of destroying something that means everything to someone else. It just like burning a book, or banning it. What gives you the right? The world is one giant canvas and you had to go and use one tiny spot in this giant world that someone else already has. You may be trying to make something beautiful, but you had to destroy something already beautiful to do it and that’s never okay."

I find her perpective very interesting. Who would think that poetry could be controversial in this way? She points out that to create your own work of art, you must destroy someone elses. It would be like someone going into the Sistine Chapel and painting over the ceiling because they were inspired by it. A lot of people would be angry if you did this. Coloring over someone elses work is pretty much the same thing.

While I find blackout poetry beautiful, I never thought about it in this way. I was thinking about making some of my own, but after this, maybe I won't.