blackoutpoetry

What is blackout poetry?

Start with an existing text. Black out parts of it. What is left is your poem.

It’s sort of like if the CIA did haiku.

Origins and evolution

1. 1766Caleb Whitefoord “cross-readings” across newspaper columns
2. 1920Tristan Tzara draws cut-out words from a bag
3. 1965Doris Cross paints over a dictionary
4. 1966Tom Phillips A Humument, created from an 1892 novel titled A Human Document
5. 1977Ronald Johnson Radi os, erased from Milton’s Paradise Lost
6. 2005Austin Kleon takes a marker to the newspaper
7. 2017Isobel O’Hare blacks out public apologies

Diagrams illustrate each technique and are not the works themselves.

Same marks, different acts

Censorship

to conform to requirements
or avoid trouble

Russia, 2024: a publisher blacks out about 70 of a book’s 400 pages to comply with the law. Reuters. The above is an illustrative diagram.

Blackout poetry

as an act of creation

It can be:

• subverting the source text
• wielding or reclaiming the power of erasure
• uncovering their own meanings in found material

and more

On tumblr: a distillation

All that is left:“I want to distill myself like
poets
do.”

Post by phantomrose96, blackout by shirecorn, on Tumblr.

Here are some I made earlier

Here are some I made earlier (continued)

Demo: a free online tool

Blackout Poetry Maker, by Emma Winston

1. Pick a text, or paste your own
2. Tap the words to keep
3. Black out
4. Render as image

Try the web app on your phoneemmawinston.me/blackoutpoetry

Tips when trying it out

• Draw boxes around text you want first, black out afterwards.
• Assume reading order: left to right, top to bottom.
• Minimalism works.
• Try a quick poem first to get your creativity flowing, then take your time.
• Experiment with paper versus digital.
• Ultimately, you decide your own pace.
• There is no “bad” or “wrong” output.

Closing reflection prompts

• Do you see yourself as subverting the intent of the source text?
• What messages emerged from your act of creation / destruction?
• Paper or digital – which did you prefer?
• Would your three words for poetry be different now?

Keep experimenting

Resources

Thank you for being here. These slides are available at nh.clarayeo.org/blackoutpoetry.

Source texts on the table, spanning years 1651 to 2025

• 1651Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
• 1667John Milton, Paradise Lost
• 1776The Declaration of Independence
• 1792Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 1818Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• 1843Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine
• 1848Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• 1855Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
• 1859Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• 1861Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management
• 1865Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• 1948Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• 1949George Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak”
• 1996John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”
• 2000Lawrence Lessig, “Code Is Law”
• 2008Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”
• 2009Sandra Beasley, “Unit of Measure”
• 2012UK Government Digital Service, Government Design Principles
• 2015Virginia Postrel, “Losing the thread”
• 2016General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Article 17: Right to erasure
• 2022Hansard (parliamentary proceedings), Online Safety Bill second reading
• 2023Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok’s enshittification”
• 2024Ada Palmer, “Tools for Thinking About Censorship”
• 2025Steve Donoghue, review of Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
• 2025Cory Doctorow, “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI”

Each link goes to the full text. The sheets on the table may be excerpts where not practical to reproduce the full text.