To celebrate the upcoming release of my poetry collection Forgive Us Our Trespasses, I’m running a blog post series about it, starting with the most basic question:
What the heck is “blackout poetry”?
Blackout poetry is a form of poetry where you take a newspaper article, a book, or some other pre-existing material, box off certain words, and cross out the rest to create something new. Rather than writing new words in a blank document, you take an existing text and remove everything you don’t want.
It’s like plain old editing, but artsier and with a hipster aesthetic.
Blackout poetry falls under a wider category called “found poetry,” where you create poetry from words and phrases you encounter out in the world like billboard signs and postcards.
I first heard of blackout poetry back in 2010 when Austin Kleon popularized it with his book Newspaper Blackout. I spent a good portion of my summer break from college that year cutting up newspaper articles and inhaling the tantalizing scent of sharpies as I got the hang of this visual form.
I kept experimenting with blackout poetry throughout the rest of my college years and afterward. As I got more comfortable with it and figured out my own style, I thought it’d be neat to create a collection of blackout poems from the same book. I first tried it with my high school Dover Thrift Edition copy of Pride and Prejudice, a book whose intentions I appreciate but whose purposefully detailed and trivial prose I just can’t get through (sorry, Jane Austen fans). I’d called the thing Ride and Dice, and had gotten through all of five pages before I realized that I couldn’t weave a cohesive narrative among the poems, nor could I digitize them in any legible way. So, I set that project aside permanently.
A couple years later, I found an old daily devotional booklet and decided it’d be both hilarious and fascinating to make blackout poetry out of each entry. While that booklet is not the source text of Forgive Us Our Trespasses, it opened up to me the intriguing possibility of making a blackout poetry collection from a religious source text.
That intrigue led me to consult my good friend Project Gutenberg, whose free, public domain ebooks I rely on constantly in my day job. I searched “Christianity” or “theology” or something along those lines, picked a random title, downloaded the PDF, and started making poems.
Blackout Poetry and Copyright
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Does making this type of poetry out of someone else’s work violate copyright laws?” While I would argue that blackout poetry changes the source text so much that it no longer resembles the original and therefore doesn’t infringe (e.g., it’s a transformative work), I am not a legal expert nor did I want to be living with that uncertainty in publishing my own collection of these poems. That’s why I chose a public domain book as the source text. When a work is in the public domain, you can reproduce it, edit it, and make derivative works without giving attribution, paying licensing fees, or worrying about copyright infringement. You can create new works based on public domain works that are copyrighted to you, but you don’t have rights of the original work you used.
But aside from making myself sleep easier at night, using public domain works offers tons of creative potential. Since blackout poetry for me depends on finding the most captivating words and phrases, I discovered that these books with a lot of old, religious language create so much vivid imagery. It’s fun to repurpose that language and draw out or change the tone it has in its original context.
How I Made the Poems in This Collection
Most blackout poetry is made by physically altering a printed page with a pen or marker and then scanning it into a computer. I did this for the first several pages of my source text, using a freeware Mac version of Paint to add the simple coloring that I wanted. This got tedious when I realized that going through the entire 250+ page book would take forever, so I switched to taking screenshots of each PDF page. This saved me a ton of time from printing out a few pages only to mark them up and scan them back into the computer. It was much easier to get through the entire book using only digital tools.
A handful of poems incorporate artwork that I found on Pixabay, a stock image website where everything is in the public domain via a CC0 license. I cropped and edited them as I saw fit. Last but not least, I hired an old friend of mine, Corrie Liotta, to design my book cover. Working with her was fantastic and certainly saved me a ton of trouble trying to throw something decent together in my freeware programs. That, in a nutshell, is how these poems came to be! Be sure to preorder Forgive Us Our Trespasses so you can enjoy the entire collection.