Bustle Hustles 'Blackout Poetry'

Our hearts are aflutter over this article by E. Ce Miller about erasure/found poetry's distant cousin, "Blackout Poetry," a phenomenon that's sweeping the web. At Bustle, Miller explains "The basic premise behind blackout poetry — also sometimes referred to as found poetry or erasure poetry, though there are distinctions between the three — is that the poet takes a found document, traditionally a print newspaper, and crosses out a majority of the existing text, leaving visible only the words that comprise his or her poem; thereby revealing an entirely new work of literature birthed from an existing one." Let's start there: 

The striking imagery of the redacted text — eliminated via liberal use of a black marker (hence: “blackout” poetry) — and the remaining readable text work together to form a new piece of visual poetry. Pretty cool, right?

“It’s sort of like if the CIA did haiku,” writes Austin Kleon, the author and artist behind the Steal Like An Artist books and others, in a blog post titled: A Brief History of my Newspaper Blackout Poems. In addition to his 2010 book, Newspaper Blackout, Kleon shares his blackout poems on Instagram (@austinkleon) and Tumblr (@newspaperblackout) where he quickly learned that the central idea behind his art form was hardly new — though he’s credited with the current trend of newspaper-specific blackout poetry.

In a TEDxKC talk from 2012, Kleon traces the evolving history of blackout poetry back 250 years, to a man named Caleb Whiteford who published a broadsheet of found poetry and puns he’d collected from some of the first-ever print newspapers. According to Kleon's research, blackout poetry then made its way to a Parisian avant-garde poet named Tristan Tzara; a painter named Brion Gysin; American Beat writer William S. Burroughs; contemporary writer Tom Phillips, whose form of blackout poetry is called “humument"; and finally to Kleon himself, who began creating his own blackout poetry as a cure for writer's block.

Read more at Bustle.