Blackout Poetry
Quick answer: Blackout poetry makes a poem by inking over most of a printed page so only chosen words remain visible. Learn how to make blackout poems that go beyond the trend.
Blackout poetry is a form of erasure in which the poet takes a printed page, usually from a newspaper or old book, and blacks out most of the text with marker or ink, leaving a scattering of visible words that read in sequence as a poem. The page becomes both text and image: islands of print in a sea of redaction, with the deletion itself on full display.
The form exploded in popularity through Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout and the social media wave that followed, and it remains the most accessible doorway into experimental poetry: anyone with a marker and yesterday's paper can start. But accessibility is not triviality. The blacked-out page carries associations of censorship, classified documents and silenced speech, and strong blackout poems put that visual politics to work rather than just harvesting pretty phrases.
How It Works
Scan a page for words that pull at you, circle them lightly in pencil, and test whether they can link into a readable sequence, since the eye will travel left to right and top to bottom through the survivors. Then ink out everything else. From an invented news paragraph about a routine council meeting, a poet might rescue the words residents, quietly, agreed, to vanish, a four-word ghost story hiding in civic prose. Because the redaction is visible, design becomes part of composition: solid black bars feel official and ominous, loose scribble feels furious, and some artists draw images into the blackout so the page reads as illustration and poem at once.
Where You Will See It
Austin Kleon's newspaper poems, collected in 2010, made the form a phenomenon, though he points to predecessors including Tom Phillips, whose decades-long project A Humument painted over a Victorian novel page by page, turning each into artwork threaded with surviving text. The redaction aesthetic also connects blackout to documentary poetry that reproduces actually censored files, and classrooms everywhere now use the form because it lowers the blank-page barrier: the words are already there, waiting to be found. Galleries, zines and short-video platforms keep producing new variations.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose source pages with rich, concrete vocabulary; sports reports and science features yield better salvage than celebrity coverage. Pencil first, ink last, and hunt for a poem with a spine, subject, turn and landing, rather than a horoscope-flavoured string of abstractions, which is the form's most common failure. Vary your blackout style to match the poem's mood. If you enter contests with blackout work, photograph or scan the page cleanly and check that the venue accepts image-based poems; judges scoring language and structure, as Writory's do, still want a poem that reads as more than a found aphorism.
What poets can take from this
- Raid varied sources; the vocabulary of the page sets the ceiling of the poem.
- Test the surviving words aloud before blacking out; ink is unforgiving.
- Use the style of redaction, bars, scribble, drawn imagery, as a tonal instrument.
- Avoid stringing together abstract words like dream, hope and silence; salvage concrete nouns and verbs.
- Keep the source identifiable in your records, and credit it when you share the piece.
Try it yourself
Take one page from a manual for something obsolete, a fax machine, a video recorder, a road atlas, and blackout it into a poem about being left behind by the future. Let the shape of your ink suggest the machine itself.
Questions
What is the difference between blackout poetry and erasure poetry?
Blackout is one variety of erasure. Erasure covers any method of deleting most of a text, including white-out and faint type, while blackout specifically covers the discarded words with visible ink, making the redaction part of the artwork.
Can blackout poetry be published?
Yes, usually as images. Copyright applies to the source text, so publishing blackout of recent books sits in a grey area; newspapers, old books and public domain pages are safer. Journals that accept visual poetry generally welcome scanned blackout work.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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