Blackout Poetry Prompts
Quick answer: Blackout poetry prompts with specific source texts and constraints: 14 original ideas for redacting pages into poems, plus practical marker-and-page advice.
Blackout poetry starts with somebody else's words and a thick marker. You redact a printed page until only your chosen words survive, and those survivors, read in order, become the poem. It sounds like play, and it is, but it is also serious training in selection, the skill every poet needs most. The page gives you a fixed vocabulary. You cannot reach for your usual favourite words because they probably are not there.
Here is the craft insight nobody tells beginners: the source text matters more than your marker technique. A page of dull corporate prose yields eerie, flat poems. A melodramatic romance page yields comedy. Choose your source like you would choose an instrument, then let these prompts tell you what to hunt for inside it.
The Prompts
Each prompt names a source and a constraint. Photocopy pages rather than destroying books you love, and always work on text you are legally free to mark up for personal practice.
- Take a page from an old appliance manual and black it out until what remains reads as a love letter. Keep the word 'warranty' if it appears.
- Redact a junk-mail letter so the surviving words form a warning from your future self. The first surviving word must be 'congratulations'.
- Use a page of a phone book or old directory. Make a poem about loneliness using only names, numbers and street words.
- Find a newspaper weather report and black it out into a breakup poem. Allow yourself exactly twelve surviving words.
- Take the terms and conditions of any app, print one page, and redact it into a lullaby. Notice how sinister the leftover legal words become.
- Use a page from a school science textbook and leave only words that build a poem about your grandmother's kitchen.
- Black out a sports match report so what survives describes a war nobody won. Keep every number the page gives you.
- Redact a recipe until it reads as instructions for forgetting someone. 'Fold', 'separate' and 'rest' are your friends here.
- Take one page of a detective novel and remove the crime entirely, leaving a quiet poem about rain, coats and waiting.
- Use a travel brochure page and black it out into a poem spoken by someone who never got to go. Leave one place name only.
- Print a transcript of a political speech and redact it down to fifteen words of accidental honesty.
- Take the index page of any nonfiction book and make a poem from entries and page numbers alone, reading like a life summarised.
- Black out a horoscope column so the survivors form advice your ten-year-old self actually needed.
- Redact two facing pages of the same book into two poems that argue with each other, then title them as one piece.
How to Use These
Work in pencil first. Circle candidate words lightly, read the survivors aloud in page order, and only then commit with the marker. Page order is the form's one hard rule: you take words in the sequence the page gives them, no rearranging. Give yourself twenty minutes per page and do three pages in a sitting, because the first attempt usually teaches you what the page wants and the third one delivers it.
Afterwards, type the surviving words out as ordinary lines and look at them cold. Some blackout poems only work as visual objects, with the redaction bars doing half the labour, and that is fine. But the strongest ones stand up naked as text. Revise by returning to the page and rescuing one more word, or burying one you thought you needed.
What poets can take from this
- Choose source texts whose tone contrasts with your subject; the friction makes the poem.
- Read surviving words aloud before inking anything permanent.
- Keep prepositions and small connectors; beginners hoard nouns and end up with lists.
- Photograph or scan finished pages immediately, since marker bleeds and pages tear.
- If a page refuses to yield a poem, turn it ninety degrees in your mind and hunt for a different speaker.
Try it yourself
Take a page from a first-aid manual and black it out into a poem about repairing a friendship, keeping at least one instruction verb per line of survivors.
Questions
Is blackout poetry legal to publish?
Making blackout poems for private practice is generally fine, but publishing work built on in-copyright text can raise permission issues. Use public domain sources, your own writing, or texts you have rights to when you plan to share or submit the result.
What is the difference between blackout and found poetry?
Blackout poetry keeps the source page visible and redacts it, preserving word order, so the object itself is part of the poem. Found poetry lifts words or phrases out of sources and lets you rearrange them into new lines on a fresh page.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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