Blackout Poetry: The Poem Hidden in the Page

by Kasey Tross

One night this past weekend I was in one of those moods where I wanted to create something but I was too tired to write and too tired to have to clean up any kind of crafting mess, so I decided to try something new: blackout poetry.

If you're not familiar with the concept, it's where you take a page from a book (or any document, really) and select words from it to become your poem, then you simply black out (or strike through) all the rest. 

My first attempt was probably my favorite:

Funny how when we're struggling life still just seems to go on.

This one had kind of a story element to it:

"Almost handsome, never careful."
I may have to use that in a book someday.

My 12-year-old son saw what I was doing and decided to get in on the action. In my opinion, he won the award for the line of the day.

"Richard Harding Davis was suffering from Government"

Aren't we all?

This other one I did was kind of fun:

"Face the unknown as if it were a picnic." 

Now that's advice to live by.

So if you have an old book lying around (this one was pretty ancient and falling apart- the good thing about it was that the pages were super thick so I could even blackout both sides without it leaking through) and you need to scratch that creative itch without too much brainpower or mess, then I highly recommend giving this a whirl. 

It's fun to find the poem hidden in the page.