Blackout Poetry and Prose

Blackout poetry sits at the intersection of language and art, part poem, part painting, entirely its own thing. Our tool lets you experiment with the same concept: load a text, choose your words, and black out the rest. If you enjoy working with found language, you might also enjoy the Erasure Poetry tool.

Curious about the art form behind the tool? Learn about the history of blackout poetry.

Directions

Choose Your Source Text Select a classic text from the dropdown menu to load it onto the canvas. If you prefer to use your own writing, paste your text into the box and click the Load button. You can add poetry and the lines will be oriented correctly line by line.

Find Your Poem Ensure the Select mode button is active. Click on individual words in the text to highlight them. These are the words you want to keep for your poem. If you change your mind, click a word again to deselect it.

Apply the Blackout Once your words are selected, click the Black Out button. All words you did not select will be hidden by the background color. You can change this background color by clicking the colored squares in the Blackout section.

Style Your Words To make your words tilt on the page, click the Edit mode button. Now, click on any visible word to reveal a control menu. You can use the arrow buttons to tilt the word or the plus and minus buttons to make the word larger or smaller.

Adding Drawings and Images

• Drawing Click the Draw mode button to enable the pen. Use the color picker and the slider to adjust your pen color and thickness. You can draw freely over the blackout area.
• Images Click the + Image button to upload a photo or illustration from your device. Once uploaded, you can drag the image to position it. Click the image to rotate it or delete it.

Save Your Work When you are satisfied with your creation, click the Download button. This will save a copy of your blackout poem to your device as an image file.

Reset If you want to start over completely, click the Reset button to return the text to its original state and clear all drawings.

As an example, here is a sample of a finished Valentine’s Day digital card.

The art of erasure

There is a poem hiding inside almost everything ever written. It waits inside the newspaper, the instruction manual, the old novel gathering dust on a shelf. Blackout poetry, also called erasure poetry, is the art of finding it. This is the same art as the deconstructed poetry tool; there is astonishing beauty hidden inside a heap of words.

The process is simple. Take any existing text: a page torn from a magazine, a printed article, a passage from a book. Read it slowly, without any preconceived ideas, and let certain words catch your eye. Circle them. Then take a marker and black out everything else, leaving behind only the words you’ve chosen. What remains is your poem.

The technique was popularized by British artist Tom Phillips, who in 1966 began transforming a Victorian novel into an entirely new work of art, painting over its pages and leaving windows of visible text. Austin Kleon later brought the form to a wider audience with his 2010 book Newspaper Blackout, showing that any morning paper held poems waiting to be freed with a Sharpie.

What makes blackout poetry so interesting is its constraints. You cannot insert a better word, you are limited to the words already on the page, and what you come up with will be a piece of art: separate from the original and brand new.