Blackout Poetry

What is blackout poetry?

Blackout poetry is a poem made by taking an existing page of prose and blacking out every word except the ones you want to keep. The words that survive, read in order down the page, become the poem. Nothing is added — the writing is entirely in the choosing, which is what makes it a reading activity as much as a writing one.

It sits inside a much older tradition called erasure poetry, and it reached most classrooms through the American writer Austin Kleon, whose book Newspaper Blackout (2010) made the newspaper-and-marker version famous. Kleon popularised it rather than invented it: artists had been doing something similar for decades, most famously Tom Phillips, who began painting over a Victorian novel in 1966 to make A Humument.

How do you make a blackout poem, step by step?

1. Read the passage once, aloud, straight through. Do not let anyone touch a pen yet. They need to know what the passage says before they start dismantling it.
2. Read it again and circle in pencil. Fifteen or twenty words, no more. Pencil matters — the first pass is always too greedy and they will want to undo it.
3. Read the circled words aloud, in order. This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that teaches. It almost never sounds right first time, and fixing it is the lesson.
4. Cross some out and add one or two back. Usually the fix is cutting, not adding.
5. Black out everything else with a marker, paint, or patterned drawing.

On the whiteboard, the activity above does the first four steps live: paste a passage in, click the words to keep, and press Black out the rest so the class watches the poem appear. Then print the same passage as an A4 sheet and let them do it on paper.

What text should you use for blackout poetry?

The best passages are descriptive, ordinary and slightly over-written. You need more words than the poem needs, so dialogue is a poor choice and instructions are worse. A paragraph of setting description from your class reader is nearly always the right answer.

Length matters more than teachers expect. A whole page is too much — children stop reading and start hunting for nice-sounding words at random. Aim for 60 to 120 words. That is enough to choose between and short enough that they have genuinely read all of it.

Where do you get pages without ruining books?

This is the practical objection every teacher raises, and it is a fair one. Four ways round it, in the order I would try them:

• Print the passage. The sheet this activity produces does exactly that — your chosen text, laid out with room to work over.
• Old newspapers. Free, endlessly available, and the original version of the activity. Read a page first: adult news is not always classroom-safe.
• Damaged library stock. Most school libraries have a withdrawal pile, and librarians are usually delighted to see it used.
• Charity-shop paperbacks. A pound each and children love working on a real book page.

Which year groups is blackout poetry for?

Year group	What to change
Years 2–3 (Grades 1–2)	Cut the passage to 40–60 words and give a target: find five words that tell us how the place feels. Accept a phrase rather than a poem.
Years 4–5 (Grades 3–4)	Full activity. Add the two-joining-words rule. Ask them to give the poem a title that is not a word from the passage.
Year 6 (Grade 5)	Give the whole class the same passage and display the results together — the point being how differently thirty readers heard one paragraph. Strong bridge into inference and authorial intent.

Is blackout poetry the same as erasure poetry?

Nearly, and the distinction is worth knowing if a colleague raises it. Erasure poetry is the umbrella term for any poem made by removing words from an existing text. Blackout poetry is the version where the removed words are covered in solid black, so the redaction itself is visible on the page. Every blackout poem is an erasure poem; not every erasure poem is blacked out — some are painted over, cut out, or simply left white.