Before starting this project, I had a passing familiarity with blackout poetry. One of my colleagues does them regularly, and while I’ve always found the results to be “neat” in a novelty sort of way, that’s about as far as my interest went. When the assignment was given, I thought my biggest obstacle would be mustering up the enthusiasm to do the work, but that the work itself would be relatively simple: You take something (a page of words) and make it into less of that thing (a few words). If subtracting from someone else’s work counts as art, I could have cruised through my BFA with nothing but 10 minutes and an eraser. I’m being facetious, but I honestly wasn’t expecting too much of a challenge.
As is so often the case when I make dismissive assumptions about something I don’t actually understand, the reality proved to be much more complicated.
To start with, you’re not just “subtracting words” from a piece, obviously. There needs to be some intentionality to the words you choose to leave behind. Initially, my strategy was to scan the text trying to cobble something together out of words I was cherry-picking almost arbitrarily. This proved to be an exercise in futility, as searching for a handful of needles in a haystack is only negligibly easier than finding one. I refined my process to scanning for a “subject” first, a noun, and trying to work outward from there. I would often get to a place where I had built the beginning or the end of a statement, but rarely a complete thought. These little one sentence narratives I was constructing would hit a dead end, and I’d have to adjust what I thought I was saying and come up with something else I could say instead, adding and removing words as necessary. There was a lot of give and take, a lot of massaging, and a need to abandon preconceived notions of what exactly I was making, but in the end, I was amused by the results of this freewheeling process. I was also struck by how much effort went into crafting a single sentence.
I tend to think of poetry as an expressive medium, where the author is free to explore any thoughts or feelings he or she desires. Blackout poetry imposes constraints on this process. The author doesn’t have access to their full vocabulary to say whatever they want, but is forced to make thought provoking decisions about what they want to say with the limited words they do have access to. It was particularly fascinating to me when the entire class presented their work, and I discovered how wildly the messages varied despite being generated from the same general word pool.
This entry is too long, but I need to touch on the drawing element of the project as well. In short, trying to draw around blocked off sections of a “canvas” is, unsurprisingly, hard. This too was an iterative process, as I gradually became more confident using increasingly complex designs and expanding my tools a little beyond a single Sharpie marker. On the upside, whenever I messed up catastrophically, I could always color over my terrible doodles with ink. It is called a “blackout” poem afterall!
