1. Found & Blackout Poetry How-To

2. Blackout & Found Poetry  Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry (a literary equivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.  A blackout poem is when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text–like in a newspaper–and starts redacting words until a poem is formed.  You will choose ONE to create for your portfolio.

3. Assignment:  Look for several sources you might use for your found or blackout poem.  Photocopy any books you cannot deconstruct.  Found Poetry will require you to cut out words. Look for photos, bockgrounds, colors, or images that can help add meaning to your poem,  Blackout Poetry will require you to use the text to create a visual poem or illustrations. Think about colors or markers and patterns you could create, as well as positive and negative space.

4. Found Poetry: A Language Collage  Writing found poetry is like creating a visual collage of language, the way a visual artist might use scraps of paper, cloth, feather, and other objects to create something new.  Your poem MUST express one central theme or idea.

5. Potential Sources for Found Poetry:  Instruction books; recipes  Horoscopes; fortune cookies  Bulletin boards flyers  Copies of Math, Science or Social Studies textbooks  Dictionaries  Magazine or newspaper pages  Pieces of letters, e-mails, post cards, or notes that you have written or received

6. Rules for Found Poetry:  Keep track of where you get your words do you can give your sources credit.  Off-Limits Sources: poetry, song lyrics, commercial advertising, and anything else that is already “artistically arranged.”  Use the words in the sequence you found them.  Cut out anything unnecessary or dull.  Adding your own words is OFF-LIMITS to this form of poetry, but for the sake of your sanity, you my add no more than two words of your own to clarify or make meaning.  Also, you may make minor changes in tenses, possessives, plurals, punctuation, and capitalization, as necessary.

14. Blackout Poetry  Taking published works in the form of newspaper articles, novels, and even horoscopes, this style of "blackout poetry" reveals only carefully selected words to create a new, shorter composition of expression. Often, the poems produced offer a sense of hope and inspiration. At times, they can be depressing but thought-provoking.

15.  Blackout words in a story or article to leave behind the general gist of the piece.  Given any written piece (newspaper, something from online, etc.) as a source of words, black out words to create an understanding of independent reading material.  Blackout words from the newspaper et. al. to demonstrate a feeling or theme or understanding of a class novel (chapter, unit, whole piece).  Play around with words to create something new.  Play around with parts of speech to create a poem, maybe using specific parts of speech. Blackout Poetry Rules:

18. Artistic Examples