Wound Up

I have a confession to make. The Black Out Poem has captured my imagination. I find it interesting to take a page filled with writing and turn it into something often contrary to the original meaning. It’s like playing with someone else’s words and making them become my own. Free verse is the best way to write this form of poetry. I ran out of pages in Rebecca Hunt’s Mr. Chartwell. I decided to step things up in my adventure with black-out poetry.

Before I retired, I worked in a small university police office. Part of my duties centered around processing the lost and found. At the end of each semester, students often left books on table tops they couldn’t sell back to the bookstore. We kept them for a long time before placing them in the trash. I brought Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset home because it caught my attention. This poem I created from my rescued book is titled Wound Up.

About the Black Out Poem and Wound Up

Poet takes a black marker and redacts words until a poem is formed. It is important to note the text and redacted words form a visual poem.

Method to use

1. Identify source text. The source can be a newspaper, a book page, or written text.

2. Draw a box around keywords or phrases.

3. Make Connections between boxes. (This is optional.)

4. Color the rest with a marker. You can use any color. The most common color used is black.

I found this style of creating a poem unique from anything I’ve ever tried before. The words are already provided, and the challenge is to make something poetic out of the text. I’m excited to see how the different textbook writing style found in Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset translates into poetic form.

Wound Up

A born loser
A natural genius
A pea-brain
Fixed judgments
Am I next?
This caveat
Taught more
Stories about
Geniuses
Alone propelled into
The other half of
Discoveries
The message
Amazing
From innocent remarks
Wow
You didn’t make mistakes
 are speed perfection
Speed and perfection
The enemy of
Anything challenging
Complete a task
Deny them
Whoops
I guess that was too easy
Wasting your time
Reassuring
Feel secure
Same principles applies
Afraid to show a deficiency
Always knew
Every time
Got so wound up

Who is Molly Shea?

Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh.  To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here.

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