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 Go For It.
About the Black Out Poem and Go For It
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.
Go For It People be like Want the impossible Worrying about Being a nobody Admire Instead of being contemptuous Somebodies are people Who go for it With all they have Very different teaching A different lesson You get out What you put in Lost his cool Shooting lazy From the outside Not exerting Lit a fire The same fire Improve all the time Timing, nerves, and wind Work on it Nothing is promised Prophecies coming true Things happening.
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.
Be sure to follow Molly on Twitter!
Molly – this is great 🙂
A sort-of random question: Does the poem always have to follow the order of the original text? I thought the selected words and phrases from the original text could be rearranged… is that true?
~David
They can be rearranged. I think the common way to do that is to draw arrows to the portion or word you select.
The book must be a good read. And not only that, it generates a black out poem like the above. Sometimes we are forced to chase the impossible and now I’ve complete give up on such a habit.
Thank you.