The Blackout: "You Are Gone"

 I found this week's poetry style enjoyable and frustrating to practice. 

    There is this website called Random Passages that I found while searching for poetry to read. It is sort of an online folder of random book passages that the website creator found memorable. The first post is dated back in 2010 while the last is from 2017. It's unfortunate because I thought many of these passages were interesting and actually read some of the books. 

The creator wrote, "If you love reading, you’ll know what it’s like to come across a piece of writing that somehow captures your imagination."

 This is what I believe poetry produces. Or should. When I read poetry, I find all sorts of worlds, topics, fantasies, or realities no matter the poetic structure. The thing about poetry is it urges you to access knowledge and/or emotion to create understanding from words. Books are the same. 

The poetry form that was picked by the wheel for this week was the blackout (or erasure or redacted). 

I recall making a blackout poem once in school, but writing one now was a new experience. This poetry style started because of people who published redacted versions of the paper, and then soon enough, artists were expressing surreal, absurd, and existential thoughts through the interplay of words and images. Blackout is when you make poetry out of someone's work or a preexisting work. Some might argue that it's not 'making,' it is 'finding' or discovering poetry among the words on a page.

What is Blackout Poetry? Examples and Inspiration

What is Blackout Poetry and How to Teach it (incorporating blackout poetry in the classroom)

So, I used Random Passages to start practicing blackout poetry. I used Screencastify to record the process. 

Through this exercise, I realized how hard it can be to find inspiration. It's not easy to find words you can string to form new meanings, especially when the passage is written for a specific message. Sometimes, there's no imagery. Some passages are short. You have to scan the passage multiple times to choose words that could fit the poem. My problem was that the poem seemed to run off in different directions as I was picking the words. 

Here is the blackout poem I decided on in the end:

"You Are Gone"

What does it mean?

    I found this in Tim Weaver's You Were Gone. I noticed that the passage had color imagery and played with that. I thought of "the brighter the light, the darker the shadow" when I was looking for the words. I also thought about the ideas of facades and fake smiles - or even the reality of depression. I don't know. This might look like the simplest poem I've got since I started my learning project, but it was the hardest to "find." 

The passage from You Were Gone by Tim Weaver

If you're looking for something to do or are interested in writing poetry, I recommend doing blackout poetry. It's interesting to make something out of something, and it would give you the opportunity to explore works. For road trips or flights, you can even bring some books that you won't mind writing on.