Questions about blackout poetry

Blackout poetry is a poem formed by blacking out most of the words on a page and keeping the rest. The kept words stay in the order the page gave them. Nothing is added and nothing is moved.

The page can be any printed text: a newspaper article, a page of a novel, a sonnet. The black bars are part of the poem. They show how much was left out.

ELIDE does this on screen, with public-domain texts. You press or drag across words to black them out, and what is left is your poem.

Found poetry takes existing text, such as a sign, a letter or a news report, and arranges it as a poem. Erasure poetry is a kind of found poetry in which you hide most of an existing text and keep what remains. The Academy of American Poets lists blackout poetry as another name for erasure.

In practice, people tend to say “blackout” when the hiding is done with a marker or a black bar, and “erasure” when it is done any other way: white-out, paint, fading, cutting. The tool matters less than the rule. The poem is made from words that were already there, in the order they were already in.

Found poetry is the wider family. It also takes in collage, where words from several places are moved into a new order. A blackout poem does not move words.

People have altered printed pages for a long time. These are a few of the books that shaped the form, each easy to look up.

Tom Phillips began A Humument in 1966 by painting over a secondhand Victorian novel, W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), page by page. A small first edition was issued in 1970. The new title is what is left of the old one.

Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (1977) took away words from the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost until a new poem was left. Milton’s poem opens: “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit”.

Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004) fades most of the words in Shakespeare’s sonnets and keeps a few, so the old text sits behind the new poem. Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow (2006) whites out most of the words in an old book of the same title.

M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) draws every word from one source, the 1783 legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert, which concerned the killing of enslaved people aboard the slave ship Zong. Because she repeats and recombines the words, it sits nearer found poetry than blackout.

Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout (2010, Harper Perennial) gathers poems formed by marking out words in newspaper articles, adds poems from his readers, and ends with a guide to making your own.

A second line runs through constraint writing. The Oulipo, founded in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, is a group of writers and mathematicians who write under stated rules. Blackout poetry is one such rule: use only the words the page already has, in the order it has them.

Both, in different senses. Every word belongs to the first author. The choice of which words to keep, and what they say together, is yours. The poem comes from reading, and here the reading is the writing.

The question is an old one. In “The Death of the Author” (1967), Roland Barthes argued that a text is not a message fixed by what its author meant. It is made of earlier writing, and its meaning is completed by the reader. Blackout poetry puts that idea to work. The author’s text stays on the page, and what you add is a reading.

Poets who work this way credit the source. ELIDE does too: every poem’s page names the text it came from, with title and author, whether or not the maker gives a name.

Credit is not the same as permission. For public-domain text there is nothing to ask. For text still in copyright, see the question on copyright.

Choose a text with room in it: a page or two, not a whole book. Read it once without touching anything. Notice words you like, a phrase that repeats, a mood.

Then look for a thread. A poem needs a subject, even a small one. Find a few words that point the same way and keep those. Black out the rest, working outward from the words you have chosen so you do not lose them.

Read the result aloud. Black out more if a word is doing no work. Bring a word back if the poem has a gap.

In ELIDE, paste a text or choose one from Inspiration. Press or drag across words to black them out. The eraser brings them back, and undo and redo work as you would expect. Trim moves two lines that cut words off the start and end of the page. When you are happy, give the poem a title and save it. A title is optional, but a poem needs one to appear in the gallery.

Read the whole page before you black out anything. The best words are often in the third paragraph, not the first line.

Keep fewer words than you think you need. A poem of eight words that all count reads better than one of forty where half are filler. Let the bars do work too. A long run of black reads as a pause, a silence, or something that cannot be said.

Listen to the sound. Read the kept words aloud and notice where the stresses fall. Look for a repeated sound, or a rhythm you can use.

Add a title that says something the words do not. A good title changes how the poem is read.

Practise on short texts first. A sonnet is fourteen lines and a lot of choices. The teachers page has five starter prompts if you want a place to begin.

Not in a blackout poem. The rule is that the words stay where the page put them. If you move words, you are making a collage or a cut-up, which is a different form.

ELIDE keeps to the rule. The only things you can do to a word are to black it out and to bring it back. There is no way to move one.

Count the words on the page and call the number n. ELIDE counts a word as a run of letters and digits that may also contain apostrophes and hyphens, such as summer’s or well-known. Spaces and punctuation are not words.

A blackout poem is one choice per word: keep it or black it out. The kept words stay in order, so the poem is fully described by which words are kept. A page of n words therefore makes 2ⁿ poems: two choices, repeated n times. Each poem is an order-preserving subsequence of the page.

Here is a small case. These are the first two lines of Sonnet 18, from Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Project Gutenberg eBook 1041):

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

They hold 15 words, so they hold 2^15 = 32,768 ways to keep or black each one. ELIDE does not save a poem with no word blacked out, so 32,767 of the 32,768 can be saved.

Keep four words, compare, summer’s, lovely and temperate, and black out the other 11. The poem looks like this:

█ █ compare █ █ █ summer’s ██ █ █ █ lovely █ █ temperate:

That is one of the 32,768. The count doubles with every word you add.

Twenty words give over a million poems. A page of 300 words gives a number with 91 digits. Almost all of those poems say nothing, and the craft is finding the few that do. This is why two people given the same page usually make different poems.

Trim chooses which stretch of the page the poem covers. The window is a pair of numbers counted in words: the first word shown, and the first word not shown. On a page of n words there are n(n + 1) ÷ 2 possible windows. For the 15-word example that is 120.

Words outside the window are not part of the poem. They do not appear on the share page, in the PDF or on the share card. Any word you blacked out outside the window is dropped when you save, and it does not count in the number of words redacted.

Trim does not black anything out. It cuts words off the start and end. A window that covers every word is the same as no window, and ELIDE stores it as none.

So the whole model is two choices. First pick a window. Then, for every word inside it, keep it or black it out.

Only words are blacked out. Punctuation follows them when the page is drawn, by two rules.

First, a mark that touches a blacked-out word goes dark with it. Black out day in “day?” and the question mark goes too. Second, a mark that sits between two blacked-out words is blacked as well, so a lone dash or ampersand does not float between two bars. Spaces are never blacked, so the lines keep their shape.

Punctuation beside a word you keep stays. In the example above, the colon after temperate stays because temperate is kept.

Because the rule is applied when the page is drawn, a saved poem records only which words you blacked out. The editor, the share page, the share card and the PDF all use the same rule, so they agree.

Look for a text with concrete nouns, strong verbs and sentences of different lengths. A page or two is enough. Poems and the openings of novels both work, in different ways.

Prose gives you more words to choose from, and its sentences hide the lines you make. Verse already has a shape, so a blackout of a poem is a kind of conversation with it. A good prose place to start is the opening of Pride and Prejudice, which many readers already know, so they see at once what you kept:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Inspiration offers 29 well-loved public-domain texts, from sonnets and odes to novel openings, each with a button to start from it. Each is cut from a Project Gutenberg ebook. A Randomise button picks one for you.

Very short texts leave little to choose. Very long ones are hard to hold in your head. A page or two sits between.

Yes. On the home page you can paste text, upload a .txt, .md, .pdf or .docx file, or give the address of a web page. A text can be up to 60,000 characters, a file up to 5 MB, and a PDF up to 300 pages. ELIDE reads the text in the file.

An uploaded text is link-only. It never appears in the gallery, and it asks search engines not to list it. Anyone who has its link can open it. It is kept for 365 days, then deleted along with every poem made from it.

For a newspaper, paste the article text or upload a PDF of the page. Only use text you have the right to use. See the question on copyright.

Yes. Every text in Inspiration comes from Project Gutenberg and was checked before it was added. ELIDE’s rule is that the author died before 1 January 1955 (or the work is ancient or has no known author, such as Homer), and that the ebook is not marked as copyrighted.

The date comes from Australian law. The National Library of Australia says that published works whose creator died before 1 January 1955 are generally in the public domain. ELIDE also looks for editions old enough to be in the public domain in the United States.

Project Gutenberg does not state the law outside the United States, which is why ELIDE checks the author’s death year itself. Ebooks known to be in copyright, for example some modern translations, sit on a deny-list and cannot be added.

Public-domain rules differ between countries. If you are outside Australia and the United States, check the rule where you live. Each text’s page links to its Project Gutenberg ebook.

Blacking out words does not end the author’s copyright. The words you keep are still theirs. This page is general information, not legal advice, and the rules differ by country.

Making a poem for yourself, in a notebook or a classroom, is one thing. Publishing it, selling it or entering it in a competition is another. If you plan to publish, ask the rights holder or choose a public-domain text. Public-domain books remove the question.

ELIDE does not offer books that are in copyright. If you upload your own text, the poem stays link-only and out of the gallery, and you are the one who must have the right to use it. If a rights holder asks, the removal form takes a poem or a text down.

Blackout poetry is a close-reading exercise. To decide what to keep, students must read the whole passage and judge which words carry its meaning. Then they can explain their choices, and the explanation is the part you can assess.

A simple lesson: give every student the same short passage. Set a limit, such as no more than twenty kept words. Ask for a title. Have students read their poems aloud and say why they kept what they kept. Compare results. The same page gives different poems.

The teachers page has five starter prompts, a printable worksheet for each text, a class folio with a three-criterion rubric and a printable anthology, and reader’s-theatre parts for ballads. Everything is free and needs no accounts. In the folio, students appear by initials or room codes only.

Choose the text yourself, and read it first. Public domain does not mean suitable for every age.

Load the text once. ELIDE gives it a source-text code that starts EC-. Give the class that code or its link. Each student looks it up, opens the text and chooses Redact this. Each saved poem then gets its own code that starts EL-.

The page for a source text links to a view of the poems made from it, side by side, with a heat map of the words most often kept. A class link carries up to 40 poem codes after the # in its address. That part of an address is never sent to a server, so the link is the whole record. There is no class list, and nothing is public unless the poems already are.

A student can add their poem’s code to the class link and send the new link to the teacher.

ELIDE has no accounts and does not ask for an age. Students need a text and a browser. An email address is asked for only if someone joins the newsletter, or chooses to give one on a report or removal form.

A saved poem holds its text, a title and an optional name. Both title and name are public, so ask students not to put personal details in them. A title can be up to 120 characters. A name can be up to 40 characters and cannot contain a link or an email address.

A basic screen checks a poem’s title, name and kept words for adult language before the poem can go public. A poem that trips it is saved as link-only. The screen is a net for the obvious cases, not a filter, so look at what students choose to publish. Anyone can use Report this poem on a poem page, and a person reads each report before anything changes.

For accounts, privacy and ads across popple, see the popple questions page.

It keeps the source text, with an EC- code and a record of where the text came from. It keeps which words you blacked out and a log of each blackout and restore, with the word and the time. It keeps the trim window, the title, the optional name, and whether the poem is public or link-only.

The reason is to show the poem again, exactly as you made it, from its code, and to name its source every time. The log is a record of how the poem was made, and a stored poem holds word numbers rather than a second copy of the text.

It does not keep an account, a password or your IP address. To limit abuse it keeps a hash of your IP address mixed with a salt that changes every day, so it cannot be used to follow you from one day to the next. See the privacy page.

Uploaded text is kept for 365 days, then deleted with its poems. Poems made from public-domain texts are not deleted on a timer. They stay until someone asks for their removal.

An EL- code names a finished poem. An EC- code names a source text. Both have the same shape, such as EL-XXXX-XXXX: the two-letter prefix, then two groups of four characters.

The characters come from an alphabet of 31 letters and digits with no 0, 1, I, L or O, so a code can be read aloud or copied from paper without mistakes. Each prefix has about 8.5 × 10¹¹ possible codes (852,891,037,441). A poem’s code is drawn at random, so it cannot be guessed from another.

The two kinds never cross. An EL- code cannot open a source text, and an EC- code cannot open a poem.

To find one, use the Find by code box at the foot of Inspiration. It accepts any case, with or without dashes or spaces. It says only whether the code exists and where to find it. It never returns text.

Anyone who has its link can open it. There is no sign-in.

Whether it also appears in the public gallery depends on four things. The poem must have a title. It must come from a public-domain text, not an upload. It must pass the basic screen for adult language. And it must not have been removed.

A poem that is link-only asks search engines not to list it. A poem in the gallery shows “by NAME” under its title if the maker gave a name, and no name if they did not.

Save the poem, then choose PDF beside its link. ELIDE makes a one-page A4 PDF in the same look as the share card, with a solid bar over every blacked-out word. A bar is as wide as the word under it. The word itself is not in the file.

The poem is set as large as will fit, from 14 point down to 7.5 point. If a long poem does not fit even at 7.5, the PDF stops at the last whole line that fits and ends with an ellipsis. Trimmed words are not in the PDF.

The footer names the title, the source text and, if given, “by NAME”, with the ELIDE mark and the poem’s code. PDFs carry no ads.

Every poem has a share card: a 1200 by 630 pixel image that appears when the link is pasted into a message or a post. Kept words appear as text and blacked-out words appear as bars.

The card is drawn from a preview, never from the full text, so a blacked-out word cannot reach the image, its description or the page behind it. Bar widths are rounded up to a multiple of 3 characters and stop at 15, so a bar tells you very little about the word under it.

A link-only poem gets a plain ELIDE card instead.

Use the removal form with the poem’s code. A person reviews each request, and takes the poem down when it is yours to remove or it breaks the rules. A removed poem cannot be reached by its code. A lookup answers as if the code had never been issued. Removing a source text removes the poems made from it.

There are no accounts, so the code is the key. Keep it somewhere safe. To report someone else’s poem, use Report this poem on its page. A person reads each report before anything changes.

They are the same across all of popple’s sites, so they are answered once, on the popple questions page. It covers accounts, what is public, downloads, ads and how to get in touch.

ELIDE’s own privacy page lists what this site collects and who it shares it with.