180°: Blackout Poetry, the Movement

Since we have started our session of poetry in American Literature, I have been on this crazy kick forming my own. I believe my inspiration first came from E.E. Cummings and the modernism movement, and then it sprouted into researching a few ideas on Pinterest. One form of poetry stood out to me called (newspaper) Blackout Poetry. Blackout Poetry is taking an article of writing, like from a newspaper or magazine (even books), and crossing out most of the sentences or words and leaving a few selected words showing to form a poem. Very interesting concept, right? Apparently it is popular on the internet, if you’re hunting for it like I was. I have never seen it before, but there is much more history with it than I had originally thought.

I thought this had recently been discovered in the last ten years or so by a man, but this form of poetry dates back to 1916 and is called Dadaist Poetry (or simply just Dada) that was founded in Zurich. The founder of this form of art was Romanian-born French poet and essayist Tristan Tzara, and like many of the modernism poetry was taken place it was during World War 1. In a way Dada was a form of protest for artists and writers against the very concept of art (or what society expected it to be). This kind of art forged a revolution and began to gather people at night clubs, listen to classical and dance music, and read poetry (some of it nonsense poetry). They would criticize the war and western civilization.

To make Dadaist Poetry is very similar to the Blackout Poetry. For Diadaist Poetry, you cut out words from newspapers or magazines and put the slips of words in a bag, and then you shake them around and take them out one by one. The words you pulled out structured the poem for you.

It is truly amazing and refreshing to learn that there are more genres of poetry out there, and I have yet to discover most of them it seems like. Before learning about Tristan Tzara, I checked out a book from the library titled Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon. It is filled with all of his newspaper poems and the introduction of this book said that he randomly started marking the newspaper to form a poem one day. So, it makes me wonder if Kleon even read or heard of other poets like Tristan Tzara that created this genre of poetry. If not, then in a way he started his own kind.

I started doing my own blackout poetry about a week ago and have been posting my poems on Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. I am blown away at the turn out at how many people click “Like” and comment on how much they love it. I have so far been posting one poem a day and gathered more followers on Instagram and Tumblr.

Here is a couple to show my inspiration of this century old movement.