Parisian Phoenix Publishing

Black Out Poetry has made a couple appearances in my life recently, once in R. Diskin Black’s workshop with the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group in late April and once while reading Urvi Thakker’s honors thesis. (Urvi is a senior at Lafayette College, where McKenna Graf is also a member of the Class of 2026. Congrats to both of them as graduation approaches.)

I recently received 10 copies of a text in Spanish when Ingram sent me the wrong book. Hating to waste, I wondered if I could use black-out techniques to find English words in the Spanish text and craft poetry. That proved messy, as my black-outs accidentally obscured the wrong letters, or I missed words.

I found the permanence of black-out distressing.

Instead, I got a yellow marker and started finding English words in the text. Then, I worked with them on another sheet of paper with the intent to show the original “black-outs” (which were now highlights) beside the final work.

In essence, I’ve made a giant word search.

I wrote one “poem” from one page, but then I got lost in the string of words, page after page, with some of them making more sense than others. Instead of reforming a text to mean what I’d like it to mean, I am extracting words from within a language that’s not even mine.

Where will this go? I have no idea.

Artist Maryann Riker suggested checking out Brian Dettmer…Brian builds art from texts in a 3-D version of black-out poetry. And for my readers and authors in Chicago, he has a studio there. For more on Brian, click here.