Newspaper Blackout Turns News Into Poetry
Posted: 5/11/2012 | By: Nu Yang
With just a marker and some creativity, you can transform today’s front page into iambic pentameter, a haiku, and possibly even a limerick.
Created by Texan poet Austin Kleon, Newspaper Blackout poems are created by redacting words from newspaper articles with a permanent marker. His collection of poems was published in a book (“Newspaper Blackout”) along with a 250-year history of finding poetry in the newspaper and a “how- to” section to help readers get started making their own poems. Readers can share their creations at newspaperblackout.com.
It didn’t take long for newspapers to notice how their copy was being used. The Wall Street Journal described Newspaper Blackout as “a kind of Rorschach approach to reading newspapers,” while Toronto’s National Post said, “One can imagine taking up blackout poetry on their daily bus commute in place of Sudoku or the crossword puzzle.”
Kleon, who admits to using The New York Times exclusively when creating his poems, told The Austin Chronicle, “The (Times) layout is always pretty great. And, most of all, there are a lot of words in it. Which sounds really simplistic, but it’s hard to find papers nowadays that have a lot of words in them that are good words.”
Created by Texan poet Austin Kleon, Newspaper Blackout poems are created by redacting words from newspaper articles with a permanent marker. His collection of poems was published in a book (“Newspaper Blackout”) along with a 250-year history of finding poetry in the newspaper and a “how- to” section to help readers get started making their own poems. Readers can share their creations at newspaperblackout.com.
It didn’t take long for newspapers to notice how their copy was being used. The Wall Street Journal described Newspaper Blackout as “a kind of Rorschach approach to reading newspapers,” while Toronto’s National Post said, “One can imagine taking up blackout poetry on their daily bus commute in place of Sudoku or the crossword puzzle.”
Kleon, who admits to using The New York Times exclusively when creating his poems, told The Austin Chronicle, “The (Times) layout is always pretty great. And, most of all, there are a lot of words in it. Which sounds really simplistic, but it’s hard to find papers nowadays that have a lot of words in them that are good words.”