Friday, December 30, 2011

Form Challenge: Blackout!

Today's prompt is a form challenge.  The form?  The newspaper blackout.  This style of poetry has been made famous by Austin Kleon.  You can read more about him here.

So, go grab yourself a newspaper article and a black marker.  The object here is to black out all of the words you don't need, leaving only the ones you do.  Try for minimalism here - black out most of the article, and leave only a very few words for startling effects.  Don't worry if the article doesn't initially intrigue you - we're going for the hidden things here, the messages you would never see without blacking out everything else. 

Hint: don't black out the title until you've found the poem inside the article.  Sometimes the resulting contrast between the article title and the poem itself is the best part. 

If you feel like submitting your blackout poem, or viewing others, newspaperblackout.com offers a large collection of them. 

No comments:

Post a Comment