Blackout Poetry - How to

I found out what blackout poetry was when I discovered Tyler Knott on tumblr. He has the loveliest poetry. Its all very heartfelt and seems to be written about someone he loves dearly. Which makes my heart really happy.

This one is one of my favorites of his 

Anyways back to blackout poetry. What you do is you find a page in a book. Pretty much any page will do. And you read it and pay close attention to words that you like. After you have gone through the page, you start to circle some words and essentially make a poem by crossing out all the words you don't want.

I have always really appreciated poetry, but whenever I try to write it myself, I just end up making Dr. Seuss rhymes. So I gave blackout poetry a try, and it turned out to be much deeper than anything I could've written on my own. 

I know it could be seen as a sort of "cheating" when it comes to writing poetry, but I don't agree. I love art. I was even going to try and double major in art and psychology (its literally not possible if you want to graduate in 4 years - art requires way too much time.) 

When it comes to drawing though, I have such a hard time coming up with original ideas, and it can be very disheartening to a creative soul. But something that comes really easily to me is making collages. Even though it is taking a bunch of things that you didn't make, it is still art. And not everyone can do collages. My friend is an incredible artist, he can draw super imaginative creative things, but he has no eye for how to make a collage. It takes a special talent and degree of creativity to see how things will come together to make something beautiful. So proof! Collaging is an art form. And I think blackout poetry is basically a collage in the verbally artistic world. 

At times when I am doing blackout poetry, there are words that I have found on the page that all go together, but they aren't in the right order. So I will do a modified blackout poetry (it takes a lot less sharpie and you don't even have to write in the book if you don't want to.) 

What I will do is just write out the words on a piece of paper and arrange them in the way that I want. After that I will find a picture online and add the poetry to it. 

Doing it that way also allows you to make variations of it, or add other words that you didn't find on the page. 

I didn't finish blacking it out, and I spilled cranberry juice on it but here is one of mine.

 An ordinary mind almost drowned by the dull hue of fear