Celebrate Women's History Month with Blackout Poetry

What is Blackout Poetry? 

There's an old legend that when Michelangelo was asked how he made his exquisite statue of David, he answered that he just chipped away everything that didn't look like David. He never actually said this, but that's okay, because it's the perfect way to explain blackout poetry.

In blackout poetry, you take a page of text – say, from a book or a magazine – and you black out everything that doesn't look like poetry to you. And when you're done? Poetry! You can add additional art details like this example from the New York Times poetry contest.

How do you create blackout poetry?

You can use printed text and marker. This allows you to add additional artist details like above.

To create digitally, you can go to the Blackout Poetry Maker.

• Choose a source! They provide some examples in the left column of that page, and we have some additional suggestions below. These are just ideas - paste in whatever you'd like!
• Click on all the words you want to keep. Changed your mind about a word? Just click on it again to unselect it.
• When you're done, click on the black out. button below the text.
• Not happy with the results? Just click reset.
• Click on the Render square button; it will show you your poem as an image file. Right click (or control-click on a Mac) and select Save image as. Send a copy to library@cityhigh.org

Project Gutenberg is a website that gathers books and other texts that are in the public domain. That means that you can legally use any of the texts - no need to worry about copyright issues! 

In honor of Women's History month, the Penfield Library picked a few books you might want to use for your blackout poetry.

• A Daughter of the Samurai By Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
• Violets and Other Tales By Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
• The Letters of Jane Austen
• Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands By Mary Seacole
• Radio-Active Substances By Marie Curie
• Mrs. Dalloway By Virginia Woolf
• Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted By Frances E.W. Harper
• Frankenstein By Mary Shelley
• History of Woman Suffrage, New York (Chapter XXXVII)
• Women of History
• The Women's Bible By Elizabeth Cady Stanton

(adapted from Penfield Library - https://libraryguides.oswego.edu/blackoutpoetry)