The requests for commissions increased to the point that she had to establish a website portal to manage all the work. The overwhelming response was that people wanted to see more. As she posted more and more of her deeply personal blackout poems, she started to apologize for filling up everyone’s feeds on social media. It was with the recent death of her brother that she turned to her ongoing work with blackout poetry to process the grief. She has experienced hardship and loss in her life that informs all areas of her writing. She has been doing commissions of blackout poetry for a while now, and has been offering blackout poetry on her Patreon page monthly for supporters at a particular level. Jessica McHugh was recently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for her blackout poetry collection a complex accident of life that included poems derived from a particular volume of Frankenstein. All the poetry images in this article are used by permission of the poet, Jessica McHugh. I sat down for a conversation with her as I prepared to write this piece. This article really exists because of Jessica McHugh. The best way I can think of to explore the form and its process is to focus on one poet and her work in detail. More teachers are including it as part of poetry curriculum in school. A number of key writers and poets are sharing more of this type of work across social media. There is a resurgence of interest in this artform. You can find examples the same way on other social media platforms too. If you go on Instagram right now and type in the hashtag #BlackOutPoetry or #BlackOutPoetr圜ommunity, you will find some of the most incredible art and poetry you’ve ever seen. Like any craft, it has a niche of people fiercely loyal to it. Already, it had all the experimental elements that many poets utilize within the art form today.īlackout poetry occupies an unusual space that crosses over heavily between written composition, visual art, and crafting. By the 1960s, true blackout poetry was practiced by a number of accomplished poets and artists. Moving forward, that familiar look of words formed from cutting out different letters in different fonts to create messages or poetry was one that many people recognize. Dadaism in the early twentieth century is well known for pushing back against traditional forms, and cutout poetry was a part of that. Various shape poems through the centuries can be seen as contributing to the aesthetic. Word codes used as early as the 1700s are sometimes credited as being part of the origin of blackout poetry. The origins of playing with text in this manner go back pretty far, depending on how loosely you define the art form. As time has gone on, the blacking out process has turned to drawing other artwork over the page, different ways of boxing off or circling the selected words, different patterns of words around the page, and even collage and craft elements being added to the pieces.īlackout poetry occupies an unusual space that crosses over heavily between written composition, visual art, and crafting. In the past, the rest of the page with all the unused words were literally blacked out, leaving only the pattern of selected words. It produces something new, different, and creative out of and apart from the original source material. This is used to create a poem or other piece from the isolated words. That piece can be a newspaper article, a document, or a page from a book. Hashtags save us again.īlackout poetry is preserving some words while redacting the rest on a preexisting or “found” piece. Even when you call it blackout poetry, as most people do these days, there’s not a clear consensus online whether it is “black out” or “blackout.” It’s probably safest just to use the hashtag #BlackOutPoetry, then it doesn’t matter whether it is compound word or not. It’s been called redacted poetry/writing, found poetry, erasure poetry, and it crosses over into cutout poetry and collage art. All the poetry images in this article used by permission of the poet, Jessica McHugh.īlackout poetry has been called a number of different things across time.
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