Blacking Out Self-Publishing

While blackout poetry is slowly becoming more accepted, it is often difficult to publish poems written in style. For a long while, publishers seemed to struggle with thinking of blackout poetry, and even found poetry as a whole,  as legitimate poetry. They assumed it was just plagiarism or that it was not creative and thus not worth publishing. A Writer’s Digest article even suggested that erasure and blackout poems were only “new,” and thus appropriate for publishing, if they erased “more than 50% of the text.” This attitude was incredibly pervasive amongst the publishing community for a long time. For instance, in 2011, found poet Jenni B. Baker received a rejection letter in response to a submission of found poems that told her: “How about next time you try to write something original and not plagiarize someone else’s work for a change!” Many found poets, including erasure and blackout poets, received similar messages. 

These kinds of misunderstandings led found poets to make their own publications instead where they could publish their work. Due to this misunderstanding of found poetry, Baker and Beth Ayer founded The Found Poetry Review the day after Baker received that letter. They hoped to use the journal to “educate more people about found poetry and provide a home for work that was often not welcome in traditional publications.” Over the five years Baker and Ayer ran the magazine, they published over 150 poets over ten volumes.

By publishing so many found poets and categories of found poetry, the editors for the magazine were able to help give the publishing and writing communities an idea of what found poetry should look like. According to one of the poetry editors E. Kristin Anderson, who also happens to be a blackout poet, writers were often confused as to if their work was really found poetry. She recounts on her blog, “During my time as an editor at Found Poetry Review, I sometimes saw writers send in a poem written by someone else that they found in a book or magazine, and sent it in. Just a poem. Someone else’s in full. That’s not what constitutes a found poem. That’s just literally finding someone else’s work . . . . And it’s certainly not something you can attribute to yourself or publish without permission from the author.” The editors, including Anderson, made it a point when someone submitted to “send out personalized rejection letters with a few notes about why we rejected your piece.” This feedback was instrumental in helping the greater writing community to develop an understanding of found poetry.

Because of this work by The Found Poetry Review, more mainstream publishers began to start feeling comfortable publishing found poems. Poetry Magazine even shared on their website a collection of erasure, blackout, and cut-up poems of their magazine created by patients in the pediatrics ward at the John H. Stronger, Jr. Hospital under the direction of poet Eric Elshtain. This uptick in mainstream publishers publishing found poems is actually what led to Baker and Ayer to close their magazine, as they felt their original goal was complete, and to an extent, it was. However, a majority of mainstream publishers publish primarily text-based found poems rather than visual ones like blackout poems.

Due to this lack of publication of visual poems, poets and artists in the mid to late 2010s began creating lists of places that did accept visual poems, found and otherwise, because they were so few and far between. For instance, in 2016, poet Trish Hopkins, who is known for her collations of places to publish, created a list of journals that accepted “nontraditional & found poetry,” including Vagabonds Creative Anthology, which I was an editor for at the time. However, just two years later, a commenter noted that several of the publications were defunct.

Those magazines and journals that publish visual found poems that have remained in business often do not publish them frequently. In the April 2020 issue of Poetry Magazine, only two of the 29 creative pieces published were visual poems that relied on atypical visuals in some way to create additional meaning. For example, one of the pieces published was a selection from Madeline Gin’s “Transformatory Power.” The poems are visual in that they were typed with what appears to be a typewriter or written with a pen and then photographed or scanned. They cannot exist as poems without their visual context. However, they are not blackout poems. Neither of the visual poems in this issue of Poetry Magazine are. Thus, even those magazines that do accept visual poetry submissions do not often publish blackout poems. Additionally, mainstream book publishers still reject found poetry submissions for the most part, even though smaller journals have begun publishing these forms.

Found poets have long been cut out of mainstream publishing, and blackout poets even more so. In order to get their work published, they have had to make their own journals or just self publish on social media or through self-publishers like CreateSpace. They will likely have to continue doing so until we begin acknowledging blackout poetry as a legitimate category of poetry that is separate from erasure and worthy of study in academia. Once we do so, publishers will hopefully begin to lose their association of blackout poetry with plagiarism or a lack of creativity.