+ The 1920s

Each time I look to identify the first blackout poem, I stumble across an earlier one. This project does not seek to identify the genesis of blackout poetry necessarily, but I do hope to identify some of the works that spurred the contemporary blackout poetry genre into creation. For instance, we should likely consider Man Ray’s 1924 piece in the Dada artists’ journal 391 as one of the predecessors of the contemporary category of poetry.

Scholars like Michael G. Powell are hesitant to call the piece a poem outright, as it does not include any words, but it does resemble what we would consider today a blackout poem, minus the words. The piece is composed of thick black lines that look almost like Morse code with some shorter and some longer. They are arranged to look like a poem with a title and then 17 lines divided into four stanzas.

In his history of redaction, Powell claims the work is a result of Man Ray’s involvement with the Dadaist movement. He suggests Man Ray’s goal was to “deconstruct, experiment with, and possibly even destroy meaning, laying bare the nature of our customs of reading and writing.” It is possible that in this goal of deconstruction is where blackout poetry first came forth. However, while one of the earliest movements that have appeared to influence blackout poetry directly, it is neither the first, nor perhaps even the most impactful.

+ The 1950s

One of the most often mentioned pieces in conversations about the history of erasure and blackout poetry is Rober Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing. According to Sarah Roberts of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the project arose out of Rauschenberg’s desire to “discover a way to make a drawing with an eraser.” He found erasing his own drawings unsatisfactory and approached popular painter Willem de Kooning to ask for a drawing of his to erase. Upon receiving the drawing, he returned to his studio and erased it so completely that we no longer know what de Kooning originally drew.

Art and literary movements often grow together. Though Rauschenberg’s piece is not a poem, it likely influenced erasure poetry and thus blackout poetry due to the two’s unique interconnectedness in their early days. In his history of erasure poetics, blackout poet Travis Macdonald suggested that blackout and erasure poetry was “spurred in no small part by similar gestures in the visual arts.” This is especially true when we consider that contemporary erasure poets like David Dodd Lee have noted their first experience with erasure as being Rauschenberg’s erased drawing.

Roughly six years after Rauschenberg erased deKooning’s drawing, the Beat generation began drawing attention to another form of found poetry that would later influence blackout and erasure poets, cut-up poetry. In 1959 Beat poet and painter Brion Gysin expanded upon the cut-up method introduced some thirty years earlier by Tristan Tzara in the 1920s when he pulled words out of a hat to create a poem at a surrealist rally. While working on a project, Gysin had placed newspapers on his table to keep it from being damaged as he cut papers atop it with a razor blade. As he cut, the newspapers became cut into pieces as well, and Gysin began rearranging them in new ways. He, Sinclair Belies, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso later went on to publish a book of these cut-up poems entitled Minutes to Go (1968). Gysin and Burroughs further published throughout the 60s and 70s. Whereas blackout poetry does not require the cutting up of a source text, it does use a similar physical manipulation, as poets cover portions of the source text. In some cases, poets make merge cut up and blackout methodology. Many poets will cut their source text into a smaller, more easy to manage section, for example. In doing so, they may cut off words mid sentence and even lines halfway. Additionally, cut-up poems are often credited as being one of the predecessors to blackout poems in interviews with blackout poets and in popular contemporary blackout poet Austin Kleon’s Ted Talk “Steal Like An Artist.”

+ The 1960s

In the 1960s, a few people began playing with blackout poetry across the world. While the rest of this history predominantly focuses on the history of this category of poetry in the United States, the lack of things happening specifically in the U.S. at this time makes it difficult to narrow the scope that specifically, especially since many of these poets and projects went on to inspire American blackout and erasure poets.

The most influential poet of this time is likely Tom Phillips, as he began his almost fifty year long book-length project in London 1967. Blackout poet Mary Ruefel even suggests in her essay "On Erasure” that “the aesthetic ends of erasure, everyone agrees, begin with Tom Phillips.” Though she says erasure here, the essay itself deals with the practice of creating blackout poetry, which cements the idea as well that Phillips has a deep connection with blackout poetry and perhaps erasure due to the academic conflation of the two categories of poetry.

However, as I stated above, Phillips was not the only one creating blackout poetry at this time. For instance Austrian concrete poet Gerhard Rühm created one of the first blackout poems using a newspaper as a source text in 1962. He painted over the front page of the daily paper Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung for six consecutive days from August 7th to August 12th 1972. He only left the word “und” (“and”) exposed. According to the Generali Foundation, he did so in order to comment on how he felt the paper added to the news rather than just reporting it. However, fewer know of this project in comparison to some of Rühm’s more popular pieces.

Two years later and a little south in Italy, journalist turned poet Emili Isgrò made his first canellatura (cancellation) by blacking out excerpts of a newspaper, leaving just a few words visible. He went on to incorporate a greater variety of source texts from novels to encyclopedias to even the Italian constitution. In Italy, his works have been credited as greatly influencing visual and conceptual poetry in the country. Due to this, his poems are generally lumped in with visual poetry rather than being specifically defined as blackout poetry, even though with their thick dark lines, they look just like most contemporary blackout poetry today. Despite beginning his canelllatura project before Phillips began A Humument and continuing his project for an even longer same time span, Isgrò has not received nearly as much attention, particularly in the U.S.. Alastair Smart noted that even though Isgrò has inspired numerous projects, including Caludio Cutugno’s 2015 Milan Fashion Week series, “outside his native land Isgrò is hardly a household name.”

The next year, in 1965, American artist Doris Cross began her “Found Word” series, which Lis Bensely, in an article on Cross’s life’s work, describes as “a body of work of manipulated dictionary columns that transport words beyond their linguistic territory to create visual/visceral redefinitions.” Cross took her childhood dictionary and manipulated fifty pages within it by taking the source text and whiting it out, covering it in masking tape, painting over it, and drawing over it with both crayon and pencil. She described her process as opening the dictionary and then “certain words just came out and they worked. I began to get images of presentations – very large columns – related to each other yet not related.” However, she didn’t think of herself as creating poetry. Instead, Cross says she is “making connections, not writing poetry.” Despite not considering herself a poet, there are those such as Jenn Shapland who credit her as the first practitioner of erasure and blackout poetry.

Right around this time, Belgian artist Marcel Brooddthaers began undertaking a similar project. He took Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard” (1914) and covered every line with black stripes. He left no word visible. Mallarmé’s poem already had an experimental typographical style with numerous white spaces. As a result, Brooddthaers’s work looks like a mixture between an erasure and blackout poem with black lines floating in white space; however, it is neither, as the project was not a poem but an artistic experiment. After several years working on it, Brooddthaers published the project under the same title as Mallarmé’s poem, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard , in 1969.

+ The Late 1960s and 70s

Soon after, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Oulipo movements laid further groundwork for blackout poetry. In his essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics,” blackout and erasure poet Travis Macdonald credits Oulipo for increasing the acceptance of found poetry. He mentions that because of Oulipo, "the use of appropriation as a poetic tool has moved from the outskirts of abject plagiarism to semi-accepted practice.” He also describes the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets as having “repeatedly challenging and extending the boundaries of both page and composition in their respective attempts to harness, exploit and reveal the material nature of language itself.” Together, these two groups opened space for blackout poets to play with page and physical representation of a source text through their blacking out. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Lyn Hejinian even went on to create a book of erasure poetry The Fatalist(2003) by erasing her own correspondence.

Also around the same time the Fluxus community began and started producing more. This group was less focused on literature than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Oulipo, but it included two members who are often referenced as being influential in the birth of the erasure poetry, which as we know has been historically tied closely with blackout poetry: poet and artist Jackson Mac Low and avant-garde composer John Cage.

Cage and Mac Low began working together in 1954 when they began creating using “chance operations,” methods that transform texts beyond the intent of the author. One of Mac Low’s first chance operations texts 5 Biblical Poems (1954-1955) is heralded by those like Travis Macdonald in his essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics” as being one of the predecessors to the contemporary erasure poetry movement. However, Macdonald purposefully identifies Mac Low’s series not as an erasure poem but rather as a found poem. To make the book, Mac Low erased Hebrew scripture and then added slashes to indicate rhythmic silences. He determined the number of words and silences per line by rolling a die. According to Macdonald, Mac Low, in line with Fluxus, “concerns himself primarily with how these absences are to function alongside their textual counterparts.” It is this focus on the how that opened doors for erasure poetry moving forward, as it helped emphasize how the presentation of a found poem impacts the meaning.

Cage’s 4’33”, a musical score that instructs players to not play their instruments throughout the entire three movement piece, resulting in four minutes and 33 seconds of silence or mostly silence, is also worth noting here. According to Cage, the music was meant to be “whatever sounds the audience heard in the background. Silence. . .does not exist, when one listens carefully.” He effectively erased the music from his musical score. Cage also went on to produce erasure poems using mesostics, but his musical erasure is often cited more as an influence on contemporary erasure poetry.

+ The Late 1970s

While not fully blackout poetry, it is also important to consider Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977) when looking at the history of blackout poetry. Travis Macdonald describes Radi Os as “an elaborate poetic erasure” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). His erasure is so in-depth that Eric Selinger describes it as “rewriting-by-excision.” Most of the book is clearly erasure, with a handful of Milton’s words floating on mostly blank pages, the rest of the source text having been removed. However, portions of it are done in a blackout style with the thick dark lines obscuring portions of the source text. In his essay on erasure poetics, Macdonald suggests that “By carefully and selectively muting Milton, Johnson draws his own unique constellations from the old bard’s “stars,” in effect discovering the once “invisible” poems of Radi os and, by extension, a fledgling poetic form.” Since Macdonald is specifically writing about erasure poetics, the “fledgling poetic form” he refers to is erasure, but his comment could be applied to both erasure and blackout poetry, as the project operates within both categories.

Radi Os was published in 1977, seven years after Phillips had published the first edition of A Humument. However, it is unlikely that either knew of one another due to the small print runs of their respective books and geographical separation, as Johnson was in San Francisco, California and Phillips in the UK. The books received very different attention. Whereas Phillips’s A Humument went on to receive substantial academic coverage, Johnson received less. In fact, Selinger recounts that it was described as a “failed experiment, written by gimmick, fit only to be salvaged in scraps for future efforts.” Over time, more began reading it and in a collaborative 2012 interview, several blackout and erasure poets noted that it partially inspired their own projects or that it was one of their first experiences with either erasure or blackout poetry.

+ The 1980s and 90s

In 1982, Jesse Glass published Man’s Wows, a short collection of erasure poems made from John George Hohman’s 1855 book Pow-Wows, or Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts and Remedies, for Man as Well as Animals. The book was originally published in a limited edition run of 126 copies on special papers printed by Charles Alexander’s Black Mesa Press. Though Glass was a fairly popular experimental poet, Man’s Wows is one of his lesser known works. However, his work is occasionally brought up as an example of erasure poetry alongside older works like Johnson’s Radi Os and Phillips’s A Humument.

In the late 80s, both Mac Low and Cage started publishing more and more erasure poems. In 1989, for instance, Mac Low published Words n Ends from Ez (1989). In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 193: American Poets Since World War II, Bruce Campbell describes Words nd Ends from Ez as “a diastic reading through Ezra Pound's Cantos that yields a flux of letters, words, and syllables.” Diastic poetry was something Mac Low developed. The PoemTalk podcast hosted by Jacket2 expands on Mac Low’s diastic methodology, “Mac Low’s constraint, for which he preferred the term “quasi-intentional” to the term “chance,” involved the letters forming the name E Z R A P O U N D. Words, phrases, and letters were extracted from the original cantos based on those letters and on their placement within words.” Mac Low created erasures in this time that were constrained by rules he placed upon himself.

Cage made many poems in a similar way. For example, his late 80s mesostic poem “Writing through Howl” was produced by what Marjorie Perloff describes as “writing-through” Allen Ginsberg’s "Howl." He erased Ginsbergs’ strophes based on the 50% mesotic rule using the thirteen letters ALLENGINSBERG. Both Cage and Mac Low continued to experiment with erasure through chance operations throughout the entirety of their careers, but their poems were labeled as those chance operations like mesostic poetry or diastic poetry rather than erasure poetry. However, it is likely that they had some impact on contemporary erasure poetry, especially considering that Mac Lowe’s name is often listed in collections of erasure poets.

The same year Mac Lowe published his erasure of Pound’s Cantos, Stephen Ratcliffe published his erasure poetry collection [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG (1989). While the cover of Ratcliffe’s book suggests that it is blackout poetry, the interior poems are actually erasures, as according to scholarship on the book, Ratcliffe has “rubbed out most of the texture of Shakespeare’s sonnet, keeping the words where they originally were in the line.” Scholar of Shakespearean erasures, Vincent Borque describes Ratcliffe’s work as “much more a composition-with than a destruction of Shakespeare’s text” as he has having “ Borque also asserts that “Ratcliffe’s lines are inheritors of Mallarmé’s poetics of the spatial page,” referring to the same poem that Brooddtahers blacked out in the 1960s. Ratcliffe’s [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG was one of the first in the trend of erasing, blacking out, and manipulating Shakespeare’s sonnets to create found poems, which eventually included more contemporary blackout poets Jen Bervin’s Nets (2006).

In the mid-90s, Chris Piuma joined this trend with his erasure poetry book The Constellated Sonnets (1995), a series of 150 poems in which Piuma erases all the words in each line except for one while maintaining all of Shakespeare's original punctuation. According to his blog, he selected the words at random by “Rolling a d10; if a six came up, using the sixth word, and if there was no sixth word in that line, rerolling.” Despite using the same source text, Piuma claims he had no knowledge of Ratcliff’s project published six years before and only found out about Ratcliff’s book “by stumbling upon his book in the Strand” years later.

Around the same time as Piuma, artist Ann Hamilton, like Brooddthaer and Joesph Kosuth’s 1986 “Zero & Not” exhibit, began creating art pieces that look like blackout poems but without the words. She made her works in front of visitors as a part of her 1993 installation tropos at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. According to her website, “in a room with a floor covered in horsehair, an attendant read each line of text silently while at the same time, with an electric burner in hand, [Hamilton] burned each line from the book as it was read, causing the air to fill with acrid smoke.” Her source texts were books without any chapter headings, titles or authors listed that had been purchased by Hamilton from The Strand, New York’s landmark secondhand bookstore, the same bookstore Piuna later discovered Ratcliffe’s book. Unlike Piuna and Ratcliffe, Hamilton did not choose her books for their content but rather just the feel of their pages. Although Hamilton’s work does not claim to be poetry or leave any words of the source text unburnt, the aesthetic comparison of it with contemporary blackout poetry is striking.

Also in New York in 1993, David Diao began experimenting with blackout poetry techniques in his paintings. He silk-screened pages from art magazines that discussed his work onto two of his large paintings from the 1970s and then with red ink, crossed out the author’s name and wrote in his own. Both Diao and Hamilton’s works were collected in the “Under Erasure” exhibit in late 2018 that collected examples of erasure being used as both an artistic and poetic tactic.

+ The Early 2000s

Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, the conceptual poetry movement began emerging as an evolution of Oulipo. According to Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place in Notes on Conceptualisms, ideally conceptual poetry “negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense—one does not need to ‘read’ the work as much as think about the idea of the work.” The goal of the movement was to create pieces in which the idea of the piece and the process of making were more important than the final piece itself. Additionally, Thomas H. Ford noted in his essay “Conceptual Poetry, Nonconceptual Poetry, and Postconceptual Poetry” that conceptual poems require “the rigorous application of conceptual constraints or procedures to language” similar to the rules Oulipo placed on its poets.

Blackout poetry cannot be considered a part of the conceptual poetry movement because It derives meaning from both the process of blacking out and from the final version. However, conceptual poetry did influence the blackout poetry significantly, particularly by normalizing appropriation within the poetry world.

Conceptual poets were the ones who really began taking others' texts and modifying them and calling them their own. For instance, take Kenneth Goldsmith’s poetry collection Day (2003). He rewrote an entire issue of The New York Times, but he stripped it of conventional typographical distinctions such as separations between title and article or even between the articles, advertisements, and paratextual apparatuses. Ford describes it as a “startling defamiliarisation of one our most familiar textual objects.” Blackout poets do something similar in that they do what we have all been taught not to do in a book: write in it. They appropriate source texts similarly to Goldsmith and other conceptual poets, but how they do it is a bit different.

+ Mid to Late 2000s

A year after Goldsmith published Day, Jen Bervin released her poetry collection Nets in 2004. Nets holds a special place in the history of blackout poetry because it is a difficult book to place in the context of erasure and blackout. Unlike Phillips or Johnson, Bervin leaves every word of her source text, William Shakespeare’s sonnets, visible. She just greys out those that are not a part of her new poem. In his review in Jacket Magazine, Philip Metres compares Bervin’s work to “rubbings of old slate gravestones whose original names and dates have faded into near-obscurity; the poet, the pencil etcher, wants to retain the artifact through a kind of representation of it. However, through time and weather, it is possible only to have a partial version.” We can still see everything, there are just some pieces we can see better than others.

Additionally, Nets allows us to trace a distinct historical connection between blackout and erasure poets. Bervin opens the book by thanking Stephen Ratcliffe who created erasures of the same sonnets in the late 80s. Several works including Borque’s essay, Andy Frazee’s essay “the Dependence on/Transcendence of ‘Shakespeare” in Stephen Ratcliffe’s [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG and Jen Bervin’s NETS,” and Geneive Kaplan’s dissertation “Reclaiming the Book-Object: Appropriate Text in 21st Century Poetry” place these works and Chris Piuma’s The Constellated Sonnets (1995) in conversation with one another and suggest there is a historical connection between the three that we can use to start tracking how blackout and erasure poetry has grown and evolved.

In 2006, a year later, Mary Ruefle released A little White Shadow, a blackout poetry project created from Emily Malbone Morgan’s 1889 novel by the same name. Ruefle’s is more obviously blackout poetry than those I have previously mentioned here. She covered Morgan’s words with white paint, obscuring them while leaving them on the page. Unlike Johnson, she does not remove the words permanently, and unlike Bervin, she does not leave the source text readable. As a part of the Found Poetry Review’s Book Review Series, Douglas Luman reviewed Rufele’s book in 2014, almost eight years after its publication because it was considered to be an important text to the history of found poetry. However, it has not received much academic or popular media coverage. This could be due to length, as it is only 48 pages long, which is short compared to other blackout poetry projects. Its source text could be to blame as well, as more popular blackout poetry projects such as Isobel O’Hare’s all this can be yours (2018) and Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackouts (2010) have gained popularity in part because of what they have used as their source material. Regardless, Ruefle’s has simply not received the same critical acclaim. Her nonblackout poetry has garnered much more attention.

Two years later, Bervin published a blackout poetry book titled The Desert. Unlike her Shakespeare erasures, this book is specifically in the style of blackout poetry. However, she does not paint or draw over the source text, John Van Dyke’s The Desert. Instead, she physically stitches over the source text’s words with pale blue thread. According to Granary Books, the entire book is a single poem that “forms its own elemental landscape and shares Van Dyke’s poetic attention to visual phenomena.” Only 40 editions of the book were released, which means it has not been very accessible for the public and, therefore, has not been widely read.

Finally in early 2011, Srikanth Reddy’s published Voyager(2011), an erasure project of former SS officer Kurt Waldheim’s memoir In the Eye of the Storm. Even though it is not blackout poetry, I mention it here because it is one of the more popular contemporary erasure works that is often referenced in academic scholarship in conjunction with blackout poems. The book is divided into three sections that Reddy refers to as books that each tackle a different part of Waldheim’s story. Reviews of Voyager like John Rufo’s ask, “Who is speaking throughout the text? Some philosopher? Waldheim himself through Reddy’s editing?” However, Reddy is quick to say that “I didn’t write it” when asked about Voyager. He claims that all the words belong to Waldheim and that he only “composed this text by deleting words from Waldheim’s memoir” and then “visually arranging the resulting word-sequences into the “step-down” tercets that William Carlos Williams used for his poetic sequence on the underworld.” Reddy has also remarked that “I don’t think I’ll ever try my hand at literary erasure again. Deleting this passage into existence was one of the most difficult things I’ve attempted as a writer, and now that it’s done, I’m glad I did it—but now I’d like to try speaking for myself, for a change.” While his work is not blackout poetry, Reddy’s poems are important to consider within the context of blackout poetry because Voyager started bringing more attention to the question of authorship for found poets. This conversation is ongoing and is something even poets themselves discuss with one another.

+ The 2010s and Onwards

Following these late 2000s to early 2010s projects, blackout poetry began becoming more solidified as a category. We began developing a collective understanding of what blackout and erasure poetry are and how they are different due to scholars beginning to write about these categories of poetry. Additionally, towards the end of the 2000s, blackout poetry began to take on new life as a result of several poets receiving attention from newspapers and other popular media sources or even just from social media. The poets below brought unprecedented attention to this category of poetry; read more about their specific contributions by clicking their names:

• Travis Macdonald, author of “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics” and Mission O Repo
• Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackouts *Isobel O’Hare, author of all this can be yours

Additionally, over the past two decades, several specific movements and trends have emerged within the blackout poetry community. You can read more about these by clicking below:

• DIYing black out poetry
• Educational outreach in classrooms and community workshops
• Social media poets
• Blacking out newspapers
• Addressing political issues including:
  • U.S. warfare with the Middle East
  • Donald Trump’s presidency
  • The #Metoo movement

The above poets and movements are not a complete list. This project is on-going and ever-growing. As more scholarship about blackout poetry emerges, so will this website. However, right now, it is limited by the lack of work that has been done to trace trends within the blackout poetry community and the lack of attention given to blackout poets.