Blacking Out the Future: Where Do We Go From Here? 

In his dissertation on erasure poetry, John Nyman states “I propose that both the theoretical structure of erasure’s double/cross and the actual plurality of strategies employed by erasure-based works makes any attempt to define fixed characteristics of the genre, or even to fix it as a genre at all, futile.” I would argue, however, that it is not futile to define erasure and blackout as individual categories of poetry. In fact, people are already doing so.

As of mid April 2020, videos on the social media platform Tik Tok that are tagged with the hashtag “#blackoutpoetry” have been viewed over 730,000 times and these videos feature poets covering source texts with paint, markers, pencil and more. People are developing a community knowledge of what blackout poetry is and is not. For instance, if I were to hand one of my high school English students an erasure poem and call it a blackout poem, they would tell me what I had given them is not a blackout poem. They have made enough of their own blackout poems and read each other’s enough to be able determine what makes a blackout poem a blackout poem. If the public is already creating these mental lists of characteristics of blackout poetry, why are we not attempting to do the same in academica? 

Blackout poetry is constantly evolving and it will only continue to do so, just as all categories of poetry do. It has moved from artists’ studios like Tom Phillips in the 60s on to social media platforms like Tik Tok. Those making it have changed as well. Whereas originally the field was dominated predominately by white cisgender men like Tom Phillips and Ronald Johnson, female and nonbinary poets and poets of color have been increasingly taking over the blackout poetry community. Rather than experimenting with rephrasing classical works, poets who are coming from marginalized communities are beginning to take back their voices from oppressors through blackout and erasure poetry. Whether through erasing the words of a conservative president or blacking out the words of false apologies by sexual abusers, these poets are changing how and why they are creating blackout and erasure poetry. The makeup of blackout poets and poetry as a category of poetry is changing rapidly and will likely only continue to grow and morph over time. 

Scholars Marjorie Perloff and Kenneth Goldsmith both suggested that how we interact with literature as both writers and readers is changing due to the internet and the respective increase in literature. Blackout poetry is quickly asserting itself as one of the ways we are processing this change. In a world of texts, we may not wish to add more, as Goldsmith once suggested, but we may want to modify those texts that already exist. Is the modification of a preexisting text, however, the creation of a new one?

That is one of the questions we as scholars need to answer as we move forward in our study of found poetry. There has been minimal academic work done on found poetry or any of its categories including erasure and blackout poetry in comparison to more traditional genres. We need to bridge this gap and begin investing in these lesser researched genres and categories academically. Doing so will enable us to clearly define what characteristics these categories should or should not have, thus making it easier to correctly determine what category a poem falls under. In turn, this would allow us to trace the greater impact on society by these respective genres. 

While this project was initially completed as a part of a thesis and is thus limited in its scope, it is my intent for it to continue to grow. We still need to explore numerous avenues in the history of blackout poetry and even more that will likely emerge as how we interact with literature continues to change with the invention of new technologies. After all, when I started making blackout poetry in 2013, Tik Tok was not even available in the United States. When I first noticed poets were making blackout poems on Tik Tok in late March 2020, there were around 350,000 views on videos tagged “#blackoutpoetry” and then by mid April the number of views had almost doubled. As blackout poetry becomes more popular, we as scholars need to track its growth and explore why and how people are making poems in this way. Something about blackout poetry makes it interesting and accessible to those who have never so much as written a single poem before. The question we need to start answering is “why?”