Blacking Out in the Classroom

My AP English students often ask for blackout poetry days. They started making blackout poems the year before in sophomore English as a part of their Lord of the Flies unit, and they became obsessed. They created so many that the school library even displayed their poems for months. Many have continued to make their own blackout poems for fun. Every few weeks, they ask me if we can make blackout poems in class. 

Their requests are not unique to my school. Blackout poetry has become increasingly popular in classrooms across the US from elementary to even college.  Googling “black poetry lesson plan” yields over a million hits in .050 seconds, and there are over 150 lesson plans tagged “blackout poetry” on the popular curriculum website Teachers Pay Teachers. Both Scholastic and the National Council of Teachers of English have posted how to guides and lessons for how teachers can incorporate this category of poetry from elementary through high school. While it appears from these numerous public postings that blackout poetry is becoming increasingly popular in English and Language Arts classes, there has been minimal investigation into the pedagogical benefits of blackout poetry. 

Even English classes at the college level have taken to using blackout poetry to engage students on a different level. Melissa Landenheim explored some of the benefits blackout poetry has at a college level in her article “Engaging Honors Students through Newspaper Blackout Poetry.” In the article, she explores how her students created blackout poems out of Sappho’s poetry in an honors seminar course. She found that the “blackout poetry makes students active participants in the construction of knowledge and understanding” and that her students’ understanding of and ability to engage with Sappho’s poetry increased once they created blackout poems of Sappho’s works. One of her students remarked, “Although writing the blackout poetry was difficult, I definitely learned a great deal more about the works we have read by writing them.” According to Landenheim, the students have gone on to use blackout poetry as a way of interpreting other works throughout the year. 

Blackout poet and former high school English and creative writing teacher JM Farkas found blackout poetry especially helpful in her creative writing classes. She mentions in a post for the National Council of Teachers of English, “When I taught 12th grade Creative Writing, blackout poetry was one of my most successful lessons.” Her students were more engaged and more open to writing because they “seem less intimidated by the process of erasing, as opposed to new writing.” The blacking out opens the door to creating entirely new works that are not dependent upon a source text. 

Additionally, Farkas found that blackout poetry helped make classic literature more accessible and interesting to high school students because “blackout poetry provides an opportunity for students to “make” the words say whatever they want.” Students can take what they are reading, even if it was published hundreds of years ago and make it apply to them by morphing it through blackout poetry, similarly to how Landenheim’s students were better able to engage Sappho’s work after creating poems of it. 

To have a full understanding of how blackout poetry helps students in their literary analysis skills, more research needs to be done. While some teachers, like AP Literature and Composition teacher Brian Hannon, have discussed how they have used blackout poetry as an analytical tool for students, there have been few, if any, IRB approved studies published that investigate whether blackout poetry helps students grow their reading comprehension, writing, or literary analysis skills. 

However, before we can begin diving into researching the impact of blackout poetry, we have to identify what blackout poetry is, since teachers - like scholars, poets, and journalists -  conflate erasure and blackout poetry when discussing it. This conflation makes it difficult to even begin to do this research and in some cases even to teach either blackout or erasure. Without a clear distinction between the two, we end up teaching students the wrong things about both, furthering the conflation. For instance, after listening to blackout poet Mary Ruefele speak at the University of Arizona in 2017, middle school ELA teacher Natalie Welch decided to teach her students about erasure poetry. She did so by having her students make blackout poems by “crossing[ing] out words and lines from published poems.” Then they copied their poems onto a new sheet of paper, by this I am assuming they copied just the words not the formatting of their original poem, thus creating new erasure poems. Their peers then made blackout poems of their erasure poems, but Welch refers to every version of these poems as erasure poems. This left me confused about what students were supposed to be creating and how, as the language she was used to describe the poems her students were making did not match the methodology she described them using. This makes it difficult to replicate and to assess. 

Furthermore, conflating the two is particularly detrimental when using blackout poetry to teach and assess things outside of just getting students interested in poetry. Blackout poems depend on a physical obscuring of the source text. This allows poets to incorporate visuals that add or reinforce a meaning, which in turn provides students the opportunity to increase their visual analysis skills. Comparatively, erasure poems depend less on visuals and would not be as useful in a class that is looking for meaning in visuals. But what if a teacher writes and publishes a lesson plan on developing visual analysis skills and refers to blackout poems throughout it as erasure poems? Will the next teacher be able to adequately replicate the lesson? Possibly, but it would not be guaranteed as that initial teacher was referring to an entirely different category of poetry. 

If we want to increase the use of blackout poetry in classrooms, we need to be able to clearly explain what blackout poetry is and then begin exploring the academic benefits of it. While I have had success teaching blackout poetry in my creative writing classes, I have yet to bring myself to incorporate it into my AP English courses because I have not seen enough evidence that supports that blackout poetry is beneficial for my students in developing their reading and analytical skills. Anecdotes like Farkas and Landenheim’s are encouraging, but they are not enough. We need to support students’ love of blackout poetry with evidence and to gather that evidence, we need to separate blackout poetry from erasure and establish a clear definition of what qualifies a poem as either or.