Why Poets Keep Blacking Out U.S. Political Rhetoric 

Following Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, many people started writing in publications from The New York Times to The Atlantic about how political poetry was coming back into fashion. Poet laureate Tracy K. Smith suggested it was because this kind of poetry “has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems, of accepting the likelihood that even we the righteous might be implicated by or complicit in some facet of the very wrongs we decry…[poems] take us by the arm and walk us into the lake, wetting us with the muddied and the muddled, and sometimes even the holy.” However, I would argue that blackout poetry does not quite do this. Instead, it does almost the opposite. Rather than showing that the average U.S. citizen is complicit in this political turmoil and upheaval, it allows us to highlight how those we have elected and upheld on pedestals have failed us. In a 2016 interview, the editor of Poetry Magazine Don Share remarked that “Sometimes we feel alienated from our politicians, and that becomes itself a political issue. And poetry works through and around that.” Blackout and erasure poetry go a step further. By physically manipulating political rhetoric, we are able to expose what we believe is the truth within it.