Blackout Poetry

I've been at home with burnout for months now and I can't do shit. My body won't let me, so I've been looking for arts an crafts with the following criteria. It's cheap, it doesn't take up a lot of space if you stop halfway through, and it's easy to pick up again when you feel like it.

Whether you suffer from writer's block or are just looking for a creative activity that requires little energy, blackout poetry is a good option.

Blackout poetry is when you start with an existing text, choose which words you want to keep and eliminate the rest. This can be done with a black marker or with artistic drawings. The remaining text tells a completely different story to the original. 

• book/newspaper/magazine
• pencil
• eraser
• pen/fine liner/ marker of some sort
• ruler (optional)

Briefly browse trough the text

Look for nouns, adjectives and verbs that look interesting and mark them with a pencil. Then find a few extra words to make it flow.

Erase the marks on the words you did not end up using. Read through it again and adjust your choices until you are happy with the result.

Now that you have the poem it's time to redact the rest of the text.

Traditionally it was all covered in black marker, hence the name blackout poetry.

But you can take your blackout poetry a step further by adding patterns, designs, or a drawing to the areas you're 'blacking out'. For example, instead of using black marker on everything except your chosen words, you could create a drawing or design that relates to your poem. Like I did using red to highlight the blood and gore in my poem.

Hindsight: I made a mistake with underlining the text in black finerliner before deciding on the red marker and the flow of the marker does not really work with the flow of the text.

However, as it is such an inexpensive activity, both in terms of energy and cost, you can just keep making more and more until one really stands out. As with most art, quantity leads to quality.