Understanding The Current Blackout Conversation 

The academic conversation on blackout poetry has thus far been minimal, but there are a handful of individuals discussing some of the poems within the category. A majority of the coverage has been published in the literary magazine The Kenyon Review and poetics journals Jacket2 and Evening Will Come. Those publications often interact with and cite one another, causing the conversation to become somewhat insular. In her Jacket 2 essay series, Jennifer Cheng directs readers to Solmaz Sharif’s essay in Evening Will Come. Meanwhile the most cited blackout and erasure poetry publication on The Kenyon Review, “The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft,”  includes Travis Macdonald the author of “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics'' published in Jacket, which Jacket2 hosts. 

In addition to these three publications, there are a small number of scholars such as John Nyman, Andrew David King, and Douglas Luman talking about some blackout poetry projects and found poetry overall. Due to the lack of specific scholarship on blackout poetry and the lack of definite characteristics of the category, numerous academic pieces, including Chen’s essay series and King’s essays on The Kenyon Review, mention blackout poetry and poems without ever using the phrase blackout poetry. This can make it difficult to determine how much coverage of the form there actually is. Certain popular blackout poems, however, have generated academic coverage. 

Tom Phillips’ A Humument (1970), for instance, has received significant academic attention, especially in the art world. There are several articles concerning his work in the context of art and artist’s books rather than as poetry. Phillips’ has collated a majority of the academic scholarship on his blackout poetry on his website. He lists twelve pieces, including one by Andrew David King in The Kenyon Review. He leaves off several that were either published after he last updated the website or were written without his knowledge, such as several graduate theses and dissertations. 

One of the most significant pieces he leaves off is an essay titled “Broken English”  in Heather McHugh’s essay collection Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993). The essays originally started as a lecture series at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Several blackout and erasure poets attended or worked at Warren Wilson College, including Janet Holmes and Matthea Harvey.  However, McHugh does not focus on blackout poetry as a genre, but she looks at how Phillips fragments language. She puts his work in conversation with pre-Socratics works similar to how Macdonald places Phillips’ work in conversation with Sappho’s poems in his “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” This focus on fragmentation aligns McHugh’s scholarship more with erasure poetics scholarship, however, as she focuses primarily on what Phillips is taking away rather than what he is adding, which is the hallmark of blackout poetry.  

There have also been a small number of MFA and doctoral students who have addressed blackout poetry as a part of their theses and dissertations. A majority of these include a minimal amount of academic scholarship because they are creative writing based thesis and dissertation projects, meaning that a large portion of the papers are focused on the writers’ own poetry. For example, Shelby Tansil’s “Black Tie Poems: An Exploration of Formal Poetry” includes a small section on blackout poetry. However, of that section only a paragraph is related to the history of the actual form and the rest looks at Tansil’s experience creating it. Andrew Allport did something similar in his dissertation for his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He discussed Phillips’ A Humument, as well as other blackout poetry collections including  Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow and Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os as a part of analyzing what he calls “fragment poems.” He identifies the poems as being blackout poems and his analysis all leads up to his own fragment poem collection. Similarly Amanda Gaebel briefly addresses erasure and blackout poetry in her MFA thesis “Palimpsest” by comparing Phillips’ A Humument and similar art pieces to palimpsests. Like Tansil, though, she centers most of the discussion in how she applied this to her own palimpsests. 

Several academic publications have in fact connected blackout and erasure poetry to palimpsests. In “Poetry Under Erasure,” Brian McHale suggests a connection between erasure and palimpsest. He discusses both Rachel Back’s “writing-over,” Michael Davidso’s “palimptext” and Rachel Blau DuPelssis’s analysis of Susan Howe’s poetry as palimpsests. However, he refutes their analysis to an extent by stating that “occlusion or over-writing need not involve material erasure.” Palimpsest originally referred to documents that had their surface scraped off in order to allow it to be used again. However, according to Gaebel, “fragments of the original document would accumulate in the borders where it was poorly erased.” The term as now changed to include anything that “has changed over time which still shows evidence of its history.” Due to the physical nature of partially erasing and then covering what is left by writing over it, palimpsest sit oddly in between erasure and blackout poetry. The intent of erasure and blackout poetry separate them from that original definition. Based on the original definition, palimpsests do not necessarily intend to engage with their source material to create something new; they simply do so out of necessity. Ideally the parchment would have been scrubbed clear after all. There is some bearing in continuing to analyze blackout and erasure poems as if they were palimpsests; however, I think there may be more value in deterring the differences between them and how our methodology and intent in creating these forms differs and why they do. 

Many scholars, like Gaebel, lump Phillips’ work under different genres. Several theses and dissertations have also looked at pieces of blackout poetry as a part of discussions over other genres. For instance, A Humument appears in Mary Alden Schwartzburg’s dissertation “Reading in Four Dimensions: The Poetics of The Contemporary Experimental Book.” Schwartzburg, though, never once mentions the phrase “blackout poetry” throughout the entirety of the 258 page dissertation. 

John Nyman’s dissertation “Double/Cross: Erasure in Theory and Poetry” comes closer to an analysis of the category as a whole, but it is still lacking. This is in part because Nyman misidentifies, as many scholars do, Phillips and Johnson’s blackout poetry books as erasure. The predominant focus of the paper is analysing erasure and blackout poems through the context of Jacques Derrida’s “writing under erasure.” As such, his research is not as applicable because it focuses on the idea of erasure whereas blackout poetry focuses on adding rather than erasing. 

Additionally, there have been a handful of individuals consistently writing book reviews of blackout and erasure poetry including Luman for Found Poetry Review and Elizabeth Robinson. As the magazine’s Book Review Editor Luman created the Found Poetry Review’s Book Review series, which covered new and old found poetry publications alike. He did not, however, specifically cover blackout poetry. Most journals, in fact, do not cover blackout poetry publications with the same breadth of coverage as they do more traditional forms.

While there has not been much academic coverage of blackout poetry, there has been greater coverage by popular media and newspapers, especially following the rise in blackout poetry being posted to social media following the #MeToo movement and Donald J. Trump’s election. Larger outlets such as Vice, Bustle, and The New Republic began covering blackout poetry in earnest in 2016 in line with this rise in social media posting. Most of these larger outlets cover blackout poetry in relation to the social issue blackout poets are addressing in their pieces rather than the form, however. 

The New York Times has been more purposeful in its coverage of the form, often addressing what found poetry in its National Poetry Month coverage and the paper’s youth poetry contests. This coverage, in turn, has spawned additional coverage in local papers, as when youth poets win the contests, their hometown papers discuss their win. Additionally, local papers have also covered events relating to found poetry, which started becoming increasingly popular after 2010, and poets in their area started creating blackout poems. Like in pieces published in the larger publications, though, the scope of local papers is limited. They do not engage in debates on what blackout poetry is or its validity as a category. 

While there has not been an exorbitant amount of coverage on blackout poetry by the popular media, there has been a significant amount. Typically popular media does not cover poetry. Yet, the rise in popularity amongst readers and the number of individuals creating online has made the popular media unable to ignore the category. Academic publications, however, have been surprisingly silent on blackout poetry in comparison. The three aforementioned publications, The Kenyon Review, Jacket2, and Evening Will Come have begun the conversation, but there is still more academic interrogation of the category needed in order to assert its importance in the ideas of critics and scholars.