Blacking Out the News
Around the same time that the content of blackout poems started becoming more political, the source material started changing. Authors started moving away from the classics in favor of the less traditionally literary pieces, things like legal documents and newspapers.
While others were experimenting with this kind of source text beforehand, Texas writer Austin Kleon was the first blackout poet to gain major popularity with blackout poems made from newspapers. According to the preface of Newspaper Blackouts (2010), Kleon first started creating blackout poems out of boredom rather than political activism. Unable to write, he started playing with the stack of newspapers his girlfriend had been collecting for work and happened to start making blackout poems. While Kleon did not set out to talk about politics (and he often does not even touch on political issues in his poems), many of the articles he used as source material did. After all, when writing about the news, it is impossible to fully escape politics.
Kleon began by posting his poems on Tumblr under the hashtag “#newspaperblackout.” Others soon began joining him, something Kleon encouraged. After five years of publishing online, Kleon was approached by HarperCollins and asked to create a collection of his works, Newspaper Blackout. Whereas previous blackout poetry collections had been predominantly published by smaller indie presses with a smaller reach, HarperCollins was a major publisher. As a result, Kleon’s book received significantly more press than other earlier blackout poetry collections.
When he was creating this collection, it appears that Kleon attempted to steer away from explicitly political content. In a blog post in 2008, Kleon stated alongside a poem about Obama, “. . . I would never put [politics] in the book, and why I’m posting it here.” He claims he does not write about politics specifically often, and he does seem to avoid politically charged words in his book. Yet, when he invited readers to begin making their own poems, politics quickly became part of the conversation.
Kleon published a website called “Newspaper Blackouts” alongside his book of the same name. On this website, Kleon encouraged his readers to submit their own blackout poems and offered how-to instructions and videos on making them. This encouragement of readers is a consistent theme in Kleon’s career. His methodology is based on this idea of sharing and community creation. He typically posts the poems directly to his website or Instagram after making them, even crediting his digital readers as being the reason he continues to write blackout poems.
Additionally, by creating a tumblr dedicated to sharing newspaper blackout poems, Kleon removed many of the barriers poets face in publishing experimental poems. Typically digital literary magazines have submission processes in which submitters must pay a small fee and the editor either accepts or denies the poem based on their opinion or a set of agreed upon regulations. Often blackout poems go against these submission regulations because of their more visual quality as well. Before Kleon, it was significantly more difficult to get a blackout poem published. Yet, on the “Newspaper Blackout” tumblr, Kleon simply shared all the newspaper blackout poems that came his way. He did not position himself as an evaluator of content, simply a sharer. Additionally, his hashtag “#newspaperblackout” took on a life of its own on social media sites such as Instagram, enabling poets to completely remove Kleon from the process. They could publish their work without Kleon acting as a middle man.
Kleon not only held digital space for new blackout poets, however. He also opened physical space. At his first solo art show of his poems, he created a physical space for visitors to create their own poems and hung them up in the gallery alongside his own poems. By hanging up attendees’ poems, he placed them in a position of power. They were not just viewers. They became creators as well, given wall space just like this famous poet; this in its own is political.
This is reminiscent of DIY zines, which are tied with the ideas of resistance because they took control of publishing from those who were in power. They published what they wanted, how they wanted. Here, Kleon was given a show by people who wanted to see just what he had written, and he refused. Kleon’s actions are comparable to how Stephen Cuncombe describes what the DIY zine community did: “everyday oddballs...speaking plainly about themselves and our society with an honest sincerity, a revealing intimacy, and a healthy ‘fuck you’ to sanctioned authority — for no money and no recognition, writing for an audience of like-minded misfits.” Kleon is giving his stage to those “like-minded misfits” who attend his show, encouraging them to share their work about their lives.
Kleon’s actions also inspired many to bring blackout poetry into their classrooms and their daily reading. He especially, though, it seems inspired The New York Times. The newspaper uses his how-to videos to explain how to create blackout poems for their poetry contests and credit him as having popularized the form. As a part of their 2014 National Poetry Month celebration, the newspaper produced an interactive digital blackout poetry maker that “featured snippets of Times articles you can use to create and share your own short poems.” After participants finished making their poem, they could share their poem on The New York Times website and social media. Visitors can click through numerous poems made on the site, including one by Kleon. Typically the process of getting published in The New York Times is fairly arduous. Yet like Kelon’s bypassing of traditional poetry publication processes, this blackout poetry maker allowed readers who were not traditional poets to have their work be a part of this prestigious publication.
Many of those who began creating their own newspaper blackouts either as a part of Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout, The New York Times interactive maker or separately used this form to tackle more political issues than Kleon did in his book. The New York Times maker steered away from source materials that were specifically political. It provided articles that talk about Coachella and Buddhism rather than campaign races or fights for healthcare access. Even though the source material may not be inherently political, viewers can still create political poems. The blackout poem “e-du-cation” by arianna sexton-hughes using the maker, for example, comments on the state of education and how students can simply download their assignments and test answers. Many educators would consider this to be a political statement as it is commenting on issues with education, something many view as being political.
137 Likes, 8 Comments - CNN Poems (@cnnpoems) on Instagram: "we / lick boots / play good / how / Want / is performance / a show"
Though they did not use The New York Times, poet Jamie Mortara did something similar to sexton-hughes. They began the Instagram account “@cnnpoems,” a collection of blackout poems made of CNN poems. Their pieces fluctuate between the political and nonpolitical, touching on things from sex, depression, to global warming. In the bio of the account, Mortara describes the poems as being “how i cope with the headlines,” which suggests that these poems were created as a way to deal with the political happenings of the world.
By popularizing newspapers as a source material and opening up creating blackout poetry to the general public, Kleon set the stage for the blackout poetry political revolution of the late 2010s when Donald J. Trump began campaigning and was then elected as the President of the United States. Kleon helped give the general public, those who might not call themselves poets, the ability to process the political climate, specifically the onslaught of political news in the information age.