Blacking out on Tik Tok and Other Social Media 

While academia and mainstream publishers struggle with correctly identifying blackout poetry, Tik Tok users don’t. In looking to understand why we as scholars need to be paying attention to blackout poetry, we only need to look at the number of posts tagged #blackoutpoetry and how writers, readers, and social media users are navigating them. Blackout poetry has grown exponentially over the past ten years due to the ability to share poems online on Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and even Pinterest. It is on these sites that a community definition of blackout poetry has arisen. People have developed a common understanding of what it is and what it is not, as evidenced by the hashtags used. This social media boom has provided more context to the category than any academic paper thus far, as those making blackout poems have taken the need to define the category for accessibility purposes in navigating social media posts into their own hands. 

On Instagram

The image sharing social media site Instagram is uniquely suited to the sharing of blackout poetry because it is so heavily based on sharing images. As such, it has become a hotbed of blackout poetry activity. There are over 149,000 posts tagged “#blackoutpoetry” and over 37,000 tagged “#blackoutpoem.” Most of these posts tagged with hashtags are completed blackout poems or poems in progress. Many blackout poems are also shared under the hashtags “#erasurepoetry” and “#foundpoetry” as well. However, there are only around 46,000 posts tagged “#foundpoetry” and 23,000 tagged “#erasurepoetry” and while many of the poems tagged with these are blackout poems, there are also numerous other categories of poetry being labeled with these hashtags. The blackout poetry specific hashtag has generated significantly more posts.

Additionally, some have taken to Instagram to encourage people to post their blackout poets to Instagram through hashtag  movements. For instance, blackout poet John Carroll began the account “@makeblackoutpoetry” in 2013 after being inspired by popular blackout poet Austin Kleon. On the account he not only shared his own poems, but he also reposted blackout poems tagged with “#makeblackoutpoetry.” There are over 59,000 posts on Instagram that now use that hashtag. Before the account went inactive in February 2019 , shortly after Carroll published his blackout poetry guide Make Blackout Poetry: Turn These Pages Into Poems (2018), Carroll had shared over 2,000 poems and gained over 60,000 followers. 

Numerous other accounts popped up shortly after Carroll’s such as “@blackoutpoetrychallenges” that encouraged poets to post blackout poems, often poems that respond to particular prompts or use certain source material. However, as is the nature of social media, few of these accounts remain active for long. Most seem to stop posting like @makeblackoutpoetry and @blackoutpoetrychallenges within a few years. 

Additionally, several blackout poets have developed followings on Instagram for their poetry. Often these accounts are successful because there is something that makes them unique.  For example, blackout poet Ryan Walter Wagner has been creating blackout poems out of horoscopes on his account “@hiddenhoroscopes” since 2010. The popularity of his account has allowed him to create a website on which he sells products such as backpacks, coffee mugs, pillows, and even leggings that feature his horoscope blackout poems. Similarly, Jamie Mortara created the account “@cnnpoems” on which they posted blackout poems made solely from CNN news headlines. The account “@littlegoldenblackoutpoems” has developed a following because the poet, only identified as “s.w.” only uses gold sharpie to create their blackouts in line with their account’s name.

Popular blackout poets such as Austin Kleon have also used Twitter to share their poems and further develop their digital following. Kleon’s account “@austinkleon” has almost 6,000 posts, of which a fair portion are blackout poems, and over 97,000 followers. Many blackout poets follow him but notably accounts such as @makeblackoutpoetry, @cnnpoems, @hiddenhorscopes, and @littlegoldenblackoutpoems that are popular but not near the level of Kleon’s account do not. Kleon originally pioneered the use of “#newspaperblackout” as a way to encourage writers to create blackout poems of newspaper articles like him. However, as he has been creating less newspaper blackout poems over the past few years, he has stopped using the hashtag. There are only around 10,000 posts currently tagged with it. 

Some blackout poets have purposefully moved away from Instagram recently, however. Isobel O’Hare, the blackout poet known for their blackout poems made from the apologies of sexual abusers during the #MeToo movement, stopped posting blackout poems on their account. They originally began sharing their poems to their social media accounts, which is how they began to develop a following. However, the constant social media attention actually became too much for O’Hare. They recall in an interview with The Rumpus that a large publisher suggested that O’Hare could be “a new Instagram poet” and that these Instagram blackout poems “would be [their] new brand.” They turned the publisher down because the thought of doing that “was just totally making me feel horrible.” Since then, they have published barely any blackout poems to their account and have a following of only around 5,000 compared to Kleon’s 97,000.

On Twitter

Twitter did not originally provide the same space for blackout poetry that Instagram or Tik Tok did. It is significantly less visually based. A majority of the content posted on the site  is text based, making it harder to share the more visual blackout poems. Many poems do get posted to the site, as do links to blackout poems on Instagram through cross-platform automatic posting. Many blackout poetry Instagram accounts use this cross posting ability to share their poems on Twitter in addition to Instagram. Their follower count, however, tends to be smaller on Twitter than Instagram. Jamie Mortara’s “@cnnpoetry” has only around 100 followers on Twitter compared to the several thousand they have on Instagram. Austin Kleon is a notable exception to this as he actually has more followers on Twitter than Instagram by a few thousand, but he does not post much about blackout poetry anymore; instead, he uses it to promote his other books and sketching projects primarily. 

Even though blackout poets do not use Twitter as much for sharing their actual blackout poems, the social media platform was important in bringing the public’s attention to blackout and erasure poetry during the political turmoil surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election. Blackout and erasure poets posted hundreds of poems written in these categories of poetry following the inauguration of Donald Trump. According to Rachel Stone in The New Republic, erasure and blackout poems are “uniquely suited to quick (and sometimes viral adaptation online).” This viral quality of these categories of poetry encourages poets to share their works on Twitter, which as a platform is known for making content go viral. 

For instance, while popular blackout poet Isobel O’Hare began by sharing their blackout poems made from sexual abuser’s apologies to Facebook and Instagram, it was not until they began sharing them on Twitter that they really began gaining traction. In their interview with The Rumpus, they recount the sudden influx of attention, “because I started sharing them to Twitter...within twenty-four hours received half a million views, which was totally mind-boggling.” A large portion of their views and the respective popularity their poems garnered is because of Twitter. 

Additionally, because of the push for educators to use Twitter to engage with stakeholders in the local and greater community, numerous educators have begun sharing their students’ experiences with blackout poetry on Twitter. For instance, in response to a tweet by Kleon, over a hundred secondary and elementary school teachers from across the United States posted about their students creating blackout poems in the classroom. Their posts were primarily visual. They featured a range of photos of students actively creating and analyzing blackout poems in addition to their final projects. A majority of the more recent posts that use the blackout poetry hashtag are by educators either talking about using blackout poetry in classroom or sharing photos of their students’ completed works. The New York Times also used twitter to encourage students and their teachers in their blackout poetry contest during April 2019. This generated numerous responses from teachers encouraging other teachers to incorporate blackout poetry into their classrooms. 

This has led to the creation of two different sides of Twitter when it comes to blackout poetry posts, one that is more political and one that is dominated by educators. During times of political turmoil and during educational pushes for greater inclusion of poetry in the classroom like National Poetry Month, the number of blackout posts increases. But Twitter overall is not the most popular social media platform for blackout poet

On Tik Tok

While Twitter and Instagram have both generated a large following of blackout poems, more and more youth poets have been moving to the video-sharing social networking service Tik Tok. According to the popular social media managing service Hootsuite, 42% of Tik Tok’s users are 18-24 year olds, while 27% of users are 13-17 year olds. This means a majority of the app’s uses are young adults and teens. 

Poems are typically a static thing, words on a page that are meant to be read. However,  Tik Tok blackout poets are changing this. On the app, poets post videos of them making the poems, going step by step through their process. The videos are set to popular songs used in various Tik Tok trends such as the Renegade dance. Thus far, users have generated almost 700,000 views on videos posted with the hashtag ”#blackout poetry” and over 10,000 views on those labeled with the hashtag “#blackoutpoem.”  

Blackout poems are unique due to how they are made. They require the covering and modification of a source text. Traditionally, readers of blackout poetry are only shown the final product, but on Tik Tok, poets are incorporating their methodology to the final product they are putting out into the world. The creation of a more traditional poem, someone typing or handwriting  words would not generate as engaging of a video. The visual aspects of blackout poetry, on the other hand, are interesting to watch. 

As Tik Tok continues to expand, it is likely that more of these young poets will begin posting on the app. There are already entire challenges like the “#inklinchallenge” devoted to encouraging people to create blackout poems and then post them. One of the videos created for this challenge was viewed over 13,00 times and liked over 4,000 times within two weeks of its posting. This is beyond the typical reach of the average poem published in traditional literary magazine. The creator’s account also links to their Instagram page where they have posted even more static poems.