Blacking Out in the Age of Trump 

In 2016, blackout and erasure poetry gained new life in the face of the political turmoil surrounding the United States’ presidential election. Erasure poet Alison Thumel found herself lost upon Donald J. Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States. She said his election caused her to fear “for the future and began to resist in the only way [she] knew how: by creating.” However, she, like jayy dodd, found herself “wordless” and “inundated with information in the news and on social media,” which caused her to turn to found poetry alongside hundreds of other poets. Literary magazines and social media platforms quickly became inundated with blackout and erasure poetry submissions.

Several popular media outlets such as Vice and The New Republic have covered this sudden rise in the category of poetry’s popularity and attributed it to two needs of the American people. The first, according to Rachel Stone,  is a need to “re-examine the institutions and narratives that shape American’s lives, from government bureaucracy to new media” in order to “craft their own counter-narratives” that tell their story from their perspective. The second is to process documents, how they are currently being handled by the government and public and our access to them. 

Blackout poetry allows us to negotiate the power documents hold over us and their place, deserved or not, in our lives. In the introduction to Make Blackout Poetry: Activist Edition, blackout and erasure poet Jerrod Schwarz encourages people to take documents integral to American history and black them out because “You are owed a conversation with what rules you” and documents included in the book, such as the Immigration Act of 1924, The Monroe Doctrine, and the Declaration of Independence, are often far removed from the average person’s daily life, but they influence our daily lives by contributing to how rules and laws of the U.S. He tells readers that “Every word you black out in this book brings you closer to the truths of your American identity...whatever remains when you’ve finished, that is the precious distillation of what America means to you” because we are taking ownership of those documents that rule us that we are told we have no control over. Furthermore, in a 2019 interview with Vice, Schwarz considers the explosion of blackout poems to be “art imitating society.” Poets are doing what many consider the government to be doing by editing documents. However, whereas government redactions attempt to hide material, poets are attempting to “elucidate a hidden truth” to show what is actually going on. 

Currently the truth is something many do not feel that the average American has access to, particularly when it comes to government documents. Schwarz suggests this lack of trust is “the defining feature of America, right now: we don’t get to know the whole truth.” In that Vice article, Adriane Quinlan remarks that blackout and erasure poems become more and more prominent when we become aware of “how everything we see, touch, read, wear, and nibble was created through selection by cutting, refracting, withholding, reducing, commercializing, and making smaller from a wider, more complex strata of possibilities. Everything around us is blackout and erased, which causes us to become hyper aware of what we do and do not have access to. 

Take, for example, the Mueller Report. In March 2019, the public was allowed for the first time to read special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on their 22-month probe on possible Russian interference in the presidential election. However, a significant portion of the document was redacted by Attorney General William Barr and his staff. They covered with heavy black lines any portion of the  document that addressed the grand jury or intelligence materials, anything related to any ongoing investigations and any “derogatory information about ‘peripheral’ individuals” according to Ryan Lucas from NPR. As a result, some pages of the Muller Report look a lot like blackout poems. 

Seeing documents like this be redacted, being unable to read the full story, generated frustration for a lot of people. In a 2019 interview with Vice, poetics critic Kenneth Goldsmith suggests that “In the Trump era, I think people are angry and pissed off at documents” and that it is that anger that is turning people towards blackout poems. When documents like this are redacted, readers are unable to engage in true dialogue with them, so they find a way to create that conversation by physically manipulating the text. 

A Brief Timeline of Trump Era Blackout & Erasure Poems

On the day of Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, the online literary magazine The Rumpus posted several poems by Airea D. Matthews as a part of their Rumpus Inaugural Poems series. According to Matthews, these poems walk the line of erasure and cut up, as they open with the note that “The following are composed entirely from the original text of the Constitution of the United States of America.” The poems all look similar to traditional erasures in their spacing and composition, but it is unclear if the words of Matthews’ poems occupy the same locations in the poem as they do in the source text, which is one of the primary differences between erasure poems and cut-up poems. 

Just before his inauguration, Queen Mob’s Teahouse published a short collection of erasure poems made from Trump’s campaign speeches by Ariel Yelen. They rely heavily on mocking Trump by removing words in order to make his language and syntax seem simple and uneducated. Two days after his inauguration, the online literary magazine PANK published a blackout poem of Trump’s Inaugural Speech created by Jerrod Schwarz. Schwarz titled the piece “Inaugural Speech - Erasure” and most have described it as an erasure poem respectively. However, it is instead a blackout poem even though it appears to be an erasure at first glance, as Schwarz did not erase any piece of the original speech. Instead he changed the font of the speech to white and highlighted it with a light grey while leaving the parts of his poem unhighlighted and in traditional dark black font coloring. Upon close inspection, readers can see all of the speech’s original words. 

Around Trump’s inauguration, more people started writing and publishing blackout poems inspired by the president. Two Vermont College of Fine Arts graduates Kelly Lenox and Pamela Taylor, for instance, expanded the ERASE-TRANSFORM Poetry Project to include poems all sources of political speech. They hoped to “foster perspective in this difficult election year” and provide a space for “transforming political speech into poetry and art, in hopes that it might inspire other transformative actions." They went on to publish a handful of numerous blackout and erasure pieces such as Trish Hopkin’s blackout poem “Redacted” and other more traditional politically inspired poems before going inactive in June 2018.

In late February 2017, Tyrant Books published a politically inspired blackout poem by Niina Pollari that used Form N-400 as a source text. Pollari describes form N-400 as the United States’ “application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.” Pollari titled the poem, “Form N-400 Erasures,” but the piece looks just like Kleon’s blackout poems with heavy black marker lines covering the parts of the source text Pollari wished to obscure. Therefore, though she originally titled it in a way that would imply her piece is an erasure poem, it would be more appropriate to call it a blackout poem. 

The magazine has only gone on to publish two other erasures: “Erasure of Trump’s Letter to Kim Jong-un” by Jerrod Schwarz on July 14, 2018 and “The Human Condition '' by Denise Sedman on June 5, 2019. Schawrz’s piece is more overtly political than Sedman’s as his is a critique of United States and North Korean politics through his erasing of a May letter from Trump to Kim Jong-un whereas Sedman is celebrating Anthony Bourdain’s life and acknowledging his death by erasing one of Bourdain’s New York Times articles. Schwarz also stays more in line with the erasure format while Sedman’s piece like Murrey’s resembles more of a cut-up poem. Thus far, however, Poets Reading the News, have yet to publish a black out poem even though many poets are making them. 

In December 2019, Headline Poetry & Press began the “Erasure The Occupant” project. The project’s co-editors Hokis and Kim Harvey posted a call for “erasure poetry created from the words of the White House Occupant. Extravagantly colorful to black marker taken to text. This column will run until he is VOTED OUT!“ Despite being referred to as “Erasure The Occupant,” Hokis and Harvey accept both erasure and blackout poems. The submission instructions seem to suggest a preference for blackout, as it talks specifically about different ways authors could cover their source texts. On December 21, Hokis published the first poem in the series, their own blackout poem made from Trump’s December letter to House Speaker Pelosi. entitled “Page 1: Hate’s Vantage Point.” Headline Poetry & Press has published 11 pieces, of which ten are blackout poems.

These publications are only a fraction of the ones created about the political climate during Trump’s presidency. There are thousands of literary magazines, all publishing a variety of work consistently. As such, it is likely that many of these magazines are publishing similar pieces to those mentioned above. Additionally, many poets bypassed the traditional publication route and simply posted their Trump-inspired erasures on social media sites. 

For instance, jayy dodd posted an erasure poem titled “Inaugural Poem for [REDACTED]” to her twitter, where it quickly took off. Since its initial posting, it has garnered 578 retweets and over 1,200 likes. The day after dodd tweeted the poem, which uses a poem The Independent claimed as being written for Trump’s inauguration as source material, Lit Hub published it. Buzzfeed also went on to include dodd’s poem in an article. Few articles beyond Buzzfeed’’s, though, include dodd’s work in their round up of Trump-era erasure and blackout poems, however, because it was lost in the massive amount of pieces created and published during this time. Blackout and erasure poems about the political climate of the US and even the world continue to be published both in literary magazines and social media every day, as the genre is uniquely suited to the visual and viral nature of the internet.