Blacking out for
The New York Times
In addition to physical workshops, there has also been a digital push for teens to create blackout poems from The New York Times. In 2010, the newspaper launched a yearly Teen Found Poem Contest. These contests only required participants to create a found poem, not necessarily a blackout poem, using an article from The New York Times as their source text. Blackout poems are a category of the larger found poetry subgenre, which encompasses any poem made of words sourced from another text. This includes, cut-up, cento, erasure, and blackout poems. A majority of the winners were not blackout poems as a result. However, in 2014, the newspaper released a digital blackout poetry maker as a part of their 2014 National Poetry Month Celebration. Then, for their tenth anniversary of the Teen Found Poem Contest, The New York Times changed their contest from being open to all found poetry to being blackout poetry specific.
Uniquely, the contest required teens to “make blackout poetry from the print paper” rather than creating found poems from the website, meaning participants could not use the newspaper’s digital poetry maker. According to the newspaper, this requirement was added in order to encourage teens to “page through, understand how a print newspaper works, and make their own choices.” The implication of the instructions was that the newspaper assumed most teens had not interacted with their physical paper much, if at all. By forcing them to engage with the physical edition of the paper, The New York Times hoped that younger readers would engage with the news in different ways and thus become better and more robust consumers of news in an age rampant with misleading digital media. The newspaper also asked the following of participants: “We want you to have fun playing with language and meaning-making. We want you to experiment with choosing different words in different combinations to see how they create new imagery and ideas. We hope you’ll be sensitive to how the space around the words plays into the poem’s meaning, and we hope you’ll recite your work aloud to hear how it sounds. Above all, we hope your creation will show a real love of, and care with, language and what it can do. Please surprise us.”
Despite the constraint of having to use the print format, thousands of teens submitted and many did surprise the newspaper just as requested. Of the more than 2,500 submissions, the judges, Amanda Christy Brown, Shannon Doyne, Jeremy Engle, Michael Gonchar, Natalie Proulz, and Katherine Schulten, selected 25 poems as their favorites. While the “favorites” touched on a range of topics, it is worth noting that several touched on gun control and gun violence.
For instance, “Triggers” by seventeen year old Brianne Kunisch, pictured to the right, talks about a fear of school shootings. In her author’s note, she wrote that her poem was “a tribute to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting tragedy, my poem is 14 words to symbolize the day that innocent students, sons, daughters, teachers, and friends lost their lives and loved ones on February 14th, 2018,” thus drawing a specific political connection. Though the contest was not created for teens to discuss politics or political events, many did, as poets, including teenage poets, have taken to using blackout poetry as a way to process politics and trauma.
