The Need For Greater Academic Interrogation of Blackout Poetry

Blackout poetry has become increasingly popular since Tom Phillips and Srikanth Reddy first began publishing. On Google, searching the phrase “blackout poetry” yields over a million search results that include everything from poetry collections to tweets to teaching guides. Meanwhile an Instagram search of the hashtag “#blackoutpoetry” generates over 148,000 images, most of which are actual blackout poems. Thousands of people are writing blackout poems; however, there has not been this same surge of popularity in academia. 

There have been many discussions of things that are tangentially connected or similar. For instance, popular poetics scholars like Marjorie Perloff and Kenneth Goldsmith have discussed in-depth the idea of “uncreative writing” when considering conceptual poetry and the appropriation involved in the form. Conceptual poetry is comparable to blackout poetry in how it can use others’ language to create a new piece, but I would argue black out poetry is not a part of the conceptual poetry movement. Whereas conceptual poetry is an intellectual aesthetic exercise that focuses on the importance of the idea of a piece over the final product, blackout poetry develops meaning both through its creation and its final product. It has specific political and activist intentions that conceptual poetry does not; therefore, it is inappropriate to lump it in with conceptual poetry academically and analyze it with the same interpretive framework we use on conceptual poetry. 

The little work Perloff and Goldsmith have done that has been tangentially related to blackout poetry specifically has been minimal and at times even dismissive. In a review of the sixth edition of Tom Phillips’s popular blackout poetry project A Humument, Perloff remarks “I find myself a bit weary of  A Humument’s relentless parodying.” She compares it to what she calls “recent conceptual writing, like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic or Susan Howe’s Tom Tit Tot” and suggests those works have gone to another level that Phillips’ has not. However, neither of those works are blackout poems. They function in different spaces under different rules of creation and hope to achieve different purposes as a result. Several other academics have written on A Humument, as evidenced by Phillips’ A Humument Chronology, which lists every academic and news article written about him or his project, but like Perloff they focus solely on A Humument rather than looking at it as a piece of wider category. 

As an academic collective, we have not yet established guidelines for recognizing what blackout poetry is and is not, much less analyzing it. This leads to us continuing to misidentify the blackouts as erasure poems even though there is a fundamental difference in how these poems are created and the meaning generated by the differences in their respective visual attributes. 

Considering the current number of blackout poems available on the internet and how quickly the number of hashtags denoting blackout poetry are growing on social media, it is likely that the number of blackout poets and poems will only increase exponentially as time goes on. Therefore, it is critical that scholars start talking about blackout poetry as more than an isolated book or two like A Humument or Austin Kleon’s  Newspaper Blackout and consider them as a part of a greater whole. 

Additionally, there is a disconnect between the Perloff and Goldsmith’s scholarship on experimental poetry and blackout poetry. After reading Perloff and Goldsmith, Kleon wrote a blog post in which he remarks that he is after the exact opposite thing that Goldsmith is in his poetry. Whereas Goldsmith cares not for the readability of his poems, Kleon says “When I’m making my poems, readability is actually the thing foremost in my mind.” There is a fundamental disconnect between what Perloff calls “recent conceptual writing” and blackout poetry. It is not just in this difference between the desire of readability, though. It lays more in that blackout poets are often not creating blackout poetry with the intent of challenging the status-quo of originality. Many of those creating blackout poetry likely have not even read the theory Goldsmith so often discusses and if they do it is only after they have begun creating their own blackout poems like Kleon. 

Conceptual poetry is created for the idea of the piece. The final product does not matter as much as what it means to create it. Yet, most blackout poets are not creating their blackout poems just for what it means to make them. They create them because they want to see that document marred by their hand. They want to expose the meaning they see within the text. Blackout poetry has become increasingly popular due to a lot of poets’ need to deal with emotion and documents, not necessarily out of a desire to be experimental. In an interview with Vice, Goldsmith suggested that more and more people are turning towards found poetry because “people are angry and pissed off at documents.” In an age in which people are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and documents they are presented with each day, people have had to find new ways to process this anger Goldsmith suggests they have. For example, popular blackout poet Isobel O’Hare said they began their project of erasing the apologies of sexual abusers because “I just really wanted to erase their words. So I grabbed a sharpie and went to work.” O’Hare made their poems out of necessity, as a way to process their frustration not just to experiment. 

That is not to say that Perloff and Goldsmith’s ideas are not applicable to blackout poetry. Rather, scholars need to start applying these theories to blackout poetry as a category. Doing so would give scholars an understanding of why poets are shifting from more traditional poetry forms to blackout and how this represents greater cultural shifts in the writing community. 

The academic discourse of blackout poetry has also been muddled by a mistaken connection between the form and Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida’s concept “sous rature” or as it is often translated “under erasure.” We, as academics, often associate erasure poetry (and thus due to the persistent conflation of the two, blackout poetry) with this concept because they both focus on the idea of erasure. However, writing erasure and blackout poetry is not the same as writing under erasure. For instance, when discussing erasure and blackout poetry, Brian McHale suggests that “The ubiquitous white spaces of postmodernist poetry signify (among other things) that something has been lost or placed sous rature.” If we consider the translation at face value, perhaps this is correct. In an erasure poem, something has been erased after all.

However, in her introduction to Of Grammatology (1998), Gayatri Spivak states she translated sous rature as “under erasure” but that the phrase means “This is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both the word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.” When we consider this definition, blackout poetry falls more in line with sous rature than erasure, but even still blackout poetry does not always allow the entirety of a source text to be legible. More often than not, it is rendered illegible by thick sharpie lines, which is quite different than the X that Derrida used to cross out words. While Heidegger and Derrida’s ideas here could have some value in our analysis of blackout and erasure poetry, it is important that we note there are differences between what poets in this form are doing and what these scholars describe.

In his dissertation, John Nyman begins to address this, but he fails to separate erasure and blackout poetry, which limits his analysis. He treats blackout as erasure and vice versa, though they are both made differently and have an aesthetically different final product. If he were to separate his analysis and treat these categories of poetry separately, perhaps we could more accurately apply Derrida’s philosophy. Any analysis that equates blackout and erasure as the same kind of poetry, however, is going to be flawed because they are not the same. Blackout poetry does not erase, as Nyman claims. It covers. The source text is still there, hiding under the marks the blackout poet has made. How does it change how we would apply Derrida’s ideas in an analysis?

There are many questions about blackout poetry that we have not answered and more will emerge over time as this category of poetry becomes more solidified academically and publicly. However, we must separate it from erasure poetry if we are to truly interrogate how and why it functions and the effects it has had and will have on poetry and culture. But to separate it, we must begin talking about it in academic spaces and calling it its name.