How To Create Blackout Poetry

Ever wanted to try blackout poetry? Now’s your chance to learn!

Kalea Acuna
4 min readMay 18, 2021
a page of pride and prejudice crossed out into a poem
One of my blackout poems

Blackout poetry is one of my favorite hobbies. There’s so many different things you can do with it, and it’s been proven to be a great way to spark inspiration in authors who may be struggling with writers block. But even if you’re no author or poet, blackout poetry can be for anyone, and the materials needed can be found in your home without spending extra money. I’ll lay out the process in steps, but include several different ways in which you can create a blackout poem.

Step 1: Choose a slate and a medium

Before you can make blackout poetry, you need to have a slate, and a medium. The slate is what you’ll be creating the poem on. It can be a page from an old book you no longer want, a newspaper or magazine, or even some of your old writing printed out. There’s also books out there that provide you with lots of different types of slates. My favorite is Make Blackout Poetry by John Caroll. But again, if you don’t want to spend money, just find something at home that you don’t mind using.

Then figure out what you want to be your medium. I usually use sharpies, but you could use anything. Pencils, pens, paint, whatever you can think of. Or, if you’re not much of an artist and don’t want to spend the time coloring over all the unneeded space, you can instead exacto out the words and phrases you want and glue them onto a new page.

Step 2: Outline

Trust me when I say you want to outline your poem before you start coloring. I use pencil, lightly underlining the words and phrases I want to keep, until I have my poem completely written out from start to finish. I do this because if I suddenly change my mind mid page, I can go back and erase what I no longer want. When using a medium like sharpie, I would then box in the words/phrases I want so that I don’t forget that those are the words I’m using. I don’t know how many times I’ve forgotten this step and ruined a poem by covering up a word!

Step 3: Fill in

If you’re doing blackout poetry the traditional way, once you have your poem crafted, you then need to color over all the unneeded words. But you don’t have to just do one color, you can box in multiple colors, decide not to black out the page and draw illustrations instead, or, you can do line blackout poetry, which is crossing a line through the unneeded text rather than color it all in. If you’re cutting out your poem, this step would be to glue the words to your page, maybe add in some illustrations or cut the excess paper in a fun shape. It’s completely up to you, blackout poetry is meant to be experimental!

TIps and Tricks

Some people may disagree with this, but in my book, there are no rules to blackout poetry. Some say that you aren’t supposed to use more than one sentence at a time (so no big paragraphs in the poem) and others might say use only words and phrases and don’t use letters to craft your own words (which I do frequently). But how you create your poem is up to you. There are no set rules because it’s your creation, no one else’s. But there are a few good tips I can give that may make things a bit easier.

  1. Read through the whole page of text slowly, circling words that intrigue you or catch your attention. Then go back and decide if you want to use any of these words as a starting point
  2. Similar to tip number 1, but if you read the page like a book and underline the story that you see in your head, it can turn into your poem. This can be hard to do, because often times there might be a word you need that isn’t there, but again, if you’re like me, you’ll have no problem using letters from the text to create that desired word. It’s all up to you
  3. Test out colors before you use them. If you’re using multiple colors for something, maybe test them out next to each other to see if you like the contrast. Same thing with images, maybe do a rough sketch somewhere else to make sure that’s the look you’re wanting.
  4. A tip for exacto, use fun colored paper and ensure that you’re doing this with a steady hand, because text can be small and often times tricky to cut out nicely. And having little tools like tweezers so that you can delicately place down the tiny words onto the glue would be helpful. I use a paintbrush and modge podge for my exacto blackout projects, and paint the glue onto the area where I will put the letter, because modge podge will dry nice and clear, and it’s much easier then trying to put glue on the tiny words
  5. If you start a path and it’s not working, just erase it and try it from a different angle! I know that I often get frustrated when I can’t get my desired result with the path I took originally, but when I try something else I find that I like that idea more than the one I had before.

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Kalea Acuna

Freelance writer for two years|Specializes in New Adult and Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy, and Sci-fi. You can find my books on Amazon.