Newspaper Blackout

Newspaper + marker = blackout poetry. This site is a companion to the book Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon. It's a place where anyone can share their attempts at blackout poetry. Grab a marker and a newspaper, redact the words you don't need, and share your poem. Read the book About the project Share your poem Ask a question Twitter Instagram Facebook

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“The Virtuoso,” by Joseph Spinelli 

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Austin Kleon, “Hope,” 2017

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Austin Kleon, “Refugee,” 2017

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Reading between the lines: Old-school technique comes to NB school

Student A.J. Rosales looks for anchor words and sentences in an article in the Herald-Zeitung for the blackout poetry assignment.

Always cool to see blackout poems in the classroom

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Newspaper Blackouts by Austin Kleon

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

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Some recent work. More on Instagram.

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10/18/15

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Last day to get a t-shirt! buy one here

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How To Make A Newspaper Blackout Poem

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Filed under: how-to

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An oldie, for Ireland

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Recent newspaper blackouts by austinkleon

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Clear history #newspaperblackout #blackoutpoetry

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Making blackout poems on Periscope

This is like a lot of my blackout poems, with one difference: it was made live, with the help of an audience using Twitter’s new livestreaming app, Periscope. (Here’s another one, and here’s something I wrote about how my friend Wendy is using the app.)   

My rig if anybody’s interested

old gooseneck desktop mic stand

gorillapod

glif

old iphone 4

First we selected a section from today’s paper: 

Then I selected an article and a window of text, and people messaged me snippets of text to circle: 

Then we found a little story that read “later, after successfully defending her robot”:

But then, because I’m sort of a control freak, I saw the text “what it’s like” and decided to connect it to the word robot, and came up with a new sequence: 

Until finally, it turned into this: 

It was pretty fun, but it took a whopping 28 minutes. (If you have the Periscope app, you can watch it all here for the next 23 hours or so.)

Or, I shortened it to a 15 second timelapse:

A video posted by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) on Apr 2, 2015 at 2:03pm PDT

I’ll probably make another one tomorrow afternoon, so follow me on Twitter to get notified when it’s time to join in: @austinkleon  

And if you have any ideas of fun stuff to do on Periscope, let me know! Maybe we’ll do office hours on there?

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Clever crossword blackout by Susan Borri

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A blackout by @alena.shen

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A newspaper blackout by @scrabbbb

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Newspaper Blackout is 99 cents on Kindle right now!